How To Control Your iPad With A Trackpad Or Mouse In iPadOS 13.4

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at iPadOS 13.4 and how to use a trackpad with your iPad.

MacMost is supported by more than 600 viewers just like you. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.

Okay, so a big new feature in iPadOS 13.4 released today is the ability to connect a trackpad with your iPad. Now you could have done this before with even the very first version of iPadOS 13 except it was an accessibility feature and it kind of just had the very basics in there. Now it's a  fully flushed out feature of iPadOS. It works with the Magic Trackpad, even the old Magic Trackpad. It works with Apple's Magic Mouse. It works with third party bluetooth trackpads as well. It works with any iPad that can run on iPadOS 13.4. So you don't need the new iPad Pro to do it. As a matter of fact I'm going to show you using the first generation iPad Pro but it will even work on a non Pro iPad.

Also, of course, a lot of people think that you need the new Magic Keyboard which Apple is coming out with in May which is a keyboard and trackpad specifically built for the iPad Pro. But no. You can use it with existing trackpad or mouse that you have right now.

So to set this up you just need to go into Settings. Go to Bluetooth and connect to your trackpad just like you would with any other Bluetooth device. It's no different in this respect. But as soon as it's connected you could see that it works. See that circle there? That is the cursor and it's reacting to my finger on the trackpad. I don't have to touch the iPad screen anymore.

Okay, so you have this cursor here. The cursor changes color depending upon what's under it. You can see if it's over something that's light it'll change to something dark. It it's over something dark it'll change to something that's light. So you can always see it on the screen. You move it around using your finger on the trackpad or if you're using a mouse you just move that around normally. Now notice both the cursor and the content underneath react when they come in contact with each other. So if I move the cursor over an app icon here on the Home screen you can see the app icon gets larger and the cursor kind of disappears into it. Likewise the same thing in the Dock down here at the bottom. If I go to the top here, say to the date, you can see the date is highlighted and the cursor sort of blends in with it. The same thing with the battery information here on the upper right.

As you can imagine you just click like you would if your were using a Mac to go into something. If we wanted to say view the Clock app just click and it will open the Clock app. So basically to get around you can use a lot of trackpad gestures that are similar to what you find on the Mac. It's similar to what you would do on the screen of the iPad itself. So, for instance, if I go into an app and then swipe to the left or right with three fingers it will go between apps. If I pinch outward with four fingers it will take me either to the Home screen or the apps which are depending upon the situation. I could also go to the bottom here and bring up the Dock. But if I continue to go to the bottom it will go to the Home screen.

If I kind of do something in-between there, like go to the bottom with the Dock and then kind of push a little bit more but don't go all the way to the Home screen, you see it takes me to the app switcher. Now to get to the Notification Center you can just simply go to the top and kind of push up. You can also go and click on the date and time there as well. I can get to Control Center by clicking here on the battery at the upper right. I can also just drag into the upper right hand corner and it will bring it up. You can just click on different things in here but if I want to go down deeper into it like I would on the iPad I can tap with two fingers on the trackpad and go into it like that. 

As a matter of fact tapping with two fingers brings up Context menus in all sorts of places. Like for instance for apps if I were to tap and hold with one finger it would act just like I did that on the screen. But I could do it more immediately by simply quickly tapping with two fingers and it assumes that I'm doing a tap and hold. So it's the same thing as bringing up a Context menu on the Mac.

You can also use other gestures in the obvious places for them. For instance here I am in the Photos app and I can use two fingers to zoom in or out from a photo. In a web browser things work as you would expect. You can see the links get highlighted when you move the cursor over them. You can two finger click on a link to bring up a Context menu. So when you're editing text you can use the trackpad as a cursor, or course, and you can have a little more precision as to exactly where you place the cursor to do edits. You can double click to select a word. If I click and hold you can see I get a very large cursor here. So I can place this where I need.

Now there are some settings for this. If you go into the Settings app and you look under General for Trackpad or it'll say Mouse or Trackpad and Mouse, you can see you can set the tracking speed, Natural Scrolling (the direction of the scrolling), you can set it to Tap to Click so I could just barely tap the top of my trackpad instead of clicking down. I can also turn Off two finger secondary click if I want. There are some finer controls if you go down to Accessibility and then look for Pointer Control. Then under that you can see how to do things like Increase the Contrast so you can see it's darker now. I can have it automatically hide the pointer after a certain amount of time. You can see it kind of going away if I just wait two seconds there it'll fade and go away because I haven't moved. I could change the color of the cursor. I could change the size so I could make it something much larger or smaller if you want. I could turn off the Animation. So like notice how when I move the cursor over a button like a Accessibility there you could see how it blends into it. I could turn that off if I don't want that. You could see that the item still reacts to it but the cursor itself stays the same. 

I could also turn off Inertia. So if it feels weird to you to move around, there's kind of an inertia to it, I recommend sticking with it. You'll probably get used to it in a day or two. It's kind of the default way it's going to work. But if you really wanted to you could turn it off and then things act without that inertia. You could also change the scrolling speed when you're scrolling through lists like this.

So there's the basics. If you have an iPad that you just updated to iPadOS 13.4 today, then you should be able to take any Bluetooth pointing device, connect it and try all this stuff out. I don't know if this is going to be for everybody. But certainly if you want to try to use an iPad as a laptop replacement and use a keyboard and a trackpad with it then having this functionality is really important. Otherwise you're always reaching out and touching the screen.