Let me show you some tricks that I notice while using an iPad with a keyboard and mouse. Now I have an iPad mini here, which is my only iPad. And this obviously isn’t designed as much to be used with a keyboard mouse as, say, the new iPad air or the iPad Pro.
That said, there are still some interesting things to point out here. First off, one that I notice is that if you will go to spotlight, say you search for an app, by the way, you can access spotlight using the same keyboard shortcuts that you would on a Mac. You can grab applications directly from the search results and then use them in multitasking.
Something I notice is that a lot of the keyboard shortcuts from Mac OS also work here on iPad OS. And you can actually view all of the keyboard shortcuts that pertain to what you’re currently doing. If you press and hold down the command key, you can see it brings up a scrollable list of all of the keyboard shortcuts that will actually work in this context. This is obviously useful because on iPad OS, you don’t have the menu bar at the top of the screen, which you would have used previously to see what keyboard shortcuts performs certain actions. Now one of those keyboard shortcuts you can use is actually Command Tab, which I’m very grateful for. And you’ll notice that it actually pulls up just a few of the apps that you can actually cycle between.
Obviously, you’ve got, I don’t know, 50,60 different apps open at once in your multitasking, but I think it’s just showing the ones that are currently loaded up and active. You can obviously cycle between these right here. You can even do the thing that you can do on Mac OS, which is while you are in the task switcher here, you can go and do Command Queue to close out of those applications you’re not using. When you connect the trackpad, either via a Magic Keyboard or via a wireless trackpad, then you can go to Settings, General and trackpad. You can change just a few of the settings here, things like tracking speed, natural scrolling, etc. However, if you go over to accessibility, then scroll down and then go down to Pointer Control, which I believe is right up here, you will see a number of other options that I honestly think you should just have access to from the same trackpad setting, things like being able to change the size of the pointer to make it huge if you want to. You can even add a colored ring around it, make sure it’s more visible, or you can turn on and off the animations. And what this is referring to is how the pointer will kind of morph around buttons. You can turn this off and the buttons will still be highlighted, but you can see it just moves over it smoothly. Additionally, here, there is a double tap to drag, which is off by default, but you might want to turn on. I actually turned off trackpad inertia to make it a bit more like a MacBook. Additionally, there’s scrolling speed here. And I really think this one should be just in the regular trackpad settings. But here it is for you.
Back in settings. If you go to general and then go over to your keyboard settings, you’ll notice there’s actually a hardware keyboard option. One interesting thing in here is if you go down to modifier keys, you can go to each of the main keys that you would see for Mac OS. Yeah, obviously they’re set to kind of what they are normally by default. We can actually change them and even make one an escape key if say the keyboard you’re using doesn’t have an escape key. One of the big deals of the new Magic Key keyboard for the iPad Pro is the fact that because they were able to reshift the weight distribution, everything, they added more keys and they were added an escape key.
Another thing to talk about is the function row items up at the top here. Obviously, whether or not these work will vary depending on things. For example, this button doesn’t really do anything, but this button does basically meaning that the app switcher in iPad OS is the same as app expose a on the Mac. Your brightness up and down does in fact control the brightness on the iPad itself. You can also, if I just quickly tap up here, use the media keys as you would expect, and you can obviously go forward and back the same way. Obviously the mute buttons and the volume up and volume down work just fine. But to absolutely nobody shock my eject button on here does nothing. Obviously, this keyboard is meant for a Mac that does have connected to the iPad via Bluetooth. That’s why some of these don’t quite work like this guy over here. If this were like a Magic Keyboard that’s designed for an iPad, it would be populated with functions that actually do work, assuming that you have a function row. Of course, while we’re here, of course, you can use spotlight anywhere to search for things like music, but you can also use Command F in a lot of apps to jump straight to the search functionality even within that app.