A Look At New Features iPadOS Adds To Your iPad

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at some of the exciting new things coming to the iPad with iPadOS. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon and there you can read more about it and join us and get exclusive content.

So iOS 13 on the iPad isn't just iOS 13. It's iPadOS. Apple is using this new name to denote that the iPad has features that the iPhone doesn't. There are a ton of great new features you're going to get with iPadOS. Let's take a look at some of them.

One of the first things you notice with iPadOS is the Home Screen is a little different. You see some widgets on the left and your icons on the right. The stuff on the left is called the Today View. We had it before but not at the same time as the app icons. There are actually two modes. One where it's permanently there always on that first page of app icons. Another where you can make it go away. I've got it into the mode where you can make it go away and bring it back. Notice you don't get anymore app icons by making it go away. 

Now you can scroll through these to see all your widgets. Go to the Edit button at the bottom and one of the options here is to whether or not to have it permanently there. So now I can set it to be permanent and I also get these pin favorites ones that will always appear there on the Home screen. I still have the rest of them and then more that I can add to that Today View. So with it permanently there I can no longer get rid of it. It's permanently there. It just slides over. But I can still scroll up to see the rest of the widgets in my Today View and get to that Edit button at the bottom. 

So let's say you're working in an app here, like Safari, and you want to take some notes. You can bring up the Pages app in a slide over window. I'm going to slide up a little bit from the bottom to bring up the Dock. Then I'm going to slide that Pages icon over onto the screen and drop it there. So it's a slide over window. Now I can go and open a document. I can use it to take notes. I could also bring up other windows as well. 

So, for instance, say I want to bring up the News app. I can bring that over in the same way. I can easily go between these windows in a few different ways. One is I can just swipe at the very bottom of the screen right under that white bar that you see there. I can swipe one direction or another to go between these. I've got the Files app opened, Pages and the News app. So I can keep swiping right to left to get between them. I can also swipe up a little bit and it brings up this browser here where I can see all of these. This is where I can easily Quit one of the those apps. At least close that window and get it out of the way or choose one to jump to.

What's really cool is I can have a window from the same app. So I can say I want Safari to actually have another window here. So I've got another Safari window and I can bring up multiple Safari windows. So you can see here now I've got a Files window, a Pages window, a Safari window all with Safari there in the background as well. 

You can even create windows with some apps. So for instance Safari does this. I can tap and hold on a link and then drag it over to the side here and I can create either a slide over window like that or go all the way to the edge to create a split screen view. 

If you've got a bunch of Safari windows open in different places you can tap and hold its icon there in the Dock. Go to Show All Windows and you'll see all the different windows open for that app and you can jump to anyone of them. 

So there are some new ways to Edit text. Here I am in the Notes app and it seems to work in a lot of the standard apps but it doesn't yet work in Pages. Sometimes Pages is a few weeks behind. They have to come up with an update for that after the beta is done. Here I can reposition the cursor by tapping and dragging the cursor which is kind of nice. I can also select text by simply tapping, wait like a fraction of a second for the selection to start, and then drag. I'm going to do that with the word dog here and then drag backwards. That works really well for selecting text. 

Now you can still use the old copy, cut, and paste commands there but there's these three finger pinch gestures. So you're supposed to be able to pinch with three fingers. I'm not sure if you're supposed to use these three or these three, and then go up to Copy and you can see it worked. You got that little Copy symbol there at the top. It just said Copy there. Now you're supposed to be able to Paste doing the opposite. Pinch together and drag down. I can never get it to quite work. It says nothing to copy. It still thinks I want to copy something. If I pinch with the three fingers together and wait I get a little bar at the top which has Paste and Undo and Redo and Copy and Cut at the top. So I can just use that. So even that's kind of an improvement. 

You can Undo and Redo using three fingers swiping left or right. So I'll do swipe left with three fingers and it does  an Undo. Swipe right with three fingers and it's a Redo. So that's kind of nice. It's probably the best Undo, Redo functionality we've had so far in iOS. 

There's also better multiple selection functionalities. So a good way to demonstrate that is here I am in the Files app. Say I want to select all four of these items that are in here. So before I would have to hit the Select button at the right and then, you know, swipe down to get all the checkmarks. But I can do it a little bit easier now. I just tap with two fingers and drag. So I haven't hit the Select button yet. I just take two fingers and drag down and you can see it does the selection for me. 

Now there's new typing functionality. You can swipe to type but here's the catch. It doesn't work on the full keyboard. So when you see a keyboard covering the whole screen like this it doesn't work. But I can change this into a Floating Keyboard now. So I can go to Floating and now you get this iPhone sized keyboard. Here I can actually swipe to type. (Demonstrating floating keyboard.) So you can see how easy that was. If you've ever used swipe typing on the iPhone with different keyboards this is a pretty good way to type. This floating keyboard you can put wherever is convenient so you can just use one finger to do the swiping.

Here's some other features. Check this out. Go to Settings and notice there is now an area for Fonts. You can go to the App Store and add Fonts to your iPad. I don't think yet there are any fonts available but there should be pretty soon. In the Files app there's a big improvement because we had Icon View and List view. Now we have Column View so if you're used to using that on the Mac you now have that in the Files app on the iPad as well. You even have the Preview pane on the right. It even has information about the file and Quick Actions that you can perform like, for instance, Markup or Rotation of an image. 

There's a Downloads folder. That's really important because remember now with iPadOS the browser is supposed to default to the Desktop view. So you should be getting Desktop versions of webpages, not mobile version of webpages, which means the browser needs to behave like a Desktop browser. One of those things it needs is a Downloads folder. 

The Files app also gains the ability to Zip and Unzip files use just like the Mac Finder can and you can scan documents directly in here. Before you could use the Continuity feature to scan to your Mac. Here you can just go into the Files app and scan documents directly into a file in your iPad.

There are lots of other little features. Changes to Safari, changes to Accessibility features and I'm going to address those in some future videos. The one last big change I want to leave you with here is now we have Dark Mode. You may have noticed that I'm using it here. Go into Settings. Go into Display & Brightness. You can switch between Light Mode and Dark Mode. You can also go into Control Center here and when you customize controls you can tap to add Dark Mode into your Control Center. So now I'll see it when I drag down from the top right I'll be able to see the Dark and Light mode switch there and you can easily switch back and forth to it without having to go into Settings.