I know, I know. I can already hear you crying out in the name of order. “Akha, if this was truly part 2, you’d be talking about what’s new to AirPods.” And yes, you are right. Part 2 was AirPods stuff. But I’ll let you in on something: At the top (or bottom if you’re on iOS 15) of your screen, the url begins with my name, “Akha” — the subdomain. What that means, is that this little bit of the internet is my own dictatorship, my own Republic of Wadiya, and what I say goes. And I say, Part 2 will be on iPadOS 15. Satisfied? Great.
Home Screen and Widgets
With that out of the way, we can get to the start of what’s new with iPadOS. With iPadOS 14, widgets could only live on the left side of the Home Screen. Limiting widgets to a small portion of the screen seemed… wasteful. Good thing Apple remedied that with iPadOS 15. Now you can place your lovely widgets anywhere on the screen. Well, almost anywhere. Everything still has to pack in from the top left.
That’s not all that’s new with widgets. Along with new widgets for Find My, Contacts, Game Centre, App Store, Sleep, and Mail, there’s also a new, longer widget size that’s exclusive to iPadOS 15 — with the new widgets also being available on iOS 15.
If you’ll let me — not like you have a choice — I’m going to insert an iOS screenshot here to show you what else is new to widgets in both OSs.
Smart Stacks aren’t new. And neither is Smart Rotate. What is new is the new way to arrange them and the Widget Suggestions option. I can’t decide if the new arranging view is a step forward or back. On the one hand, if you have many widgets from the same app, you no longer have to guess which mobile-pocket widget you’re moving. On the other hand, moving them around takes a bit more work.
Widget Suggestions
In beta 1 this seems to temporarily place a Siri Suggestions widget in your stack when Siri thinks you’ll want to use one of them. In the final version:
Suggested widgets for apps you already use can automatically appear in your Smart Stack at the right time based on your past activity. An option lets you add the widget to your stack so it’s always there when you need it.
That stack normally has Apollo’s Wallpaper Widget and Wikipedia’s Photo of the Day Widget, but when I connect my Sony XM4s, that shows up.
App Library and Page Organisation
Two other things Apple brought over from iOS 14 are: the ability to hide Home Screen pages and the App Library. These two come hand in hand — after all, if you can hide a Home Screen page, how are you going to get the app without the App Library? (Yeah I know, Spotlight)
Something new to both iPadOS and iOS is the ability to reorder your Home Screen pages. Much appreciated.
Multitasking
Dual-Apps
Creating a dual-app setup used to be a tedious process. Let’s say I’m in my own app, Shared (iPad version to be released soon), and I wanted to have another app next to it. From Share, I used to have to find and launch the other app, go back to Shared, bring the dock up, and then finally drag the new app from the suggestions portion of the dock to one side of the screen.
Now with three taps — and one more for a shameless plug — I can choose the layout I want (split view or slide over) and choose an app for multitasking.
Smooth.
You can also create a dual-app setup from the app switcher and use the same three dots at the top to toggle an app between slide over and split view.
These improvements to multitasking would’ve been a godsend at university.
Shelf
You know how when you have multiple windows of the same app in the background and you launch the app, it opens the window that was last active? Well, what if you want another window? Currently, you can long press the app, bring up the context menu and click “Show All Windows.” Now in iPadOS 15, when you launch an app with more than one window, the Shelf shows up at the bottom of the screen and shows you all the other windows.
Notes — Quick and Normal
Quick Notes
You can use Apple Pencil and drag out of the bottom right corner — or a keyboard shortcut — to quickly create a note. A Quick Note. The quick note knows where you are so you can easily add a link to the page you’re viewing if you’re in Safari.
Quick notes can be created on iPad and Mac.
Notes
Two other new things to notes are tags and mentions. Tags are created using # followed by a keyword, while mentions are created using @ followed by a name. I don’t know if mentions are useful outside of shared notes, but more organisational tools are always welcome — although I have yet to get the hang of tagging files.
Swift Playgrounds
Okay, this is really cool. Really really cool. You can now create and publish apps all from your iPad. I think they have to be written in SwiftUI (a way of building your app’s UI using code) and I’m not sure how complicated the apps can get, but still really really cool.
Exclusive?
Maybe I haven’t been looking hard enough (probably true) but I’m going to give you what I consider to be an exclusive. If you’re on your Apple Watch and want to input text (e.g. replying to a notification) and have your iPad nearby, a little notification comes down and lets you use your iPad’s keyboard as input. neat.
There are still some Health, Privacy, and Siri changes (to name a three) and those also weren’t covered in this portion of the keynote. Want to know what they are and what I think of them? Subscribe now (for free) and you’ll get my low-down on macOS Monterey (Big Little Lies), watchOS 8, and the other announcements in your inbox over the next few days. Please also give this a like and a share.