Yes I love working on my iPad. It’s my preferred computing platform and what I mainly use to do my work. This doesn’t mean it’s all roses and dancing unicorns though.
Today we’re going to talk about the issues I have with iPadOS and my iPad as I use it daily.
### Bluetooth Issues
The issue I encounter most is a bluetooth mouse and keyboard bug. To keep it short, if your mouse is connected via bluetooth before the keyboard then you loose some of the keyboard commands that the operating system should have. Namely you loose `CMD-Space` and `CMD+Tab` as keyboard commands if you’re inside an app.
Both of these keyboard commands work when you’re on the home screen, but not if you’re in an app.
The fix is easy, simply turn the mouse off/on so that the keyboard is connected first and you’re off the the races with the keyboard working as expected.
I’ve seen this across many keyboards. Sometimes it’s because the keyboard sleeps before the mouse, or the mouse wakes up faster and connects faster. No matter which way you slice it, iPadOS should work no matter which device is connected first.
### Not Charging
For some reason, sometimes after restarting my iPad it won’t charge if it’s connected though a USB-C dock. It was charging 3 minutes earlier with the same cables, but for some reason says it won’t charge after a restart.
Sometimes sticking an SD card in, or adding a hard drive, to the dock clears this issue up. Sometimes I just go to the coffee shop and use the iPad, and then it magically charges when I come home.
As far as I can tell this has nothing to do with the cable orientation issues that I talked about in my StayGo USB-C Hub review.
### Files
While the updates to Files in iPadOS 13 have been great, it’s also a fairly poor app. It often doesn’t provide any feedback about when a file transfer to an external drive will finish. It’s supposed to show a circle that completes as the transfer happens, but that doesn’t always show up. Sometimes your file will stay in a “ghosted” state but if you refresh the by going out of it then back in, the file is there fine.
It’s also quite possible that when you head out of a folder and then try to see it Files will simply try to load the folder view forever. It will spin it’s progress wheel over and over and nothing will happen until you quit Files and try again.
When it comes to external drives, Files also doesn’t do a great job cleaning up after itself. I can move 128GB of files on to my 128GB thumb drive an then I have to reformat it because Files doesn’t seem to delete the items it says it has deleted. Sure they’re gone from the UI, but the drive thinks they are still present so you won’t be able to use the space. That means a trip back to macOS so that you can format the drive and get your full space back.
### Audio System Choices
As I mentioned in my LG monitor review, it has a headphone jack and tells my iPad it’s a dock. That means it “steals” the internal speakers on the iPad and I can’t use them. I have to use headphones to edit videos when I use the monitor with my iPad.
All I want is for the iPad speaker to always be an option to send audio to. Of course more advanced features like sending audio to Ferrite and Skype (or Zoom) at the same time would be even better, but I mostly just want to be able to send sound to my iPad speakers any time I want.
### Lack of Keyboard Shortcuts
When Apple announced iPadOS I got super excited because it sounded like we’d be getting so many more keyboard shortcuts. Well Safari got a bunch, but so much of the rest of the operating system is still out in the cold.
Why can’t you activate SlideOver from the keyboard?
Why can’t you change the active window in a split from the keyboard easily?
Why can’t you trigger Spotlight search, select the app you want and then put it in a split with the app you currently have on screen directly from the keyboard?
Some apps have handled the keyboard awesome, like Things 3 which does let you change windows in a split between itself. It lets you create a split pair from the keyboard if you want to view 2 parts of the app.
Once you see what Things 3 has done, you realize how much further Apple could have gone with their keyboard support. In short, if you can trigger it with your fingers, you should be able to do the same action with the keyboard without touching a mouse.
### Can’t Favourite Window Setups
While multitasking came a long way with iPadOS, why can’t we favourite window combinations? Many times a week I want DEVONthink To Go and my writing app of choice side by side so that I can read something and write about it. Every time I want that configuration I have to build it by hand again.
You should be able to build and then “pin” a combination of windows that you can always go back to.
### The Keyboard Row In Split Screen
Sigh, this has been a bug for a while. If you’re in a writing app the keyboard bar appears with any extra features that you need to type, like Autocorrect. Unfortunately if you have your writing app in a split with an app that has extra functions on the bottom in the tap bar, they’ll be covered up by the keyboard bar so you can’t use them. To access the tap bar you’ll need to press a little down arrow to dismiss the tap bar.
I do this many times a day and I shouldn’t have to do it at all. Apple, fix this bug and just bump the UI up a bit when the keyboard bar is active so that we can access everything on the screen at the same time.
Yes I love my iPad and it will remain my primary computing device in 2020, but Apple needs to fix these bugs so that people don’t write the device off. Reading through the list, it would be easy to assume the iPad is a terrible device, when it’s anything but.