Intro: iPad OS 16 launched last week,
and with it came a number of new features and improvements to the overall iPad experience.
I’ll be honest, this one isn’t as exciting as some of the updates we’ve seen in recent years,
but there’s still some things worth talking about here, and there are far too many individual
updates to be able to cover everything, so I’ve picked out the 9 updates that I think are really
worth you knowing about. Stick with me until the end of the video, so you don’t miss a thing.
OK, let’s get into it.
1: Stage Manager; By far the most significant change to the
iPadOS this year is Stage Manager. Now, I’m only going to cover Stage Manager here very briefly,
for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a major change to the way in which the iPad functions,
and it’s not the most intuitive piece of Apple design I’ve ever seen, so I think a
dedicated video is probably needed, and if that’s something you’d appreciate,
please do drop a comment letting me know. Second, it’s not available on all iPads,
so chances are, it’s only a small proportion of people watching this video who can make use of it.
Essentially, Stage Manager is an entirely new method of multitasking on your iPad,
allowing you to resize apps in a similar manner to the way that you can in Mac OS,
and build out App Sets, where you’ve got a few apps running together that you find useful,
and bounce from one app set to another at the touch of a button. It is, to be fair very clever,
and actually quite useful once you get to grips with it, but for the reasons I’ve already
mentioned, I will save any more discussion about it for a dedicated tutorial video.
2: Display Improvements; There have been some improvements
to the performance of displays on select iPads. If you own a 12.9 inch iPad Pro with the Liquid
Retina XDR display, you can now enable Reference Mode, which allows the ipad to deliver reference
colour for popular colour standards and video formats, and this also works if you’re using your
iPad in Sidecar mode. Also, if you own an iPad Air 5th Gen, a 5th Gen iPad Pro 12.9 inch or newer,
or an 11 inch iPad Pro, you can enable Display Zoom. This is a new display scaling setting that
increases the pixel density of the display, allowing you to view more of your apps. This
is actually pretty good, I’ve had issues with certain websites in the past when viewing them
on my iPad because they’ve not scaled properly, and this setting does seem to fix that issue.
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3: Mail Improvements; The Mail app has seen huge
changes across all of Apple’s product lineup this year, and the iPad is no different,
with 4 main changes making an appearance. Firstly, you can now recall sending an email, albeit within
a very limited timeframe, and you would do that by pressing the Undo Send button that appears,
right after you hit send on an email. Essentially, what your iPad is doing here is holding off on
actually sending the email for a short space of time, so you’re technically not recalling it,
it’s more of an ‘are you sure you haven’t just made a mistake’ function built into Mail,
but it’s still useful, as someone who has sent more than one email to the wrong person in my
time. You can specify how long you’d like to be able to Undo Send for, choosing between either 10,
20 or 30 seconds, or switching the function off entirely, and you’d do that by going to Settings,
then Mail and setting your preference down here at the bottom of the screen.
Another improvement to Mail is the inclusion of a prompt that will appear
if you say something like “please find attached”, but fail to attach anything,
a dialogue box will appear asking you if you meant to include an attachment,
but still allow you to send the email without if you wish, which is a nice little addition.
You’ve also got a couple of new Mailboxes which come complete with new functionality.
Remind Me allows you to be reminded about an email at a time of your choosing. You would
simply swipe from left to right on an email in your inbox, and choose the clock icon. You can
then choose from a pre-defined time, or choose for yourself. At the relevant date and time,
any emails that you’ve asked to be reminded about will be bumped to the top of your inbox, and can
also be viewed in their own dedicated Remind Me inbox, which you can include in your overall inbox
by pressing the Edit button here, and then ticking the relevant tickbox to include it.
The other option you can include here is Follow Up. In this box, your Mail app will
look to include any emails that it thinks you’re likely to be expecting some kind of followup for,
such as an email with a question that then goes unanswered. This happens automatically,
you don’t have to do anything to these emails, and again if you enable the Follow-up mail box,
you can then view those emails at the touch of a button.
The last change that’s really worth mentioning here is Scheduled Send.
Next time, instead of hitting the Send button on an email,
you would press and hold on the send button, until you have the option of sending it later,
choosing from two pre-defined options or a custom date and time. Your iPad does need
to be online at the time you want your Mail to send, but this is quite a useful feature.
4: Files App Improvements; The Files App has had a pretty major redesign
here on the iPad. There are now navigation buttons that make it much easier to move around the app,
basic but useful stuff like allowing you to move forwards and backwards. You can also now use a
Columns view, and you can then choose how you’d like to sort the data in those columns. Again,
probably something that should have been there for a while now, but it’s nice to see it nevertheless.
You’ve also got more, and easier to use options in the contextual menus when you
click on a file. For example, if I click on something here, you can see that I’ve got the
ability right at the top to collaborate on the file or to send a copy of it,
I can optimise the file size which will create a compressed version of it, I can
rename it which will also allow you to change the file extension, and then all of the usual
options that you’d expect. If you tap and hold for a moment on a folder, then choose Get Info,
you can view the folder size, just as you’d expect to be able to do on Mac OS.
So, nothing hugely groundbreaking here, but still useful, and finally
brings the iPad Files experience that bit closer to the Files app on Mac.
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Weather App; The iPad now comes with a built-in weather app.
Previously, if you were like me and you had the weather widget on your Home screen, if you tapped
on it you’d be taken to a weather website, now you’ll get taken to the app, and it’s very good.
You’ve got a sidebar where you can quickly jump between your favourite weather locations,
and clicking on any of the individual pieces of weather related data will bring up a more detailed
view. Great news for weather geeks, I think it’s a really well designed app. Now, if Apple could just
find their way to releasing a calendar app, what with it being 2022 and all, that would be amazing.
Photos; Again,
the main changes to the Photos app on the iPhone are changes to bring the experience in-line with
the iPhone and Mac apps. You’ve always had a Hidden and a Recently Deleted folder, but
those folders are now password protected, or can be protected using the biometrics of your iPad,
so either Touch or FaceID, if either of those are applicable to you. This is obviously good news,
now any photos that you delete or any photos that you choose to hide will not be visible
should another person pick up your iPad without you knowing about it. To unlock the folders,
just tap into the folder and either use your biometrics, or input your password. And as a
reminder, to Hide a photo, use the ellipsis menu in the upper right of a photo and choose Hide.
You can now copy and paste the edits that you make to photos on your iPad. So for example,
if I make some changes to this photo, and I like the changes that I’ve made,
and know that they’d also work well on a visually similar photo,
I could tap on the ellipsis up here in the Edit menu, and choose Copy Edits. Then,
in any other photo, I would simply tap into Edit, tap on the same ellipsis and choose Paste Edits.
If your library has duplicate photos, there will now be a duplicates option here in the sidebar,
where the Photos app will present you with any exact match photos or videos it’s been able to
find. You can then review them, and if you like, choose Merge. Doing this will delete the photo
with the smallest file size and least amount of metadata, so Photos will look to always ensure
that you’re keeping the best quality version of the file. Your mileage may vary with this of
course, but it can be a great way to reduce your library size and keep things nice and organised.
Podcasts; The Podcasts app
has been totally redesigned for iPad, and the majority of that redesign revolves around the
inclusion of this customisable sidebar. You can edit what you see here by using the Edit button up
at the top right of the sidebar, and then you’ve got the usual things you’d expect to see here;
the ability to browse the library, view charts and of course search.
Pencil Improvements; The Pencil hasn’t
exactly seen any groundbreaking improvements in iPad OS 16,
but there have been a couple of changes that I thought worth mentioning. The first is that,
when writing in an app like Notes, where you’re going to be displaying your actual handwriting,
you can then select said handwriting and use a new function called ‘Straighten’, which will
do exactly what it sounds like it will do, and straighten your handwriting across the canvas,
making the space between your lines more equal. It’s not exactly a massive improvement
as you can see, but it makes a little bit of a difference, and so you may appreciate this.
The other change in iPad OS 16 related to the pencil is that, according to Apple, you can now
draw your favourite emojis, and Scribble will input them as emojis for you. I’ll be honest,
I’ve tried this with a bunch of different emojis now, and I can’t seem to get it to work,
so if you try this and you do get it to work, drop me a comment and let me know what you did.
News Improvements; The News App has seen some updates,
making the app a more enjoyable space if you’re into your sports. In the Today part of News,
if you scroll down, you’ll eventually reach a section called My Sports. Here,
News will pull together information related to all of the teams, leagues and sports that
you’ve chosen to follow, and the fact that you can break news down like this makes for some
great choice with regard to what you see here. To find the teams, sports and leagues to follow,
simply search for them, then click the plus to add them to your News. Then,
when you click into the My Sports section of the Today part of News, you’ll be able
to see things like scores and schedules for your teams, highlights where applicable,
and then news further down, all condensed together. If you click into a team, you can
see how rich the team pages are now, although this will vary from team to team, and sport to sport.
End; So there you go,
9 new features in iPad OS 16 that I think you should check out. What about you,
any changes in the latest iPad OS that you’re really enjoying? Or any changes that you feel
should have been included, but haven’t been? 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.