- So Ipad IOS 13 dot four brought mouse and track pad
support to iPad. And you probably already know
that you can use just about any Bluetooth
or USB mouse that you already have
but did you know that you can actually customize the look
of the cursor and even the buttons on the mouse itself?
Well, I'm going to show you.
Hey everyone, my name is Jerry.
And I'm going to show you how to customize
the cursor of your mouse on iPad IOS
and customize the buttons on the mouse.
But before we do, make sure you hit subscribe
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including what's coming up next week at WWDC.
Now, let's get started.
Now the first thing that we're going to do is
configure the basic mouse settings
To do that, we're gonna go to settings, click on general,
then click on track pad and mouse.
If you have a track pad connected,
you'd have other options available, but for a mouse,
we're just gonna have tracking speed
which obviously changes how fast the cursor moves
around your screen.
We have natural scrolling which you can reverse
the scrolling direction on your mouse.
And we have secondary click.
And by changing this, this will effectively turn my mouse
into a left-hand mouse, but we're not going to
change that here because I'm not ambidextrous
and if we do, we're going to be here all day.
So that's the basic mouse settings that we have.
Now we're gonna change the look of the mouse itself
To do that,
we're going to go back to the main settings menu.
When I click on accessibility,
then we'll go down to pointer control.
In here, we have a number of different options
to change the look of the cursor on the iPad.
The first thing we can do is change the contrast.
By toggling this box, this changes the cursor
from a lighter gray to a little bit darker gray.
And then down below, we have automatic hide pointer
or automatically hide pointer,
which after 10 seconds, we'll have the cursor disappear.
We also have color and that's where things get more fun.
By default, it's set to none,
but if we choose any of these six colors listed here,
we get a ring around our cursor.
So if we choose red, we get a nice red ring around it
which makes the cursor easier to see
and feels more personal.
I'm kind of partial to orange lately
so I'm gonna choose orange for today.
And down here, we can change the size
of the ring around the cursor itself
so we can make it larger or smaller.
I kind of like it where it was by default.
Now, because of the way the cursor works inside iPad IOS,
it snaps to certain objects.
Well, with a color aside,
it actually creates a colored border
around those selected objects, which is kind of neat.
I'll show you right now.
So if we move up to the options that we would snap to,
you can see that not only is the item greyed or selected,
it also has the colored ring around it
which makes the item easier to tell
that you haven't selected.
If we move up to the notification shade button
or over to control center, you can see
that it just kind of snaps and outlines the items for you
making it really easy to tell what you have selected.
If we go back to the pointer options,
we can also change the pointer size.
This adjust the entire size of the cursor itself
which makes it either comically large or
you know, wherever you feel comfortable.
We'll try it out a little bit bigger
than normal and see how it goes.
Down here, we have pointer animations.
By disabling the pointer animations that disables
the snap effect that you get with the certain objects
like we just looked at.
So if we turn that off, we'll no longer get that snap effect
or the colored border around the items
that we're hovering over. And down at the bottom,
we can change the scrolling speed,
which just changes how fast you scroll
up and down on a webpage or inside a menu.
Now, to customize the buttons on the mouse.
We actually have to enable assistive touch
which does have one downside,
and I'll get into that in a minute.
To get to the assistive touch settings,
you go back to access ability and go to touch.
And here we choose assistive touch
and we enable it. To configure the buttons on the mice,
we go down here to point your devices and click on devices.
Here is where you will see the mouse
that you have connected.
And in here we have customized additional buttons.
What's gonna happen when we click on that,
is it's going to prompt us to click a button on the mouse
that we want to customize.
We are then given a list of functions that can be assigned
to those buttons. The first button that I'm going to
customize is going to be the scroll button.
So I'm going to click here.
It's going to ask which button I want to customize.
I'm going to press it.
And I'd like to assign the home button for this option,
Now, no matter where I'm at in any app I can just press down
on the scroll wheel and I can get to home.
It's super simple. I really liked that a lot.
And what's more is you can double press the button
and get to the recent app screen, which makes it really
easy to jump back to a previous app and to multitask.
Now, some of these other options that are available
in here may not be super useful to you
because these are made for people with disabilities
or people who have motor function issues that may not
be able to do everything that somebody
with ten fingers does on the iPad.
But there are some useful items
in here to assign to the other buttons.
Next, we're going to assign a function
to this button right here.
And what I'm going to choose is to create screenshots.
So we're going to click customize additional buttons,
press the button that we want to modify.
You gotta to scroll down to create screenshot.
Now this button, whenever I press it
should automatically take a screenshot.
And from there, I can annotate it or send it
to somebody or save it to my photo library.
So we'll just press it right here.
And right there, we get our screenshot.
We can go down here and now we can interact with
it just like we would with any other screenshot.
And for the last button on this mouse,
I'm going to assign it to volume down.
I find sometimes that I'm listening to something,
and something's too loud or I'm listening
at night and I need to quickly turn down the volume.
And instead of trying to fumble around
and find the small volume button, I can just
press the button on the mouse and bring the volume down.
So we'll click volume down.
Now you should be able to see the volume change on the iPad.
So that's pretty cool. I like that a lot.
So those are just some examples
of how you can customize the cursor
and the mouse buttons themselves.
But, I did mention that enabling assistive touch
does have a little bit of a downside.
And that is that it leaves a faded gray orb on the screen.
So by enabling assistant touch,
it actually creates a menu that sits floating on the screen.
Now I think by default, the opacity is set to 15%.
So it's greyed out and it's pretty transparent.
It's difficult to see most of the time,
but it is something that has to stay on the screen.
There's no way to get rid of it with assistive touch on.
So if you want to modify the buttons
on your mice or on your mouse
then you have to have this thing running around screen.
It's easy to ignore it after a while.
It just kind of fades into the background.
If you end up finding it's in an annoying spot
you can move it, basically anywhere you want
around the edges of the screen.
So you can reduce any accidental touches.
But it is there, so it is something to be aware of.
You can kind of just barely see it on the screen down here.
So anyway, that's my video today
on how to customize the cursor inside iPad IOS
and how to modify the buttons on your mouse.
If you found this helpful, please hit the thumbs up button.
You can follow me on Twitter at Jerry Schultz
for video updates and hit subscribe.
If you decided to customize your cursor
and your mouse buttons inside iPad IOS, let me know
in the comments below and we'll see you next time.
(funky music playing)