Gadgetory

(whimsical music) - It is Apple beta day. That means that if you have an iPad, if you have a Mac, if you have an iPhone, you can go to Apple.com and you can download the beta version of the latest version of every operating system that's coming out in the fall. You probably shouldn't, though, because they're a little bit unstable, especially on the iPad, but if you really wanna live on the edge, you can go do it. It's exciting, is what I'm saying. And, in this video, I wanna talk about the iPad. Specifically because, you know, I'm obsessed with the iPad. But, I don't wanna get into the whole future of computing thing again because one, it's just exhausting, and two, we should wait for the actual, full review before we start making real judgment calls there. Instead, I wanna look at my six favorite new features in this new iPadOS, because there's a bunch of stuff that's really great, even if you're not trying to make this your main computer. (whimsical music) I think my favorite feature in the new iPadOS is Safari because Apple has made a desktop-class browser, and what that really means is it is telling websites that it's a Mac browser instead of telling it it's an iPad browser, so they're serving the full real Mac version of their websites. And then Apple's done some stuff to make it work for touch and, specifically, I'm really excited about Google Docs. This is a really good example. You can highlight stuff, you can type stuff in, and you can even see the comments. Apple's also done a bunch of stuff to just make the browser better, so it has a download manager, you can finally download arbitrary files and save them in a file browser, just like you can on any other computer. They've done some neat stuff to the toolbar. So there's this font button here. You tap it, you can change the zoom, you can request the mobile site, whole bunch of stuff there that I really like. And they've also made it so that, if you take a screenshot, so I'll just do that real quick, boop. And you open it up, you actually have a new option to go to the full page of the screenshot, and so you have the whole thing there that switches it from a png to a pdf. And, while we're here, I'll point out that there is a new palette for the Apple Pencil. It has a bunch of new features, it's just a little bit easier to see and use. But you can still draw stuff, mark it up. Really like that. I'm also a huge fan of the new Photos app in iOS, so here it is and it is just super fast and performant. There's two things to know on top of that. So, there are these days, months, and years section. Apple basically tries to make a neat little photo album for that period of time, and you can just jump in and look at it. It also gets rid of screenshots, if you don't care about those. There's me making a video, for some reason. The other thing I really like is the new options for editing photos. So here's this picture of Nilay, hit edit, and if you tap auto, it does that same thing as before, it gives you an auto-correction of it. But then, if you scroll down here, you can see all of the different things that it's done to change the photo and you can change each of them manually. And what this means is you can really dial in exactly what you want your photo to look like, and if you're a total novice at editing photos, this teaches you what these different things do to make a better photo. So I love this new interface, even though a bunch of those features were available before. But what is new is you can apply a bunch of editing features directly to video inside the app. And then there's the Files app. You knew I was gonna bring this up, the Files app finally works with regular old USB drives, you can just plug it in and they show up like they 'sposed to, finally! Files app also has a bunch of other neat little updates, so it has a column view just like the Mac, and you can dial all the way in to get to the metadata for a specific file, which is really nice. It also works really well with Google Drive now, works really well with Dropbox, and SMB shares, if that's important to you. The other new iPad feature that I really love is technically a Mac Catalina feature, but I'm gonna count it here because it's so good. It's Sidecar, so if you have a Mac, you can just click a button on it and it will make your iPad a monitor that is attached to your Mac, and it works wirelessly or it works over USB if you wanna charge it at the same time. It's very, very low latency and you can even set it up to show the Touch Bar so it'll show a version of the Touch Bar down on the bottom of the iPad, which is pretty neat. Apple's also changed a lot of how you interact with text on the iPad, so we'll open up the Notes app here and the first big thing to know is, if you pinch on the keyboard, it becomes little, and then you can drag it around wherever you want on the screen, and my favorite feature is they finally added Swype typing and it works pretty well. For a first attempt on a Swype keyboard, that's super impressive. Apple's also done a bunch of stuff with how you move the cursor around. Now you just move it around where you want it to go and it will get big as you drag it around if you can't see where it goes. And if you wanna select text, you can just select text. There's also this new three-fingered gesture for cut, copy, and paste, so you can highlight your text, erp, and then copy by lifting up, do it twice to cut, and then three fingers plop down to paste. It's a little bit awkward, but it works. If you find that annoying, you can also just selects a bunch of stuff and then just tap three fingers, and it'll pop up this little menu at the top to help you just do it without having to learn all these complicated, whatever gestures they've got now. Of course, you may have heard that Apple's made changes to the home screen. I don't think they've gone quite as far as I would like. It's still uncreative icons, but whatever. You can swipe over and you can get your widgets right there on the home screen pinned there next to your icons, and I like Apple's widgets, so I think that's nice. You can also long-press on apps and have it pop up a contextual menu, sort of like right-clicking. But just don't do it for too long, 'cause if you hold your finger down too long, you go into jiggly mode, and nobody wants that. So, all that's the big stuff. I also like a bunch of little things, I guess fonts are coming and there's the Share Sheet, and a few other things that we could talk about, but if you're really excited by it and you wanna install it right now, maybe wait a minute. It's still a little bit buggy. I've definitely run into a couple of things. Ugh! What's up there, keyboard? (beep) We'll just open up Notes app here, so you can really see what's going on. This is broken. (beep) They now have this thing at the top, which isn't showing here. (beep) This is frozen. (beep) I just, (sighs) do I wanna say it worked way better than I expected it to when it was so crashy? (beep) Now, I'm not gonna show you windowing again, because it's a little bit buggy and I don't think we should judge it based on this iteration. We should judge it on the final iteration that's coming out this fall. But when it comes out in the fall, I'm gonna be really excited to use it and, I didn't think I would say this, but I actually understand why Apple renamed this from iOS to iPadOS, because it deserves to be renamed. It really does feel like something new. Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching. Are you gonna install public beta? Let me know in the comments, let me know how it's going for you. Also, if you're waiting for the other features in iOS, Haim is doing a great video on everything on the iPhone. New privacy stuff, reminders, Apple Maps, and, of course, dark mode, so check that out.