Using the iOS 11 iPad Dock

The iPad Dock is a persistent Home screen feature that allows you to easily switch to your most-used apps. You can customize the left side of the Dock, while the right side shows your most recently used apps. You can also bring the Dock up inside of other apps for quick switching or multitasking.

Check out Using the iOS 11 iPad Dock at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: One of the best new features of iOS 11 on the iPad is the Dock. The Dock you can see at the bottom of the screen there and it is very similar to the Mac Dock but works differently in some ways.
One of the ways that it's similar is that it is always there. So here you've got your home screen apps and there's page one. I'm going to swipe to page two and you can see the Dock at the bottom doesn't change. So these apps are ones you can access anywhere. That's similar to kind of how it worked before with the bottom row of app icons. 
You can easily add more to the Dock by dragging app icons from the main part of the home screen down to the Dock. You can add many more in there. You can squeeze a bunch in and you can see it will get slightly smaller as you add more. 
Now the icons on the right aren't ones you drag into. So they are just recent apps. Depending upon how much space you have is how much can fit on there. So the recent apps will change. For instance if I were to go and go into say the Photos app and then go back to the home screen you can see the Photos app has been added there. If I go into the Calendar app and back out you can see the Calendar app is now in there. So it's going to change to be the most recent apps there on the right side. 
Now you do have some options. If you go into Settings and then you go to General you'll find Multitasking & Dock. So now you can find a few different things in here. One of them is Show Suggested and Recent Apps in the Dock. So that's your only real option there. If I turn that Off you can see now I only have the items I've added that are permanently there. It does give me a lot more space and it does give me this feeling that the Dock isn't changing all the time. But, for me, it's definitely more useful to have the recent apps there so I can easily get back to them. 
Now the Dock is also used in multitasking. So I've showed this before. If you go in to say Safari here and then you want to multitask. You can drag up from the bottom of the screen and here inside the app you get the Dock. If you drag up too much it actually goes to this screen. A multitasking screen with Control Center. But just dragging up a little bit gives you this Dock here. I can use this to switch between apps. So I could go to the Settings app and I'm just switching. So I can drag up and then switch back to Safari. But I could also bring it up and then use multitasking by dragging an app in as either a window or a portion of the screen. So the Dock is very important for multitasking tasks as well.
So it's a really useful tool. It does take some time to get used to it. I'm still flipping between screens here to find apps where they just appear there at the bottom of the screen and are much easier to access. Of course you're going to take the time to customize which apps appear permanently on the left side of the Dock. If you do it right you could end up using the Dock a lot more than the rest of the home screen. 
You could also put Folders down here. So, for instance, I've got a folder here with some games. I can drag that down and put that in the Dock. Now I can access that app folder really easily as well.

Using the iOS 11 iPad Dock

Comments: One Response to “Using the iOS 11 iPad Dock”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

Recent Shorts

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information