iPadOS 15 is the next version of iPadOS, with tons of new features and improvements. If you haven’t watched the event, here are the top 5 features you should look out for:
Apple Notes: Notes gets supercharged this year with a bunch of new features such as Tags, Activity View and Mentions. Tags works similar to how they work in Finder, you can add 1 or more # Tags to your note and then browse through them using the sidebar. Tags are also synced across Reminders, allowing you to have Notes and Reminders tied together with the same Tags.
- Similar to Google Docs, you can collaborate with people using @Mentions and track changes they made. This is going to be really useful in schools where students might want to share and collaborate on the same Note.
- The highlight though has to be Quick Note, a new way to create a note anywhere in the system. This is similar to sticky notes of macOS, but with a better UX and more capability (Handwriting & rich links).
Universal Control: This feature is a continuation of sidecar that was introduced 2 years back. Side car allowed to mirror your Mac display on iPad, whereas Universal Control allows using your Mac keyboard/Mice with your iPad. Once you have an iPad near your Mac, you can drag the mouse pointer across macOS onto the iPad’s display. This is going to be a life saver for people who constantly switch between iPad and Mac.
Safari: iPadOS launched with desktop-class Safari, and this year it gets a new look. The tab bar, toolbar and URL field are all combined into a single a single row, thus making more room for your webpage.
- Safari gains tab grouping, allowing you to sync a set of tabs across devices and quickly switch between different group of tabs. This is better than having different safari windows.
- Safari on iPadOS (and iOS) now supports extensions; grammarly/honey/1password should all work like on macOS.
Multi-tasking: This was one of the biggest hurdles of using iPad Pro, and with iPadOS 15 multi-tasking is getting a lot easier. There are 3 main features of multi-tasking
- Visual Clues: Once an app is open in iPadOS 15, there are 3 dots on top of the window allowing you to 1. Make the app full-screen 2. Make the app into a split-screen 3. Make the app into a slide-over window. These options are very intuitive in their implementation and work similar to the one on macOS. The three dots also make it easier to identify active app when in split screen.
- Shelf: iPadOS gained the ability to open multiple windows of the same app. But the current multi-tasking UI makes it difficult to keep track of windows and can get frustrating. Shelf makes it a lot easier and present all the windows of the current app visible as soon as you open the app. You can open a new window from the shelf as well as minimize a window into the shelf.
- App Switcher: The app switcher now displays apps that are open in slide-over and allows app pairs to be created/destroyed. This will speedup creating new app pairs and also closing individual apps within a pair.
Home Screen: Home Screen for iPadOS now resembles the one on iOS, giving you the ability to place widgets anywhere you like. Widgets gain an additional XL size which suitable for the larger screens. More native apps Mail, Contacts, Game Center have widgets now. Lastly, iPadOS gains App Library support, which unlike iOS is available in the dock too.
It’s a big year for iPadOS, and these are only some of the features that are available. Of all the announcements at WWDC, I am most excited for iPadOS.
