The iPad’s Slide Over multitasking feature offered an approximation of this experience, but Quick Notes is far more flexible. At the top of this Quick Note is a button that automatically appears to let you save a link to the page you're visiting. Finally, you can swipe between Quick Notes you’ve started if you want to get to a specific document. Depending on your settings, you can start a new note every time you access Quick Notes, or just keep adding to the same one. You can quickly type or write down (with the Apple Pencil) whatever comes to mind and then swipe the note away when you’re done. Swiping in from the lower right corner summons a new note that floats above whatever apps you’re using. As Apple’s Craig Federighi said during last month's WWDC keynote, Notes are now a “system-wide” feature. The other new feature that could fundamentally change the iPad experience is Quick Notes. All that, plus the apps in my dock, make this the prime place to go when I need to get things done. I have a widget showing recent notes in the “work” folder, another with Reminders (also specifically from my work group), an Apple News widget showing the latest tech news, and widgets for Google Calendar and Gmail. For example, my work screen only has six app shortcuts (Drive, Docs, Sheet, Trello, Slack and LastPass), but the variety of widgets I have installed provides glanceable info and easy access to a lot of tools. It took a little work, but I’ve now hidden the apps I don’t use as much in the App Library and now have five home screens curated for work, entertainment, games and so forth. I’m glad Apple did this, because it makes your iPad’s home screens far more customizable than before, something sorely needed on a big-screen device. Both widgets and the App Library came to the iPhone last year, and it was surprising that they didn’t arrive on the iPad until now. You can also select which apps you want to show on the Home Screen and stash the rest in the App Library, an auto-organized place to find everything you’ve installed on your iPad. As with last year’s iOS 14, iPad users can now pin widgets anywhere they want. The most obvious change in iPadOS 15 is that widgets have come to the Home Screen. With that out of the way, let’s dig into the new features. Unless you're extremely curious, I'd wait for a few more beta versions to be released before giving it a shot, unless you can put it on a back-up iPad. (Examples: my cursor doesn’t always move to the search field when I summon it, and the last few letters of my messages are sometimes cut off when using the app in Slide Over.) It’s nothing deal-breaking, but it’s noticeable, particularly when I use my iPad for multiple hours at a time. I’ve generally been able to use my 11-inch iPad Pro without any issues, but apps occasionally crash and throw me to the Home Screen interacting with notifications doesn’t always work and there are various other hiccups here and there. Apple’s public betas are generally pretty reliable, and that’s true here, too. Should you install iPadOS 15?īut first, a note about that beta status. There are a lot of new features to unpack, and the just-released iPadOS 15 public beta is still a work in progress, but here are some of the most significant changes to look forward to when the final software arrives this fall. That said, Apple has made a handful of significant changes and a host of smaller ones, all of which add up to an experience that makes the iPad more customizable and flexible than before while still retaining (and improving upon) the basic iPad experience. This year’s iPadOS update isn’t going to satisfy those who want the iPad to work more like a Mac - it still feels like an iPad, for better or worse. Ever since the well-designed and overly powerful 2018 iPad Pro arrived, people have increasingly asked Apple to make its tablet software as flexible and impressive as its hardware. IPadOS 15 is arriving at a crucial time for the iPad.
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