Yes, Apple announced a bunch more stuff than I’m going to talk about today. I didn’t care about most of it, or at least they weren’t the features that got me excited.

You can view the keynote here.

iPadOS

Yup we have a dedicated iOS variant call iPadOS that is only focused on building apps for the iPad.

Pinned widgets look interesting. I’m not sure what I’ll put there, but I’m interested to have something there, maybe calendar and my battery life? Maybe deliveries?

Slide Over, it’s going to be cool to try this out and see if I want many apps in Slide Over.

Multi-Window capability has been something we’ve wanted for a while. Very excited for this in all the apps I have that don’t have some built in side-by-side view like Ulysses introduced in version 16 a few weeks back.

Being able to have many versions of the app in different spaces is awesome. I could see have many versions of Drafts or iAWriter across spaces with Reeder and DEVONthink for my writing.

The new way that apps work will be great for moving files around. No more going deep into folders then back out again to find different locations. Put two versions of Files up on the screen and work with two different locations.

External storage is going to be very cool. I wonder if we’ll ever see something like BackBlaze come to iPadOS so that I can backup my iPad along with the external drive of videos and such. Currently my Mac Mini has the extra drive hanging off of it where I archive my video projects. Then BackBlaze takes care of offsite backup for the external drive and macOS.

The new text editing gestures for cut/copy/paste look interesting, but I wonder how much I’ll use them since I have a keyboard attached almost all the time. Moving the cursor precisely by picking it up looks interesting, I can see using that.

There is mouse support coming to iPadOS which I know some people are excited about. I’m not sure what I’d use it for so…it’s coming and we’ll see.

Some Other Things We’ve Found Out

According to Owen Williams with iPadOS we’ll be able to get much closer to running IDE environments on our iPad’s and then preview the local site directly in Safari.

oh, you want to work on the website in Visual Studio Code and see what’s happening as you edit the site? We can do that too. https://twitter.com/ow/status/1135926710778642433/video/1

Wanna see something wild? With Safari in iOS 13… you can finally run a full-on IDE. Behold, coding on an iPad, mouse and all. https://twitter.com/ow/status/1135919541073014786/video/1

I’m very excited to see how this plays out and if I can run a full locally hosted site or not and what it will take to do get this running.

Also according to Rene Ritchie we’ll be able to fully control iPad’s from the keyboard, not just with voice.

Mouse support in iPad is real. In accessibility.
Also full keyboard control for the entire UI (opposite of Voice Control.) https://twitter.com/reneritchie/status/1135643633690992640

macOS

I’m iPad first, but there are a bunch of cool features coming to macOS. I’m interested to try Sidecar which would mean something like AirDisplay3 isn’t needed. Breaking up iTunes has been a long time coming.

Voice control is very cool. I’m not the targeted user, but I love seeing new accessibility features.

Find my iPhone or other Apple Devices offline. Very cool.

Activation lock is awesome to make stealing macOS devices much less attractive to thieves since they won’t be able to get in to the machine.

Catalyst is cool. I’m interested in seeing what happens with iPad apps on macOS. I’m tempted to start building a few apps for my iPad that could take advantage of this. Yes, that would mean I have to work on my Mac Mini because you still can’t develop iPadOS apps on an iPad.

SwiftUI seems like a great time to start on those iPad apps too.

Beta’s

I’ve never been one to install Beta’s and I’m not diving into the developer beta’s that are available now. I’ll likely lag behind a day or two and install the Public Beta’s coming out in July.

Now to wait for all the podcasts and other resources that will break down iPadOS even more for me so I can get more excited and fight off the desire to install way to early beta’s on my main work iPad¹.