44 MACWORLD MARCH 2020
iOSCENTRAL iPAD NEEDS TO EMBRACE MICE AND TRACKPADSmouse to an iPad via USB or Bluetooth
and turn on Assistive Touch, you’ll see a
virtual finger on the screen (it’s a circle with
a smaller circle inside it) that you can move
around with the device. Even at its smallest
size, it’s still pretty large—but so is a
fingertip.
Using a mouse with an iPad is a great
way to understand just how smart the
operating system is when it comes to
intuiting what you want to do when you tap
the screen with your big, fat fingers. As a
Mac user, I expect to need to click
precisely the right pixels on the screen or
come away disappointed—but on my iPad,
if I click in the general vicinity it almost
invariably does the right thing.
Unfortunately, the fact that the cursor is
a virtual finger is also a drawback. So
many iPad interface features are based on
gestures, and it’s less fun to try to emulate
a flick of a finger with a mouse. Using a
prototype of Brydge’s keyboard/trackpad
combo, which makes my iPad feel very
much like a MacBook, felt even worse—
because I expected to be able to use all
the Magic Trackpad gestures I’ve
internalized over the years, and they’re
just not supported. (I’d love to connect a
Magic Trackpad to an iPad and then swipe
from app to app.)
I’m also disappointed that iPadOS 13
doesn’t appropriately support the one
cursor that’s been on iOS for years—the
text-editing cursor you see when you put
two fingers down on the iPad’s software
keyboard. In this mode, the iPad is
basically emulating a trackpad, letting you
precisely place a cursor, select text,
and more. That feature hasn’t been
integrated at all, which is a shame,
because it would really improve
writing and editing on the iPad—
and it’s right there for the taking.
iPadOS 13 also introduced an
upgraded version of Safari that
emulates a desktop browser, so
more websites are accessible on
the iPad. It’s a clever feature that
works surprisingly well most of the
time, interpreting how pages
expect you to behave with a mouse
The iOS 13 Assistive Touch cursor. connected and then emulating that