Using Multiple Apps At the Same Time With Multitasking In iPadOS

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On today's episode let's take a look at multitasking in iPad OS.

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So iPadOS really refines multitasking on the iPad. We had multitasking before but things just seemed to work a little bit better now. So there are two main modes for multitasking on the iPad and iPadOS. The first is called Slide Over. This is when you have a regular app running. So let's go in and run Safari here and say we want to have a small view of another app in a floating window. The way to get to Slide Over is the same as how we'll get to both modes for multitasking. That is to drag up slightly from the bottom of the screen to bring up the Dock. Once you have the Dock here now you can choose an app to go into Slide Over mode.

So let's go and choose the Messages app. What I'm going to do is I'm going to tap here. You'll see it kind of jump. Once it does that I can then drag it up to the right side or the left side of the screen. You see the jump there. Now I just drag and now I've got this little floating window here. I can move it to the right or left of the screen but be careful not to move it too close to the side. Then you go and enter Split View mode which is what we'll look at next. But as long as it's a floating window like this you can release it and it will go to one side of the screen or the other. Now it's this floating window on top of the app that you're using.

When you have this floating window there's a bunch of things you can do with it. Notice there's this handle at the top here and a handle at the bottom. The handle at the top can be used to drag to the left or right side of the screen like that. You can also use it to drag the Slide Over window off the screen to the right. To do that you have to do a small flick just left to right like that. Now can get it back very easily by dragging from the right side of the screen in slightly. Now if you do this too much, if you drag too much over to the right, it's going to try to enter into the Split View mode like this. 

Now you can open another Slide Over window. Let's go and do that. I'm going to go down here and I'm going to do Notes. So I'm going to tap and hold, then drag up, and I can drag Notes there. You can see it replaces the other window, the Messages window that's there. Let's do it again and do Reminders. We'll bring that up and that replaces there. You can even do windows of the same app for some apps. So let's do another Safari window here. So we actually have two Safari windows now. 

Once you have a bunch of them stacked on each other you can only see the top one no matter what you do with the top handle there only the top one will show. But if you take the bottom handle here and you tap and drag that up slightly you entered this view here where you could see all of these different Slide Over windows that you've created. It looks very much like the Task Switcher on the iPhone. As a matter of fact these Slide Over windows are shaped pretty much like an iPhone screen. So it's kind of like having a little iPhone on your iPad. Now you can tap on one of these to jump to it. So you can have a bunch of different windows and cycle through them. You also can use this bar here at the bottom and do a little pull to the left or right to cycle through them.

Now to get rid of these Slide Over windows you just tap the bar at the bottom there, drag up a little bit until you get the switcher there. You can take any one of these and just drag it up and out. So you can close all of these in succession if you wish and get rid of all of the Slide Over windows.

Let's bring one back. I'll bring back a Safari window here. If you wanted to take this window full screen you can. What you need to do is tap the top handle, drag down slightly, and then up to the top. You can see now it creates a full screen view for this window. Now let's create another Slide Over window here with another Safari window on top of this one. If you ever want to see what you've got you can always tap and hold the app here and you can choose Show All Windows.Then it goes into this mode where it shows everything that you've got. So you've got the full screen one and here's the Slide Over window. You can jump to one.

Now what about Split View. Split View is really useful because you can be looking at one thing here, like say this webpage, and you decide you want to bring Notes up. But you don't want it to cover parts of this window. So you start the same way you do with Slide Over. But instead of just releasing it here while it's kind of this little window, you drag all the way to the right or the left and release. Now it splits the screen in half. You have a handle there in the middle so you can actually resize either half. Some apps have specific sizes that it could be like one-third or one-half. Other apps allow almost any size. Of course some apps don't allow this at all. You'll find all the default apps, Notes, Reminders, Safari, Mail, all that stuff from Apple will all support this. But third party apps sometimes do and sometimes don't.

Now if you want to get rid of Split View you can just drag the handle and go all the way to one side or the other. You also have these handles here at the top. You could take one of those and drag it down and turn it into a Slide Over view. Likewise you could turn a Slide Over into Split View by dragging the Split View window to the left or to the right. You could also go to full screen by dragging down and then up like that. You can also switch the sides by dragging that handle and then swapping them like that.

Now one thing you may be asking is what if the app I want to use isn't in the Dock here? You've got several apps that you can place in the Dock on your own and then what if, say, we wanted to bringup the Calendar app and it isn't here. Well, the right side remember are three recent apps that you've used that aren't on the left. So all you need to do is go Home and then launch the app that you want. Now go Home again and you'll notice that app now appears on the right side there. So you can go back into what you were looking at before and then you can drag the Dock up. Choose that app, since it's on the right side, and bring it up here. Notice another feature here is that when I'm in Split View I can replace one of these two with a new app like that.

When you create Split View like this, the Calendar on the left and Safari on the right, if I were to go and launch Safari again you see it goes right back to this screen here. So it knows to go to the existing Split View screen rather than the new one. If I tap and hold Safari here you can see I can do Show All Windows and it shows me this window here. But I can use the Plus button to open up another Safari window. So now I've got this window open separately. Let's go to MacMost there. Now when I go Home and I tap and hold you can see I can do Show All Windows and it shows me here's the Split View with Calendar and Safari and here's Safari on its own.

Keep in mind there's a lot more than just viewing here because the windows can interact with each other. For instance here I can drag this link from one Safari window to another. If I were to go into say Messages here and compose a new message I could drag something like the link here from Safari into Messages there and you can see it adds it. So you do have the ability to basically drag and drop between apps..

Safari is particularly good at multitasking. So I've got no multitasking going on here but if I tap and hold a link you can see I can drag it to the right and it will switch to Slide Over there or all the way to the right and it goes to Split View. If I do Slide Over view I can actually stack a bunch of links there. So I can tap and drag this link and put another one there. I can tap and drag this link and put another one there. Then I can flip through these really easily. You could also tap and drag a link and then place it into the Safari window and it will replace the page there.

You could even get three things going at once. So I could bring up say another app like Messages here. Go to Split View and now you can see I've got Split View going behind the Slide Over view. Now you can't access all these apps at the same time. The idea would be to have this go away and you have access to these and you could bring this back up. So this could be, say, a Messages window the you could use to quickly check your messages and then go back to what you were doing here in Split View.

I haven't even covered all of it. There are other options as well. Notice if you tap and hold a link in Safari you actually get the option to open that link in a new window. So you can start multitasking that way instead of dragging things around. Now keep in mind that multitasking has to be supported by the app. So you'll find some third party apps don't support multitasking at all or they only support it partially. There's so much to multitasking in iPadOS that I think the only way to use it effectively is to practice it. Even just ten or fifteen minutes of practice can give you the skills that you need to use multitasking effectively.