What is going on, everybody?
I am Mike
Welcome back to Tech 24/7 TV.
I'm so glad you're back with me because we're talking about how
iPadsOS 15 accelerates your productivity no matter if
you're a productivity ninja or if you are a padawan.
We got a lot of great features that will take your game to
the next level.
Let's get started.
Now before we get in the video, folks, YouTube tells
me that almost 90 percent of you that are watching this
video aren't subscribed to the channel.
So that's kind of a shame because I love my iPad.
I love making iPad content.
And I'm pretty sure that you want to see
that content regularly.
Let's make it official like a referee with a whistle.
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because you don't want to miss what I have coming out,
including my full review of iOS and iPadOS 15 when Apple
releases this fall.
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holding you back down in the comments below.
Now, I've broken this video down into
several different sections.
You'll find timestamps to each of the sections pinned in the
first comment below so you can easily navigate back and forth
between the different sections or if you want to share a
section with someone that might enjoy it.
Now, the first thing that we're going to talk about are the
changes to the home screen and widgets because it is surely
going to be the first thing that you notice after
you're done upgrading.
iPadOS 15 enables widgets that can be placed anywhere on any
of the home screens, not just the today, view like we see in
iOS 13 and iOS 14.
Now, the unintended consequence of this changes that you're
going to get slightly less than the number of apps in iPadOS 15
per page that you are getting an iPadOS 14, and that's due to
the increased padding around the actual widgets which
themselves which can placed anywhere.
Now, those widgets here can be any number of sizes.
There are actually four sizes now, including a brand
new extra-large widget type that takes advantage of the
large screen that the iPad brings to the table.
In addition to widgets that can be placed anywhere on any of
the screens on your iPad, there's the inclusion of the
app library, which is the same paradigm, if you're
familiar with it, on the iPhone.
So I'm not going into a lot of detail on how the
app library works.
In iPadOS 15, you can have any number of home screens with
apps and widgets on them.
Now you can hide home screens just like you can on
your iPhone today.
And those home settings can actually be shown or visible to
you depending on your focus modes.
Now, I'm going to get into focus mode a little bit
later on, so stay tuned for that.
One of the things that I find very helpful in terms of
productivity is what I would call dynamic app positioning.
And Apple did not talk about this on stage, but something
that I found in the iPad OS 15 beta.
Now you can have an app that is in a specific location while in
landscape mode and while you rotate your iPad to
portrait mode, that app is in a completely different position.
So let's just say here that I'm looking at the Apple TV app,
which is in the bottom left- hand corner of my iPad while
connected to my keyboard.
If I were to flip my iPad around into portrait mode,
that app can be positioned in a different location,
allowing easier access to it while I'm holding the iPad.
And then it's really going to help out.
If you're someone who's using your iPad or switching your
iPad from portrait to landscape mode and you want better
reachability with your thumbs when trying to interact with
that specific app.
That and the same exact dynamic positioning applies to not
just widgets, but apps on specific screens as well.
One of my favorite features coming to both the iPad and the
iPhone this year is going to be dynamic text sizing that works
on a per app basis.
Now, maybe you are like me, where you have the text size
set system-wide to the smallest possible font, but you really
don't admit it to yourself.
It's kind of hard to read sometimes.
Well, here with this new feature, it is an
accessibility feature that you can turn on and you can go into
apps and set the text size per app.
So the app no longer has to worry about supporting
dynamic text size.
It's all handled and enforced at the OS level, which is great
because you can pick and choose which apps have the smallest
font and which ones do not.
I think it's just a nice addition.
It does help from a readability perspective and from a density
perspective you can fit more things on the page itself,
depending on which of your interacting with.
Now, the quickest way to do this is going to be to enable
it inside of the control center.
Once enabled, open control center.
Tap the text sizing widget.
Tap the scroll bar.
Instead of being globally, you're going to do it per app
name that you have there and then change it.
It's actually very simple.
It works great.
It does help me maintain readability for a lot of
different apps and content that I have inside my iPad.
Staying focus is significantly easier in iPadOS 15 thanks to
the introduction of focus modes.
If you're unfamiliar with what focus modes are, you could
think of this as a cross-platform mindset,
allowing you to sync your intentions with your device.
Now focus modes allow you to easily enter either lean-
forward or lean-back contexts.
They sync across all your devices as long as are running
the latest version of the software.
Do you not want to be disturbed while playing your favorite
game?
There's a focus mode for that.
You need to hammer out a proposal without worrying
about Twitter?
There's a focus mode for that.
Need to make a video call for work?
Well, there is a focused mode for that too.
Focus mode use on-device intelligence.
They use location, time of day, and other signals
to automatically enable or disable focus modes.
For example, whenever I open up PS Remote Play or connect my
DualSense controller, my gaming focus mode is enabled.
My planning focus mode is enabled automatically every day
from eight AM.
to nine AM.
Now, once you upgrade to iPad OS, there are several
focus modes created out of the box that are available by
default and this is where the customization starts.
You can specify which apps break your focus mode,
which contacts are allowed to contact you, and even in which
home screens are available in a specific focus mode.
Now I have an in-depth video coming soon on how I use
focus mode, how I have them set up.
So if you want to see that, make sure you're subscribed and
you have notifications turned on so you can be the first to
watch that when it comes out.
The next set of iPadOS 15 features are aimed towards
individuals who are using the Photos app to manage their
growing collection of photos and videos.
Now, I don't know about you, but I have about 25,000 photos
and about 2,000 videos, so it's certainly hard to find the gems
of the photos that I want to have my library because it's
littered with a lot of things that I don't necessarily need
all the time.
Now, new in photos there me four different core of core
functions: Search, modify, live text, and share.
So in terms of search, now in iPad OS 15 with photos, you can
search for photos using the app that actually was able to
save the photo.
And I don't know about you, but I have many different
camera apps, many different cameras that I actually use to
take photos with.
And I can actually search by either app name or I can search
my camera name or search by camera type.
Meaning I can type in backdrops, which is the name
of the app to use for all of my wallpapers that I have.
Or I can search by my camera name.
I could say iPhone 12 Pro.
I could say iPhone 11.
I could say show me all the photos taken with the Moment
app and that metadata, if it was saved in the photo, is now
searchable and indexable by photos.
In addition, you could actually search for photo information
inside of Spotlight so you could pull down the spotlight,
type in some information.
You could say type in lake and then you can see the search
results in spotlight as well.
The next feature is going to benefit people who are using
the messages app to share photos.
Now, I can't tell you how many times someone sent me a photo
that I forgot to save it to my library.
Each time you receive a photo in the messages app,
Photos creates a placeholder in your library.
That placeholder is going to include photo itself, who sent
it and an icon to identify it and all
the accompanying metadata.
If you want to save it to your library, there is a button
at the bottom that says Save the library and voila,
you are done, the photos in your library.
On top of that, you can actually click on the person's
name and respond to that message in line with
the photo.
Additionally, what happens when someone sends you a bunch of
photos?
You can thumb through those photos very easily without
being taken out of the context of the message itself.
And it's very easy to add your reaction to the photo.
Again, all done at the bottom of that photo message.
Now, the next feature is something that Apple
demonstrated on stage, which is mean live text.
Live Text uses on-device machine learning to take text
that's found in photos and translate it
into computer-readable text.
That means that you would take a text from an image, copy and
paste it into a word document a notes document,
a message field.
Just about anywhere in the operating system, which means a
live text can identify phone numbers,
and then you can take actions on that phone numbers
that you find.
So if you have a phone number and a picture, you can tap on
it and then place a call from that text.
This feature is only working out photographs at the moment,
meaning it does not work with videos.
Hopefully, that is a feature that's going to be somewhere in
the near future because that would be great as well.
And to top it all off, you can use Spotlight to search for
that machine-readable text and it's going to appear in
the search results.
The next feature is going to be updating metadata
associated with photos.
This means that you can update your photo library, the people
that are in your library.
You can update EXIF data, which includes the location and
the date and time.
Now, I don't know about you, but for me, it was always a
huge pain to go to my computer and update photos that might be
tagged with the wrong people.
And I almost often forgot.
I was really never at my computer that often.
And as I moved away from using a computer as my primary
machine to use my iPad, I really felt that this
feature was missing.
And I'm glad that bring it to iPadOS.
Being productive on your iPad would be so much harder if you
didn't have the ability to multitask.
Well, luckily for people like you and me who want to
multitask on their iPad, Apple is making it so much
easier this year by introducing several new notable features in
iPadOS 15.
First, iPadOS 15 introduces a new multitasking menu enabling
you to quickly enter split-screen, slide over
or even full-screen mode using two apps.
The three ellipses at the center of your screen mark the
new multitasking menu.
Now, once you tap it, three different glyphs appear
representing the new multitasking options.
Once selected, the foreground apps slide out of the way to
let you choose the app for multitasking.
You can choose an app from the library doc,
from the app switcher, or from one of your home screens.
Additionally, there is a fourth multitasking option that is
enabled for apps like mail, messages and notes,
which brings your content center screen and allows you to
focus on that.
I like this one is probably one of my
favorite multitasking modes.
I do hope that the Spark email app, which is the one
that I use, adopts this in iPadOS 15 when they launched
their new app update.
The Multi Window Shelf, which enables you to access all
open instances for an app.
Once you open the app, you'll see the shelf here on
the bottom of the page as you see in messages most often.
It allows you to go and switch between any of the open
instances or any of the open windows that you have for
a given app.
The app switcher has been updated to include slide-
over apps, which is actually very nice, but you still have
the ability to just look at slide-over apps by swiping up
on an app that you have opened and slide over.
And then if you wanted to, you can close it or
switch between them.
Now, when you combine the new multitasking menu itself,
the shelf, the improved app switcher and the fact that you
can multitask with any app we find, finding it anywhere is
such a huge improvement for multitasking in iPadOS.
They really are going to add substantive improvements in the
quality of work and allowing you to do your best work
on your iPad.
Now, if you're even somewhat familiar with the channel,
you know that I am a big lover of keyboards and I have been
talking about keyboards for a long time now.
That is because the keyboard is an essential part of
productivity on the iPad.
Apple's making significant updates to external keyboard
support in iPadOS 15 to enable you to do more meaningful types
of work on your iPad.
Apple redesigned the keyboard shortcuts bar and relocated to
the bottom of the screen in a new compact UI.
Apple introduced keyboard shortcuts in iPad OS 13 and the
initial implementation was a little kludgy if you ask me.
The current implementation has the shortcut window in the
center of the screen obscuring your content, and I feel it
takes you out of context of working on your content.
That and in addition to iPadOS 13 didn't categorize or break
down the shortcuts, nor were they laid out intuitively.
But thankfully, the iPadOS 15 fixes both of those problems.
Now keyboard shortcuts follow a similar format to the Mac and
are categorized by file edit format view and search.
You can still activate the keyboard shortcut bar by
holding down the command key for a brief moment and then you
navigate the shortcut bar by pressing the keyboard shortcut
or by using the full navigation keyboard with the arrow keys.
Now on top of that iPadOS 15 has a new global modifier
function that you can get to by holding down the globe key
on your keyboard.
Now the global modifier is going to contain another set of
powerful shortcuts and they're available anywhere throughout
the operating system.
Last but certainly not least, are the updates coming to notes
as part of iPadOS 15.
Now, there are a lot of updates and as I mentioned before in
the beginning, I do have a separate video coming, but I'm
going to go about my favorite updates.
So first and foremost is the quick note widget.
So you can swipe up from the bottom right-hand corner
anywhere in the operating system with your finger,
with the apple pencil and pull up quick notes.
This is the ability for you to use the notes application
too quickly, quick notes, take notes inside of that.
Now, once you use the quick note application,
inside of the actual notes application, quick notes
are organized in their own folder.
So they're very easy to find.
Second is that notes are now contextual.
You can add hashtags: cooking, family vacation.
Whatever the case is, and you can then organize your hashtags
in the new tag browsing window.
Third thing is that now you can share notes with other people
that was something that we introduced last year.
But you can also now collaborate with them.
You can mention people if you want to get changes done.
When you make changes in a shared note, it does keep
track of that.
So it's almost like track changes.
And then that in addition to you can now add pictures in
notes where you can have handwritten and pictures in
the same note.
Previously that was not something that was
supported in notes.
Now, those are my favorite features coming to notes
in iPadOS 15.
I would like to use it more and I think these can be the
features that propel me into using it more.
I think Notes is really going to come out of its shell,
so to speak.
In iPad I was 15 iPad OS 15 features many, many different
productivity features that I think you are really going to
be in place to do your best work yet on your iPad.
And I really hope that you were able to glean something from
this video that you're going be able to implement
in your workflows.
As I mentioned before, I do have a few videos coming up for
focus modes and for notes.
So make sure you hit the subscribe button, turn on
notifications if you want to be alerted when that
content drops.
Now, I love hearing from you whether it's down the comments
below or on Twitter where I get super nerdy about the iPad and
iPad OS,
I am like, this is tech 24/7 TV folks.
I will talk to you in the next one.