Apple’s brilliant new Magic Keyboard is going to make working on iPad Pro better than ever before — but what if you don’t own an iPad Pro? Logitech has you covered with its new Combo Touch keyboard case.
Just like the Magic Keyboard, the Combo Touch boasts real, backlit keys and a built-in trackpad. Unlike the Magic Keyboard, it also offers functions keys, and it’s pretty affordable at just $149.
Apple’s exciting new Magic Keyboard is going to make working on iPad Pro better than ever when the accessory debuts in May. It’s a huge improvement over the Smart Keyboard Folio in so many ways.
Prices start at $299, which makes the Magic Keyboard an expensive upgrade. For many iPad Pro users, however, it will be well worth it. Here are five reasons why the Magic Keyboard with trackpad blows our minds.
The surprise iPad Pro refresh, unveiled on Wednesday morning, has us all reaching for a credit cards. If you’re still on the fence, Apple’s awesome new ads will convince you this is a worthwhile upgrade.
Both highlight iPad Pro’s increasing ability to replace a traditional computer thanks to its blazing-fast A12Z Bionic processor, brand-new Magic Keyboard, and true trackpad support.
iOS 14 will ship with a brand-new Home screen layout that allows users to arrange icons in a list, according to a new report. The view is expected to be customizable and will incorporate Siri Suggestions for making your most frequently used apps easier to access.
It could be the biggest change to the Home screen since the first version of iOS debuted with the original iPhone in 2007.
iPad multitasking, Split Screen and all that stuff, has been getting a bad rap recently, and rightly so. It’s a mess. But amidst this storm of iPad hatred, there’s one great feature that stays great: Slide Over. On the iPad, Slide Over lets you dock a mini, iPhone-size version of an app over on the right side of the screen. You can swipe this away to hide it, and swipe again to bring it back out.
That’s cool, and very handy (as we shall see in a moment). But even better is that you can dock a whole bunch of apps over there, ready to use, and then fan out the stack to help pick the one you want. Let’s take a look. You’re going to love this.
Apple warned developers today that it’ll soon automatically reject any iPhone or iPad software submitted to the App Store if it wasn’t written with the iOS 13 SDK.
The iPad added drag and drop in iOS 11. We’re now on the third version of iOS to support this potentially super-useful feature, and yet it still doesn’t work. Third-party app support remains spotty and inconsistent. And, worse, drag and drop doesn’t work properly even in some of Apple’s own apps.
What’s going on?
On the Mac, hot corners are essential — and amazingly useful. You can put your display to sleep, trigger Mission Control and more, just by flicking the mouse to a screen corner. If you’re one of those people who likes to use a mouse with your iPad, you can utilize these same flick-to-activate gestures on the tablet. And there’s a bonus: Hot corners on the iPad are way, way more powerful than on the Mac.
We all know how to scroll through long documents or lists on iOS, right? You swipe on the screen, and then keep doing it, over and over, as fast as possible, like some kind of maniac. And, at some point in the future, you will probably arrive at the other end of the list. Scrolling to the very top is easy — just touch the top of the screen. But in iOS 13, you can grab the scroll bar that appears on the right side of the screen, and use it to navigate.
This is a really, really useful feature. Here’s how it works.
Apparently, some people really hate multitasking on the iPad. It’s easy to see why. All you have to do is accidentally drag a link in Safari, instead of just tapping on it, and you end up with a split-screen view, with that link in its own window. And getting rid of that window is a huge pain, even if you know how to do it.
Fortunately for people who hate iPad multitasking — which isn’t really multitasking, but is Apple’s term for the confusion of multiple-window views on iPadOS — Apple lets you turn off the feature. Here’s how to disable iPad multitasking (and why you might not want to).
Apple’s big iOS 13 update has now made its way to an impressive 70% of all iPhones and 57% of all iPads, Cupertino’s latest data reveals.
Just 23% of Apple smartphones are running iOS 12, while a mere 7% are running an earlier version of its software. A whopping 77% of all devices introduced in the last four years have been upgraded.
There were tablet computers before the iPad, but they were thick plastic laptops with the screens reversed, with awful, bendy TFT screens. The first iPad seems thick and clunky now, compared to the latest ultra-thin iPads Pro, but at the time it felt like a slice of the future.
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad a decade ago today, some critics wrote it off as “just a big iPhone.” The only thing was, a lot of people really wanted a big iPhone. And ultimately, the iPad changed mobile computing as we know it.
iOS 13 and iPadOS added official support for adding fonts to your iPhone and iPad. You’ve been able to do it for a while, using third-party apps that hack their way around the problem using software configuration profiles to install typefaces on your system.
And you can still use those. In fact, you may have to, as we’ll see in a moment. But now you can also install fonts from the App Store, as well as previewing them in a new built-in panel. Let’s take a look.
iOS 13 (and iPadOS) fixed the frustrating text-selection tools on the iPhone and iPad, but only if you know how to use them. Selecting a single word or sentence is still way easier on a Mac, because you have a mouse and keyboard permanently attached. On the iPad, though, you can still find the text selection slipping and jumping like an oiled fish.
Use these iPhone and iPad text-selection tips to highlight words and paragraphs the easy way in iOS.
At the end of November last year, I took delivery of the new 16-inch MacBook Pro. Around a month later, thanks to Apple’s generous holiday return policy, I returned it. You can read my first impressions, but they mostly remain the same after a month of use. In short, it’s a fantastic MacBook. But in my conclusion, I wrote this:
But really, this Mac is fantastic. My Cult of Mac colleagues tease me that I buy Apple gear, and then immediately send it back. This new MacBook is staying with me.
So, what went wrong?
You can sign a PDF on your Mac using the giant MacBook trackpad, and you can mark up PDFs and screenshots, too. But all that stuff is much easier on the iPad, especially if you have an Apple Pencil. The problem is getting it there. But in macOS Catalina, you don’t have to “get it” anywhere. Screenshots and PDFs magically show up on nearby iPads, where you can sign them or mark them up. Then you can return them to your Mac. These features are called Continuity Sketch and Continuity Markup, and they’re killer.
You know how the UPS guy holds up his brown scanner box for you to sign? PDF markup is like that, only on your iPad — and you never feel guilty about ordering too many parcels.
Adobe launched a major power boost today to Lightroom Mobile that adds Direct Import and Advance Export features to iOS and iPadOS.
Direct Import streamlines the workflow by eliminating the need to import photos into the Camera Roll. Users can now skip that by connecting a drive or SD card to transfer photos directly to Lightroom for iOS or iPadOS.
We will never see a touchscreen Mac. Apple has made this clear over and over. Whenever one of its executives is asked about a touchscreen Mac in an interview, the answer is always the same: macOS is for trackpads, and iPadOS for is for touch. Combining them would compromise both.
I agree. While I do catch myself tapping the Mac’s screen from time to time, there’s no way I’d want the Mac redesigned for touch. For one thing, you’d lose all the accuracy of the mouse, because clicking targets would have to be big enough for your fingers. But it doesn’t matter, because Apple has already made a touch option for the Mac. It’s Sidecar, and it’s amazing.
By now, you know that you can use multiple windows from the same app in iPadOS 13, just like you can on the Mac. And you probably also know that it’s a pain to open a new window from scratch. You have to open the app, then slide the Dock up from the bottom of the screen, then tap the app icon again, then tap the little + icon at the top right.
But did you know that there’s an easier way to open a new window in iPadOS? You can just drag an item to the edge of the screen, and drop it there to open it in a brand-new Split View window. Let’s check it out.
You’ve always been able to crop photos on your iPhone and iPad. It’s easy to “zoom” into your images, cutting out cruft and distraction at the edges of the frame to focus on what’s important. But now, in iOS 13 and iPadOS, you can do more than crop and chop. Now you also can skew images — aka correct perspective errors — all inside the Photos app’s edit mode.
You can do all kinds of things with this new Photos tool. If you snapped a picture of a painting in the gallery, and didn’t hold your iPhone parallel to the wall, you can fix that. Or you can get more radical, perhaps by “fixing” an image of a skyscraper to stop it from disappearing to a point in the distance. The good news is that these perspective tools are fun and easy to use. Let’s check them out.
The iPadOS Files app isn’t bad, but it has one super-frustrating flaw. While you can now enjoy multiple windows, hook up any and all USB drives, and even connect to network servers, you can’t do one simple thing: Preview a file. Or rather, you can preview any file, just by clicking on it, but you never know whether Files will actually show you a Quick Look preview, or just open that file in an arbitrary app.
Today, we will add a dedicated Quick Look entry to the Files app share menu. Never again will you tap to preview a file and have it launch an app instead.
iPhone and iPad owners received a critical software update this morning aimed at fixing one of the most annoying bugs in iOS 13.2.
iOS 13.2.2 and iPadOS 13.2.2 come just over a week after Apple released iOS 13.2, which contains a nasty memory bug that causes apps to quit unexpectedly in the background. The recent iOS 13.3 beta added a fix for the memory bug, but now everyone can enjoy the bug fix without having to install beta software.
iOS 13 brought all kinds of neat new features to the Files app, aka the iOS Finder. But maybe the best of all these is the new column view, a very Mac-like view of all the files and folders stored on your iPad. It’s not just an easy-to-browse view, either. The Files app column view also introduces a preview panel with plenty of tricks of its own.
Did you know that you can scan paper documents into the Notes app on your iPhone and iPad? The app turns them into PDFs, and trims them to make them look as if you scanned them in a proper scanner. Maybe you read our how-to article on scanning into the Notes app, and you already know this. But in iOS 13, things get better: You also can search those scanned documents.
That’s right. You can scan a sheet of paper into Notes, and anything printed on it will become searchable, as if you typed it in yourself. Let’s see how to search scans.
Adobe’s massive catalog of fonts is now available on iOS for the first time. You can use them inside any app that supports custom font APIs — so long as you’re running iOS 13.1.
Get started by downloading the Creative Cloud app today.
