When Apple announces its next operating software each June at its World Wide Developers’ Conference, it only tells a part of the story. Plenty of features that haven’t yet been revealed will apply to Apple’s next iPhone, for instance. But what’s been unveiled is even more interesting because it’s the innovations that will work with current iPhones and iPads. Here are some of the standouts as they apply to the iPad, focusing on how we interact with the tablet.
1 The Dock
It used to be that the bottom row of icons on the iPad were just a half-dozen of the apps you chose to keep there and which remained in view as you swept from screen to screen.
This has been hugely enhanced and looks pretty similar to the apps dock on the iMac. Now you can put more of your favorites there. The dock now holds up to 13 apps (landscape or portrait) and the idea is that almost everything you’ll need with be there. The right hand of the dock has three positions which it saves for recent apps, which is pretty handy, too.
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2 Drag And Drop
Like the dock, this is something we’re all used to in computers, not on iPads. As you’d expect from Apple it’s thoughtfully, immaculately implemented. Want to move some photos? Touch and hold one, then with another finger touch another, and it’ll leap onto the first one. You can add more. Then bring up the dock and tap Notes, say, and you can drop the photos into a note. It’s pretty cool.
3 Files
And here’s a feature every Mac and PC has, but an iPad doesn’t. Are you spotting a theme yet? That feature is file management, which Apple felt wasn’t useful on a tablet or mobile. The new Files app, while not a System Folder as you’d find on a PC, is something of a revelation. Now you can search for Word documents, scree grabs, folders, spreadsheets, and more. And not just on the iPad’s storage, you can search on your other locations, too, like OneDrive, Box, Dropbox and more. These changes combine to make it possible that you might never use a PC or Mac again, that an iPad will do what you previously turned to a laptop or desktop for.
4 Control Center
Because you can invoke the dock from any screen by swiping up from the bottom of the display, that meant Control Center had to change. Control Center as you know is the collection of controls which include flight mode, wi-fi, Bluetooth and more, not to mention AirDrop, the torch and the calculator. There were also further screens for music playback and Home accessories. Well, now all these appear when you swipe that bit further than you were used to.
And the controls have been improved. So the screen brightness is now a vertical slider, as is volume. There’s now an icon for Mobile Data, which could be a handy shortcut when you’re travelling and don’t want your data to roam.
But it puts AirDrop into a less prominent position, inside the cluster where wi-fi, Bluetooth and so on are kept. And it would be great if the wi-fi control was better: you can turn it on and off with one press but how about a long press to switch networks, please? Same for Bluetooth, an extra level beyond on and off in Control Center would be welcome.
Control Center also has recently used apps in screen view, even holding them in the pairs that you set them to before.
5 Keyboard
Have you noticed that Apple has always resisted putting numbers and punctuation on the main onscreen keyboard – except on the 12.9in screen iPad Pro? It can be annoying when you find yourself switching between keyboards more than you want.
Now there’s a great solution. When the keyboard is on screen you flick the number or symbol on to your document instead. Don’t make the mistake I did of trying to flick them upwards, like on the BlackBerry. Instead, pull downwards so the secondary character switches from grey to black and let go. I don’t know why, but this is very satisfying to use.
6 Split View
As well as two apps side by side on an iPad screen, you can do something called Slide Over, where the second app you slide up from the dock rests like a skinny, translucent window hoveraing above either a single app or a pair sitting in Split View. That’s three apps on screen together. Cool.
I mean, I’ve barely started here and I’ve deliberately left the apps themselves out. The Notes app, already one of my favourites, is transformed with markup capabilities and, on the iPad Pro, unlock with Pencil. You can even hand-write notes with the Pencil and machine learning will turn into text it can search. Safari now has an anti-tracking feature so ads don’t follow you round the net endlessly. Photos are improved, there’s a one-handed keyboard option, on the iPhone, and so much more. Next time, next time.
Date:June 27, 2017