Now if you tap on the Dock icon of the app that’s currently open, you’ll see a “shelf” containing all the app’s windows, and you can tap to bring them forward or swipe up to close them. There’s also a new window type in certain apps, a “floating window” that displays front and center above the rest of the apps, making it more like what you’d see on a Mac.Īpple has also attempted to refine iPadOS’s concept of an app that has multiple windows open. ![]() It’s vastly more discoverable than the old (but still there) drag-and-drop gestures and allows you to select a second app for Split View directly from the home screen, including the App Library. It looks like three horizontal dots, and you can tap or click on it to send an app into full-screen mode, Split View, or Slide Over. The multitasking control is more discoverable than multitasking gestures were.Īt the center of it all is a new multitasking control, which appears at the top of every app window. A lot of these changes are more visual than conceptual, but they lay the groundwork for potential expansion of multitasking features in the future. It’s great.) New multitasking, new possibilitiesĪpple has made substantial changes to how multitasking works in iPadOS 15. (I’ve removed almost all of my iPad’s apps from my home screen and am now down to a single page with a couple of folders. Being able to remove them altogether while keeping them accessible via a swipe and a couple of taps is a delight. Previously, those who wanted tidier home screens would need to hide away apps in junk folders. And while I question App Library’s utility-is it really any better than just offering an alphabetical list of apps, and doesn’t the Spotlight search box work just as well for finding apps?-at least it finally lets iPad users remove app icons from the home screen without deleting them from their device. It doesn’t appear any different from the App Library introduced on the iPhone last year. App Library is a page that shows off all the apps on your device, with automatically generated categories and a search box. Speaking of the minimum effort, Apple has also brought the App Library page to the iPad with iPadOS 15. In shorts, while being able to add widgets to any iPad home screen is welcome, I’m disappointed Apple didn’t do more here. (At least iOS 15 doesn’t force both orientations to keep widgets in the same place-they can be in different places in each.) And of course, since apps wrap differently in portrait and landscape orientations, you’ll need to edit both orientations in order to get your widgets where you want them. Moving around apps is even more ungainly when some of them are the width of two apps (medium-sized widgets) or take up a 2×2 space (large widgets) or even two rows and four columns (the new x-large widget size). When you place one widget, it may slide a bunch of apps around, pushing other widgets around, forcing you to move every widget to get them all back together. They slide around on the screen, pushing apps around as you move them. I’m also a bit frustrated about how placing widgets works. The net result is a home screen that feels even more hilariously sparse than the iPad home screen has always felt-at least until you start adding widgets to the screen to add extra density. Everything’s a little wider apart, so that one small widget fits in the same space as a single app icon (with an enormous amount of padding around the icon, of course). Apple’s clever solution to how widgets would fit into the iPad’s differently-sized app grid was to expand the app grid. That’s great, but I wanted more after waiting a year. Expanding that functionality seemed inevitable, and with iPadOS 15 iPad users can now place widgets pretty much anywhere, on any page of the home screen. The problem was that while widgets could live anywhere on the iPhone, they were limited to a single column at the left side of the first page of the iPad’s home screen. IOS 14 introduced widgets that can live on the iPhone and iPad home screen. Still, some features are more notable than others.īlast from the past: Widgets and App Library Never once did I regret updating my iPad Pro, which I use for many hours each day for both business and personal tasks, to a beta release. In addition to all the features of iOS 15 that Dan has detailed in his full iOS review, there are some iPad-specific aspects worth discussing separately. I’ve spent the last three months using pre-release versions of iPadOS 15 on an M1 iPad Pro. ![]() And I’ve reduced my home screen to a single page thanks to the addition of App Library. Widgets can be placed anywhere, not just in the left column.
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