You might be looking at the list of changes coming to the iPad this year with iPad OS 17, and
thinking to yourself that there’s not that much to get excited about. And yeah, this year’s iPad
OS update is a bit of a small one compared with previous years, but there are still some really
good additions and improvements here, and these are the 8 things that I think you ought to check
out first. Stick around, I’ll be covering all of the new Apple operating systems in massive detail
over the coming weeks, so if you want to get more from your devices, you won’t want to miss a video.
OK, let’s get into it.
***
You can now customise your iPad Lock Screen, much like you can on the iPhone,
and the process for doing so is pretty much the same. Tap and hold for a moment on a Lock Screen
until you get the Customise option underneath. You can either swipe to create a brand new Lock
Screen, or you can tap on customise to change the one you’re currently using,
which is what we’re going to do here. Choose the Lock Screen itself to customise the Lock Screen,
although notice that you can also separately customise the Home Screen if you wish.
So the first major difference here is the inclusion of the date and time up top,
and a widgets bar, which because the iPad is in landscape mode here, is showing as a bar on the
left, if I was holding the iPad in portrait mode, the widgets would be right underneath the time.
I’ll tap on the time, and you can see that I can play around with the font,
the colour of the font and the thickness of the font, just like on the iPhone,
by tapping on relevant colour icons and by using the slider.
If I then tap on the date above, I can change the widget that goes here. There
are a number of first party widgets that can go here, and just like on the iPhone,
App Developers will be able to bring their own line of widgets across to the iPad now.
For this, I’m going to choose windspeed, which is in the weather app.
I’m then going to tap on Add Widgets in the bar on the left, to add some widgets in here. These
function in exactly the same way as the one we just added above the time, it’s just that here
you’ve got a bit more space to play around with, you can see this is more of a block.
So I think I’m going to add in a Battery widget.
And perhaps a News widget.
And I’m going to add a Reminders widget. Also,
note that once you’ve input something like a Reminders widget, if you then tap on the
widget that you just added in the bar on the left, you can choose which list you want the
widget to display. That’s important when the widget has lots of options to choose from.
When you’re done, tap the cross to close out of this. And that’s it,
the Lock Screen has been customised, although if you’re wondering about
that video effect on the wallpaper, keep watching, I’ll show you how I did that.
***
A feature that works really well on the iPad in OS 17 is the ability to create a motion wallpaper.
This is where you’ve got your iPad locked, and you tap on the screen to access the Lock Screen,
and you get this little motion effect for a second, before the video freeze frames. It’s
technically not a video, it’s a Live Photo, so let me show you how you can do this.
First of all, you’re going to need a Live Photo, so you’ll either need to have
access to Live Photos in your photo library that you perhaps captured on your iPhone,
or you’ll need to take a Live Photo using the camera on your iPad, it doesn’t really matter
which. But you need a Live Photo, because a Live Photo is essentially a very short video,
and it’s that short video that we’re going to be using here.
Then open Settings, and go to Wallpaper. Either create a brand new wallpaper,
or choose Add New Wallpaper on an existing one. On the screen that appears next,
choose Photos. Then on the next screen, tap on Live Photo.
These are the photos that you can use to create your motion effect wallpaper,
although there does seem to be a bug here, whereby some Live Photos with motion will
work flawlessly here, and some just won’t, with no real explanation as to why. If you
see that the Live Photos button is crossed out when you try to do this, it means that the photo
that you’re trying to use isn’t compatible, although Apple haven’t made clear what does
and doesn’t make a photo compatible. I find that this seems to be the case with older Live Photos,
ones taken on iPads or iPhones that are running OS 17 or newer seem to work perfectly here,
so this might not be great news for you if you’ve got a treasured old Live Photo
here you want to use, but give it a try, I have managed to get this to work with some old photos.
Tap to choose a photo. If it’s compatible, down at the bottom right you’ll see a Live Photo icon
with a play button in the middle of it. This means that your photo is compatible and is being used as
motion wallpaper. Choose Add in the upper right of the screen. On the next screen, I’d recommend
tapping on Customise Home Screen, and then on the next screen that appears, tapping on the Blur
button. Motion Wallpapers look great, but they can make your screen super distracting when you unlock
your iPad, using the blur function means that when your iPad is unlocked, the background is blurred.
And there you go, each time you unlock your iPad,
you’ll be greeted with this motion wallpaper. Give it a go, it works really well!
***
A major change that’s arrived in iPad OS 17 is the ability to use
a USB C webcam with your iPad, and whilst on the Apple website,
they show an example of hooking your iPad up to a Studio Display’s built in webcam,
I think it’s more likely that people are going to be making use of whatever USB C compatible webcam
they have kicking around their house. And the good news here, is that this works seamlessly.
So here with my iPad mini for example, I’ve connected my Insta360 Link webcam,
which is still one of the best USB C webcams on the market in my opinion and there’s a
link in the description of this video if you want to go and get one for yourself,
but you can see that the second that I connect it, it powers on and we’re good to go, it’s that
easy. When you consider that built-in, forward facing webcams aren’t always the best on iPads,
and definitely not always conveniently located, this could be a low-cost and
easy way for you to take your iPad on the road, and still be able to join Zoom calls.
***
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plus future ones, for just $5 a month. You can either scan the QR code that you can
see on-screen, or follow the link in the description of this video to learn more.
***
The Health app has finally come to the iPad, and it’s honestly long overdue.
Whilst you probably won’t capture all that much data on your iPad for the Health app,
most of it will likely come either from your Apple Watch, or from your iPhone,
iCloud means that your data is synced across your devices, and it’s much easier
to view your Health information here on an iPad than it is on your phone.
I’m going to make a dedicated video all about the Health app on the iPad, but in meantime,
the basics of how this works is that you’ve got a sidebar, like you have on most first party
iPad apps, that you can access by tapping the button in the upper left of the screen,
or it should show automatically if you turn your iPad into landscape mode. You can see that you
have a number of Health Categories, and you can tap into those to view specific information,
or add information where applicable. The process is generally the same for everything,
so in Body Measurements for example, I could tap into that, then choose Weight for example,
and then on the next screen in the upper right you’ve got a button called Add Data. This is
where you can manually input a data point. The great thing about the Health app though
is that with compatible third party devices, whether that’s an Apple Watch or your iPhone
or a compatible scale for example, much of this data can be fed through automatically.
You’ve also got a Summary, and you can edit what does and doesn’t show here by
tapping the relevant Edit buttons, and in Sharing, you’ve got the ability to share
your Health data with a trusted contact, or request that someone share with you.
Down at the very bottom of the sidebar is a button to add a Health Record, where you
can access your medical records, provided your healthcare provider has enabled it. I reckon this
is more useful to those in the US than here in the UK, where it appears to be slightly limited.
Overall, the Health app is a welcome addition to the iPad, and as someone who’s been capturing
health data for years now, it’s going to be interesting to be able to properly visualise
that data now on the iPad. Is this something you plan on using? Let me know in the comments.
***
Not a huge change, but a nice quality of life improvement is the way in which you
handle PDFs in Notes now. I’m going to cover this in more detail in a separate video,
but one of the better features on the iPad is the fact that you can now edit
PDFs right from within the note itself, rather than having to tap into the PDF to
open it in the iPad’s preview app, you can just do everything directly from the Note.
So here for example, I’ve got a Note open with a PDF, and you can see that I don’t have to
tap into the note to open it, I can swipe to move through the different pages of the PDF right here.
If I zoom in and then tap the Markup icon, I can then use my Apple Pencil to start filling
this PDF form in, right here within the Note. I’ll choose a pen with black ink,
and make sure that the size of it suits what I’m trying to do, and then I can
just writing using the Apple Pencil, just like I would if this was a sheet of paper.
Once I’ve filled in the date and the name of the event in this case,
I’ll use two fingers to zoom out a bit, and then again two fingers to move across,
and then I can zoom in once again, and fill in some of the other fields in the form.
It’s all very easy to do, and there’s no saving involved, everything is getting saved in real
time as I’m completing the form. If I were to then forward this form on to someone else for example,
all of the amends and the edits that I’ve added here would be visible. So like I said earlier,
not a huge change, but if you’re someone who finds yourself working with PDFs in
Notes quite a bit, this should be a nice little timesaver for you.
***
It may not seem it at first glance, but Visual Lookup has seen some dramatic
improvements in this year’s iPadOS, taking this further away from being a gimmicky
feature and much closer to something I could see myself regularly using.
So the first major change that Apple have themselves mentioned, is that you can now
use visual lookup to identify cats. You’ve been able to use it to identify dogs for a while now,
although as someone who owns a cocker spaniel that visual lookup always manages to get the
breed wrong for, the jury is out for how well this is going to work in reality.
You can also use it to identify food, and this does seem to work really well. So if you’ve been
sent a picture of a meal, or maybe you just see something while you’re out and you’re not
sure what it is, take a snap of it and your phone might be able to help you identify it.
And here with this photo of a laundry label, your phone can now identify laundry instructions,
and let’s be honest, who here hasn’t looked at a label before and questioned what one
of the symbols has meant? Well, hopefully now you can find out.
But, this also works for symbols. So here for example, with a photo of the interior of our car,
you can see that visual lookup helps you identify symbols and give explanations of what they mean.
***
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***
In Reminders, you can now create a Kanban board, essentially a board where items in your To Do
List move along a horizontal process flow, rather than you simply ticking Done to them,
like a traditional checklist. If you’re someone who has always wanted to use Reminders in more
of a project management style of working, this is going to be really useful to you.
So here for example, I’ve got a really basic Reminders list around the topic of
creating videos. You can see that I’ve created Sections, I’ve got one for the Planning stage,
one for the Production stage, one for the Post Production stage, and I’ve got a Reminder for
an individual video in each of these. If I tap the ellipsis in the upper right of the screen,
and choose Manage Sections, I can then either rename these, or create a new one. I’m going to
create a new one to show you how easy this is to do, I’m going to call it Published.
Now again, if I tap the ellipsis menu in the upper right of the screen,
there’s an option here called View as Columns. If I tap on that, the view changes from the
traditional vertical To Do list, to this Kanban board, where my sections are sitting as
columns. I can tap and hold and then drag an item from one column to another, moving them
along the process if I wish, but I can also tap to complete an item, just as you’d expect.
A relatively minor change overall,
but huge if this is the kind of to do list approach that you prefer to take.
***
Profiles in Safari allow you to have essentially separate versions of Safari on your device,
for the different things that you’re likely to use Safari for. So the most obvious examples
are going to be personal use, work use and educational use, but you can customise and
name each profile as you wish, so if you want to get more granular and specific than that, you can.
To create a new profile, we head into Settings, then Safari. Scroll down,
and on iPad OS 17 you’ll see this new section called Profiles. If you’ve not yet created one,
you can see that the option available is New Profile, so we’re going to tap on that,
but before we do, notice that Apple explain to you what this is,
a profile will contain History, Cookies and Website Data specific to that profile.
So once we’ve tapped on New Profile, the first thing we’re going to do is
give this Profile a name. We’ll say that we’re going to be using this profile for education,
so I’ll tap into Name and call it Work Project.
Then you can choose an image for it, either from the available ones that you
can see on this screen, or by tapping the ellipsis to choose from additional options.
The same goes for the colour scheme for this profile, and for this example,
I’m going to choose a this kind of bluey green colour.
Down at the bottom of the screen, we’ve then got Settings for this
profile. We can choose where we’d like to store Favourites for this profile,
and then we can choose what we’d like to happen when we open a new tab.
Choose Done when you’re happy with the profile that you’ve just created,
and then let me show you how and why this feature is so useful.
If we go back to Safari, notice the new button that appears in the upper left of Safari. You
can see that we’re currently in the Personal profile, but if I tap on that, you can then
see at the bottom of this window that appears, that I can change my profile. I’ll tap on that,
and change this to the Work Project profile that we just created. And you can see that,
to begin with, not much has changed, we’ve got a different Safari background, but not much else.
But what I’m now going to do, is in the background, I’m going to log into a Google
account, I’ll obviously skip past the part of me actually logging in, but if you look now you
can see the ‘C’ icon, indicating that I’ve logged into this particular Google account.
Now watch what happens if I tap the Tab button, then tap on Profile, and change this from
Personal, which is the Profile where we’ve logged into Google, back to Work Project, and then go to
Google. Notice that it’s not logged in. And just to really hammer the point home, let’s go back to
the Personal profile, and you can see that again, we’re logged into Google on that Personal profile.
This by itself is a really great example of how you can use the Profiles feature in Safari. If
you’re someone who has certain websites or web apps that you log into with different profiles,
the fact that you can now bounce between them at the push of a button is extremely useful.
***
So there you go, those are the 8 things that I think you should
check out first with your iPad in iPad OS 17. What about you,
any thing here that you would have included instead? Drop me a comment and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.