MacLife UK – August 2019

A multitasking

makeover

Same screen, more apps,

more documents

DESPITE SHARING ITSOS with the
iPhone and iPod touch, the iPad
already had some unique tricks.
Slide Over and Split View, which
let you have more than one app
on screen at once, get even more
versatile in iPadOS.
The Ľrst change is that rather
than showing two diļerent apps,
you can view two documents within
the same app. Since there’s no
concept of windows here, this is
handled as two instances of the app.
A new feature called App ExposË,
accessed from app icons in the Dock
or on the Home screen, shows you
all the open instances of an app.
As before, you can have two apps
in Split View (the split can be 50:50

or 70:30) and add a third app in Slide

Over. You can now add multiple

apps to Slide Over, and ľick

between them in a carousel, while

the other apps remain on screen.

You can even open up a Slide Over

Switcher view that spreads out the

apps, like the app switcher view on

iPhone. Remembering the gestures,

with few or no visible cues, seems

a headache. For all–day iPad users,

though, they’ll soon be second

nature — as soon as their favorite

apps support them, at least.

Copy and paste

feels more magical

Chopping and changing text is easier

with iPadOS

The demo of iPadOS’ text editing gestures wasn’t the
most successful of the WWDC keynote, producing several
“umm” and “oops” moments. But the new features look
pretty usable. It’s less fiddly to move the cursor and
select blocks of text; and as well as selecting a word with
a double tap, you can grab a sentence with three or a
paragraph with four. A three–finger pinch then copies
the selection, and a three–finger unpinch pastes it,
while a three–finger left swipe will undo that action.
If you use a physical keyboard with your iPad, you can
already use Shift+[cursor selection] and standard Cut,
Copy and Paste shortcuts, and iPadOS adds even more
Cmd+[key] shortcuts for purposes from Safari navigation
to file management. The on–screen keyboard is also
improved (see p29).

You can now add multiple apps to Slide Over to make viewing and accessing multiple apps easy.

iPadOS has new

gestures for copy,

paste and undo.

As well as improvements to

the keyboard itself, you can

have the keyboard floating

anywhere on the screen.

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