My new, modular iPad Pro 12.9” setup.

Those who have been reading MacStories for a few years should know something about me: I love modding things. Whether it’s customizing the silicone tips of AirPods Pro or adding kickstands to iPad covers (which I don’t do anymore), there’s something about the idea of taking an object and modding it specifically to my needs that my brain finds deeply satisfying. I’ve done it with videogame consoles; I’ve done it with IKEA furniture¹; and I’ve done it – once again – with my 12.9” iPad Pro.

A new generation of iPad Pros and Airs is rumored to launch in the near future, and with the Vision Pro coming in a few weeks, what better way to wrap up my usage of the M2 iPad Pro than covering the mods I’ve been using?

Paperlike Screen Protector

I’m starting with a pretty common mod that you may have seen covered elsewhere before – in fact, I was convinced to try this again after watching a video by my friend Chris Lawley. I put a Paperlike screen protector on my iPad Pro again, and I’ve been happier using it than I was expecting.

I say “again” because this is not my first rodeo with Paperlike’s matte screen protectors. I tried the original model years ago, and while I liked the idea of removing glossiness from my computer’s display, the degradation in image quality was too noticeable for my taste. The original Paperlike didn’t last long on my old iPad Pro.

A few years have passed since that experiment, and things have changed in the meantime:

• I spend quite a bit of time working in my car every week, where glare is always a problem;
• We moved into our new place in 2022, and with the much bigger balcony we have now, I’d like to work outside with my iPad Pro every once in a while;
• The folks at Paperlike have come out with a second-gen revision of the screen protector that offers better picture quality and superior transparency, which should help avoiding the first model’s image degradation issues.

I should also note that I’m not interested in the Paperlike screen protector because I want to “replicate the feel of pen and paper” on my iPad Pro. I very rarely use my Pencil with the iPad as a pointing device – never as a drawing tool – and I don’t take handwritten notes. I’m merely intrigued by the idea of removing display glare and, if possible, hiding smudges and fingerprints from the screen, which is a nice bonus.

Well, I’m here to say that I’ve had a much better experience with the latest-gen Paperlike compared to the model I tried years ago. The new film does help in terms of retaining image quality once applied to the iPad Pro’s display, and I don’t feel like I’m sacrificing too much of the mini-LED display when using the new Paperlike.

As you can see, the Paperlike doesn’t completely remove reflections from the iPad’s display, but it makes working under direct sunlight much better.

A macro shot of the Paperlike to prove that small text remains crisp and legible.

Notably, the new Paperlike allows me to read font at small sizes in apps like GoodLinks and Spark without making small characters blurry, which is something that used to happen with the first-gen model. And, of course, I get all the advantages of a matte screen protector: it’s easier to work in my car or under direct sunlight, and I don’t see smudges on the iPad’s display as much anymore.

With iPad Pros soon getting OLED displays, I’m not sure I’ll be able to resist the temptation of going pure OLED without any screen protector on (I just love OLED too much), but the Paperlike experiment has been a success so far. I recommend it if you’re looking for ways to make your iPad’s display matte and get rid of fingerprints.

Magnetic iPhone Holder

Fine, let’s get to the weird stuff now.

I thought of this mod one day when I was writing with my iPad Pro on the couch and listening to music on my iPhone. Specifically, I was typing in Obsidian on the iPad and checking song lyrics on the iPhone every few seconds. In that moment, I realized that was something I do with a variety of apps on a regular basis: maybe I’m catching up on RSS on the iPad and running timers in Timery for iPhone; or perhaps I’m doing email and keeping WhatsApp open on the iPhone. Typically, I would place the iPhone next to me on the couch or, if I’m working at my desk or living room table, next to the Magic Keyboard. Wouldn’t it be nicer if the iPhone’s display was always right there instead, floating next to the iPad Pro’s display?

After some research, I remembered I once stumbled upon an Instagram ad (sometimes, they work quite well) for a company called Rolling Square that makes a clip accessory to mount a MagSafe-equipped iPhone next to a laptop’s screen or external monitor. The idea is simple enough: the Edge Pro MagSafe holder is comprised of two parts, which snap together when closed; the inner part attaches magnetically to a metal “base” that you need to stick (with adhesive) behind your laptop’s screen or at the back of an external monitor like a Studio Display.

The base of the Rolling Square Edge Pro that I attached to the back of the Magic Keyboard.

The removable magnetic clip placed on top of it.

With all the parts in place, here’s what the back of my iPad Pro looks like with the Rolling Square “base” and when the clip is closed:

The clip folded on itself.

And here’s what I see when I open the clip:

That’s all I needed to create a mounting solution for my iPhone next to the iPad Pro. I use a MagSafe case with my iPhone 15 Pro Max (the Nomad leather one), and the magnetic connection is strong enough to allow the iPhone to stay attached to the clip when I’m typing with the Magic Keyboard.²

I’ve been working with this system for the past month or so, and I’ve seen a variety of use cases naturally pop up that I wasn’t expecting would be so useful in everyday life. Running timers with the Timery app, for instance, has been a great way for me to remember to log my time when I’m working with Obsidian on the iPad. It’s easy to forget to start a timer, but with the iPhone and the Timery widget always next to my “main display”, that happens less frequently. Playing music and controlling playback – the idea that sent me down this path to begin with – has also been an exceptional addition. Instead of having to switch back and forth between the app I’m working with and either Marvis or Music, I can offload playback to the iPhone, which is always within easy reach.

My iPhone 15 Pro Max mounted next to the iPad Pro.

Reading lyrics while working in Obsidian.

You may think that having an iPhone mounted next to your computer’s display can be too distracting, but, in reality, I’ve found that handing off specific tasks to a secondary device has actually removed distractions from my iPad workflow. Whether it’s the ability to quickly read show notes for a podcast episode I’m streaming, keep WhatsApp open, or occasionally check on my Mastodon timeline, not having to do so with the iPad means that I spend less time closing and reopening Obsidian, thus helping me focus more on writing or editing articles.

In a way, what I’ve done is reminiscent of John’s old setup, when he was using an iPad floating next to his Mac’s display to offload certain tasks to the iPadOS Home Screen and manage everything with Universal Control. There’s no shared pointer and keyboard between the iPhone and iPad, but the idea is similar: it’s useful to keep a second device next to your main computer for certain tasks that may normally interrupt your workflow.

Magnetic Stereo Speakers

And now for the weirdest thing I’ve ever done to my iPad Pro.

As I was testing the Rolling Square attachment for my iPhone, I started wondering: are there other things I could magnetically mount to the sides of the iPad Pro? After all, the clips add minimal weight and thickness (2.5mm) to a device that I’m mostly using at a desk or on my lap (so weight is not a concern, really); why not explore more options?

Look, I don’t know why my brain works the way it does, but one day last month I was cooking dinner while listening to music coming from the iPad, and I had an idea:

Speakers.

The iPad Pro’s four-speaker stereo system is very good for a tablet, but what if I could find two small external speakers and mount them on both sides of the iPad Pro? I didn’t know if such a product even existed, but I was intrigued by the idea, so I started looking.

The answer came quickly by way of accessory maker Scosche. As it turns out, other people in the world had a similar idea to mine, only that instead of attaching portable speakers via MagSafe to a laptop holder, they attach them to the back of an iPhone and use the speaker as a makeshift kickstand that also happens to be a Bluetooth speaker. Said accessory is called the BoomCan MS, and it’s essentially a small puck-style speaker that packs a 3-watt driver, 500mAh battery, and Bluetooth 5.3 for fast connections to any device. But besides the diminutive footprint and the sound output (more on this below), the best aspect of the BoomCan is that it supports exactly what I imagined: get a second one, and you can pair two speakers for true stereo mode with a single Bluetooth connection to your computer.

I couldn’t believe that my silly idea was actually feasible, so I got to work. I ordered two BoomCan units from Amazon³ and mounted two additional Rolling Square Edge Pro holders to the back of the Magic Keyboard, which now looked like this:

The back of my Magic Keyboard now.

The clips aren’t too thick.

The magnetic ring I stuck to the bottom of the BoomCan speakers.

When the BoomCans arrived, I attached the magnetic metal ring that comes included with the Edge Pro clip to the bottom of the speakers for extra strength, paired the first one with the iPad Pro, created stereo mode with the second one, and voilà: my iPad is now living its Transformers era.

My iPad Pro featuring the BoomCan MS stereo speakers.

I know, I know: this looks completely and utterly ridiculous. But for those out there brave or weird enough to be fascinated by whatever this is, let me tell you: these speakers genuinely sound like a massive improvement compared to the iPad’s built-in four-speaker array when playing music at full volume. For their size and price, they provide a warmer and wider soundstage than the iPad’s default speakers, making any song sound “bigger” and with more bass.

Working from my car with the iPad Pro while listening to music via the magnetically-mounted BoomCan MS.

This is not a surprise: space inside the iPad Pro is limited, and there’s only so much air drivers embedded within the iPad’s chassis can move while keeping a low-power profile. But given my experience with other similar magnetic speakers (see footnote), I was surprised by the quality of the BoomCan MS, especially when combined in stereo mode. I often work with my iPad Pro in places where I don’t have my HomePod mini (at my mom’s place; in my car; at SIlvia’s place), so being able to listen to music without a larger Bluetooth speaker or without wearing headphones while taking advantage of the iPad’s portability is a huge plus for me.

Modularity, Always

These mods, particularly the magnetic ones, aren’t for everyone. Let’s face it – plenty of Reddit commenters are ready to poke fun at this story. But as I look forward to the next major upgrade to the iPad Pro line, these accessories reminded me of what I truly love about this platform, despite its flaws: the freedom to adapt the iPad to my workflow and complicated daily schedule.

Whether it’s used as a tablet, put inside a Magic Keyboard, connected to a Studio Display, paired with a floating iPhone or magnetically-attached speakers, the iPad’s transformative nature makes it the most flexible computer Apple makes. After all, that’s precisely the reason I fell in love with this product 10 years ago, and it’s why I can’t wait to see what its future holds.

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In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

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Here’s the thing about the iPad line: it’s always being worked on, and that work is never complete. You know, like roadwork. As a kid, I recall thinking Atlanta was only under construction for a few weeks. Oh, the naïveté.

[…]

The awkward thing about this never ending construction project is when a lower-end model get a “new” feature before a premium model. That’s what happened with the iPad 10 and the iPad Pro in 2022. The awkwardness was compounded by the fact that Apple released no new iPads in 2023. Instead, Apple introduced a third (but not third-gen) Apple Pencil. More roadwork.

I think this is a perfect encapsulation of the state of the iPad. For better or worse, it’s always being worked on. Not like how the Mac and iPhone are always “being worked on” (of course they are), but more in the sense that there’s always something that obviously needs to get fixed and we’re waiting for it.

And the funny thing is, I’ve been using the iPad as my primary computer for long enough now, I find its “current” state kind of charming at this point. It’s definitely an acquired taste, but why would you get a reliable computer that does the same reliable things for a good number of reliable years when you can experience the thrill of a platform that still feels like it launched two years ago when it is, in fact, 14 years-old and that perennially feels like it’s waiting for the next shoe to drop? Why join the navy when you can be a pirate? I’m only half-kidding with this. Besides the fact that, for me, no other computer Apple makes is as flexible as an iPad, part of the enjoyment is (again, for me) its quirky nature, constantly on the verge of improvement. (Please don’t send me this page.)

If there’s one thing you can say about the iPad line is that it’s never boring, for better or worse. If anything, we’re still blogging about it – 14 years later.

→ Source: 9to5mac.com

Every time I open the Memories tab in Apple’s Photos app, I feel disappointed. The memories it surfaces always seem to rehash the same events in my life, and they never really achieve to put my photos back in context. This is a big reason why, for so many years, I’ve been keeping a personal journal in Day One, which lets me revisit my journal entries by looking at a map of everywhere I’ve recorded a memory. Likewise, the ‘Places’ section in Apple Photos is my favorite way to browse through my older photos.

Globetrotter is a delightful new app created by indie developer Shihab Mehboob that embraces this idea of revisiting your photo memories by looking at them on top of a world map. The app does so in a beautifully-designed interface, with a focus on your travel memories. Let’s take a look.

I should start with my favorite feature in Globetrotter, which is the ability to visualize the itineraries I took on a particular day. The app tries to link together your photos based on their time and location, and overlays the resulting route on the map. It was truly lovely to see the paths we took on a hike in the Alps a few years ago, or the beautiful road trips we took along the coast of La Réunion Island back in 2019.

Visualizing our road trips on La Réunion island thanks to Globetrotter’s Event Route feature.

There are playful animations all throughout Globetrotter’s UI

Because Globetrotter uses Apple Maps, not a third-party map provider, navigating the map feels smooth and fast. Shihab Mehboob also took advantage of Apple Maps’ detailed 3D landmarks, and automatically collects those you visited in the app’s ‘Highlights’ tab, along with the flags of all the countries you’ve traveled to. I have to admit, this aspect of the app has made me want to travel again just to collect more landmarks and expand my collection.

The ‘Highlights’ tab is also where you can find a recap of the year, à la Spotify Wrapped or Apple Music Replay, in the form of a slideshow that looks a bit like Instagram’s Stories. Globetrotter’s ‘2023 Wrapped’, like almost anything in the app, can be shared to friends and family members via the share sheet, as well as to your Instagram stories.

The social aspect in Globetrotter goes a little further. Similarly to Apple’s Fitness app, and provided that they also use the app, you can invite your friends to share your travel highlights and see a ranking of who’s the biggest globetrotter in your circle.

Globetrotter is like a traveler’s pinboard where you can collect landmarks and flags of the countries you have visited.

Globetrotter can be used on all of Apple’s platforms. The app looks great on iPadOS and macOS, and it is also available for the Apple Watch, where you can quickly view your travel highlights stats. Globetrotter provides a few Home Screen widgets on iOS and iPadOS, as well as desktop widgets on macOS. Unfortunately, the widgets are quite basic, and they currently cannot be customized to exclude or include specific memories.

Globetrotter lets you glance at your traveling stats on the Apple Watch

Globetrotter makes great use of horizontal space on the Mac and the iPad.

Despite Globetrotter being a brand-new app, it already includes a decent number of settings to tweak the experience. The app provides a handful of basic appearance settings, and the possibility to exclude locations from appearing in your travel highlights. I particularly appreciate the option to disable the autoplaying music in memories slideshows — a setting that I really wish we could have in Apple Photos.

Globetrotter lets you exclude certain locations from your travel highlights and disable the slideshow music.

Unfortunately, I think the app’s settings are also where there is a big margin for improvements. Most urgently: unlike in Apple Photos, I can’t exclude people from appearing as memories in Globetrotter.

I also wish I could decide what the total percentage of visited locations, at the top of the app’s ‘Highlights’ tab, corresponds to. Right now, since I’ve only traveled as far as Germany, the UK, and a few other places in Western Europe, it shows that I’ve only seen three percent of the world, accompanied by a mostly empty world map. While I’m sure this could be a fun stat for people who travel a lot, I don’t think it is a meaningful number for most. In 2023, traveling is expensive. With inflation affecting many parts of the world, long-distance travel has probably rarely been so inaccessible to the average person — including to the average iPhone owner. What if, instead of measuring how much of the world you’ve seen, the app could let you see the percentage of your hometown that you’ve covered in photos? Or of your home country? Or of a selection of your favorite destinations? Globetrotter could then scale down to motivate you to explore your surroundings, and appreciate the memories you’ve captured closer to home.

I’ve only seen 3% of the world according to Globetrotter.

I believe that with a few additional settings like these to complement its beautiful design, Globetrotter could have the potential to be a fun and delightful app for everyone to revisit their memories, including for the average person who rarely crosses oceans.

If you would like to give Globetrotter a try, the app is available on the App Store. Its features can be unlocked for $3.99 per month, $19.99 per year, or through a one-time purchase of $49.99.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

Federico’s setup (left) and John’s (right).

Setup optimization is a never-ending journey at MacStories. We’re always looking for the fastest, most efficient, and often, most portable way to do everything in our lives. The result is constant change. Hardware and apps are swapped in and out of our systems and workflows frequently.

We write or talk about our setups in a bunch of different places, which we realize can make it hard to keep up with the most current version of what we’re using. That’s why we’ve dedicated macstories.net/setups/ to our setups. That way, the next time you wonder, what was that pair of headphones Federico mentioned on AppStories or that giant battery pack John wrote about for Club MacStories, you’ll have a place where you can quickly find the answer. You’ll find a link to the new Setups page in the navigation bar at the top of the MacStories homepage, too.

Our new Setups page is what Apple might call ‘a living document.’ We’ll update it periodically throughout the year with changes we make with links to everything that’s still being sold somewhere.

Speaking of links, many of the ones you’ll find on the Setups page are affiliate links. If you buy something using those links, MacStories, Inc. will receive a small commission. You can learn more about how MacStories uses affiliate links in our privacy policy.

Also, if you have any questions about the gear and apps listed on the Setups page, feel free to reach out on Mastodon using @viticci or @johnvoorhees, or ping us on Discord.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

Artwork source: Procreate.

I’ve been playing with Procreate Dreams for about a week. The brand new animation app from Procreate shares a lot of DNA with the company’s flagship drawing and painting app. As a result, despite my limited time and scant artistic talents, I expect Procreate Dreams will be a hit.

Procreate made a name for itself with artists with its gesture-driven, hands-on approach to art. By focusing on gestures, the company’s first app puts your artwork front and center, providing the maximum context for what you’re working on and reducing distractions. The approach also encourages interacting with the app’s canvas in a natural, fluid way.

Artwork source: Procreate.

That same approach is the hallmark of Procreate Dreams. The app tackles animation in much the same way Procreate reimagined drawing and painting on an iPad. The tools at your fingertips are deep and sophisticated but get out of the way of your creation. At times, the discoverability of features suffers a little as a result, but after spending some time tapping UI elements, long-pressing to reveal context menus, and experimenting with multi-finger gestures, Dreams reveals itself, rewarding the curious who take the time to learn what it can do.

All of the familiar Procreate brushes and tools are available in Dreams. Artwork source: Procreate.

Procreate Dreams, which has been in development for five years, offers multiple ways to create 2D animation. The full suite of Procreate brushes and tools is available to artists. For anyone who has used Procreate before, this is the perfect place to start with Dreams because it will immediately feel like home. However, underlying those familiar brushes is a new and more powerful painting engine that allows for larger canvases and more complex artwork, giving the app room to grow into the future.

Dreams also introduces a new way to animate called Performing, which allows artists to record the movement of their creations using touch. Tap record and drag a selected item on the app’s stage, and Procreate Dreams will add keyframes and paths automatically, simplifying the process of bringing your artwork to life.

Artwork source: Procreate.

Other edits can be accomplished from the timeline, which supports multiple layers, manual keyframing, cel animation, video editing and compositing, and more, all using gestures to access features and select content. When you put it all together, there’s a lot going on, but it works smoothly thanks to Apple’s Metal framework running on Apple silicon.

You’re not limited to hand-drawn animation on a blank canvas, either. Dreams supports video, to which you can add an animation layer and edit, crop, zoom, pan, and more. Separate audio tracks can be added, too.

I plan to spend some quality time in Procreate Dreams over the holidays. Drawing apps has never been my forté, and drawing on a timeline adds an additional element of complexity. However, Dreams isn’t like any other animation app I’ve tried before. My familiarity with Procreate gave me a head start, easing me into unfamiliar territory. That’s a big advantage for the app and an even bigger one for anyone who has ever wanted to try their hand at animation.

Procreate Dreams is available on the App Store as a one-time purchase for $19.99.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

Tears of the Kingdom on my iPad Pro.

Those who have been reading MacStories for a while know that I have a peculiar obsession for portable setups free of the constraints typically involved with working at a desk or playing games in front of a TV.

It’s not that I don’t want to have a desk or dislike my 65” OLED TV: it’s that I don’t want those contexts to be my only options when it comes to getting work done or playing videogames. This is why I’ve spent the better part of my career fine-tuning my iPad-first lifestyle and why I’m so excited at the prospect of a giant screen that can always be with me. Modularity, portability, and freedom from a desk or TV are the driving factors in everything I use or buy these days.

For these reasons, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I embraced the ability to use the iPad Pro as a portable monitor for videogame consoles thanks to UVC support. As I covered in my iPadOS 17 review, this feature was primarily conceived to let iPad users connect external webcams to their computers, but that hasn’t stopped developers from re-using the same underlying technology to create apps that allow you to display a video feed from any accessory connected via USB.

It’s a very intriguing proposition: the 12.9” iPad Pro has a gorgeous mini-LED display; what if you could use that to give yourself a little extra screen real estate when playing Super Mario Bros. Wonder or Tears of the Kingdom without having to pack a separate portable monitor with you?

In my review, I mentioned the Genki Studio app, which I used to play games with my Nintendo Switch and ROG Ally and output their video feeds to the iPad Pro’s display. Today, I want to explain how I took my setup a step further by enhancing the picture quality of the Nintendo Switch when viewed on the iPad Pro and, most importantly, how I created a fully-portable setup that allows me to play Switch games on the iPad Pro anywhere I am.

Orion for iPad

The first change in my setup compared to September is the app I’m using to display a connected Switch on my iPad: the excellent Orion, created by the Halide team.

Orion, like Genki Studio or Capturino, is an app to display a video feed from a connected USB device on your iPad’s screen. In addition to the app’s exquisite design (which I suggest you read more about here), the reason I’m recommending the app on MacStories is the following: Orion is the most intuitive UVC app for iPadOS 17 with the best settings for tweaking image quality if you want to play games via a portable console connected to your iPad. With a $5 In-App Purchase, you can unlock Orion Pro, which adds support for manual picture adjustments, CRT emulation for retro consoles, and – my favorite – AI-powered, real-time 4K upscaling.

Orion in Stage Manager.

Now, let me tell you about my history with Nintendo Switch upscaling. Famously, the console is limited to 720p resolution (in a best case scenario) when in handheld mode and 1080p (again, not always) when docked to a TV. The lack of proper 4K output isn’t a dealbreaker given Nintendo’s design ethos and astounding gameplay for their first-party titles, but let’s be honest: it sure would be lovely to play Zelda or Metroid at native 4K at some point.

To overcome these limitations, over the years I tried a variety of hardware solutions to enhance the picture quality of the Switch when docked. One of these is the mClassic, an HDMI dongle that sits in between the Switch dock and your TV, takes the console’s video feed, and upscales it to 1440p. It’s not 4K, and the image gets softened a little too much for my taste, but it works. I also tried the PhotoFast 4K Gamer Pro, another HDMI dongle that claims to sharpen the Nintendo Switch’s image and blow it up to 4K. In that case, the extra aliasing caused by sharpening turned out to be a problem. I even tried to combine the mClassic and 4K Gamer Pro in one monstrous contraption that required multiple HDMI extension cords and micro-USB cables to power the dongles. All of that just to have a tiny taste of higher resolutions for my Switch.

Enter Orion Pro and its AI-powered, software-based 4K upscaling. You pay $5, flip a toggle in the iPad app, and that’s it: Orion will upscale your Switch’s video stream to 4K in real-time without adding any latency or altering colors.

This is all you have to do to upscale a video feed with Orion.

I played multiple hours of Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario Bros. Wonder on my iPad Pro using Orion’s 4K upscaling and it’s been an absolute blast. In toggling Orion’s 4K button on and off, I can tell the difference between the Switch’s standard quasi-1080p video feed and Orion’s post-processed version, which is objectively more pleasant to look at on a 12.9” iPad Pro. Impressively, I’ve also had zero problems with latency in Orion with upscaling turned on. The combination of Orion’s plug-and-play nature, fantastic retro-inspired design, and sheer performance make it, in my opinion, one of the best iPad apps of the year so far.

If you have a compatible capture card (more on this below) and are looking for an app to use your iPad as a portable HDMI monitor for other consoles, my top pick is Orion, and I can’t recommend the Orion Pro purchase enough if you plan on using the app with a Nintendo Switch.

The Gear

Compared to my review in September, there are two key changes I want to cover that have made my setup 100% portable. By that I mean that I’ve created the sort of setup that I can use from my car, without having to be next to a power outlet.

The first upgrade was a new capture card with superior performance to the one I was using before. After a lot of research, I went with ASUS’ brand new TUF Gaming 4K Capture Pro card. In a very compact and sturdy form factor (it’s made of aluminum, which I appreciate, and comes with built-in RGB LEDs), this capture card features:

• Support for HDMI 2.1
• HDR passthrough up to 4K @ 144Hz
• Variable refresh rate passthrough
• Video capture up to 4K at 60 fps over USB 3.2 Gen. 2

I’ve tried a lot of capture cards and dongles over the past few months, and given my high-end setup with the ROG Ally and external 4090 GPU, I wanted to get the best the market could offer at the moment to capture footage on my iPad Pro or PC. Currently, options are limited to this ASUS card and a new one by AVerMedia, which more or less offers the same specs. In any case, my new capture card is extremely lightweight and portable, and it was immediately recognized by Orion as soon as I plugged it in over USB-C with no additional configuration necessary.

My new capture card.

The card is compact and sturdy.

The second upgrade is all about powering a docked Nintendo Switch on the go. For years now, I’ve been using Genki’s Covert Dock Mini in lieu of Nintendo’s bulky dock to connect my Switch to a portable monitor or, say, TVs in hotel rooms. Switch games typically have better performance when the console is docked (with some exceptions), so whenever possible, I try to play with my Switch in docked mode. The only problem: I always need to be close to a power outlet since I never figured out how to run a docked Switch off a portable battery.

That is, until now. A couple weeks ago, I stumbled upon the OmniCharge Omni 20+, a 20,00mAh/71Wh battery pack that, in addition to standard USB-C and USB-A ports, also comes with a 220V AC port at 100W that, well, lets you connect any appliance with a standard two-prong European plug (a U.S. version is also available). This was a true revelation for me since it made me realize I could finally be free of the constraints of power outlets and take my Nintendo Switch with me anywhere – this time even in docked mode.

The battery powering the Nintendo Switch via the Covert Dock Mini.

Besides the fact that the Omni 20+ has become my favorite battery ever made (and I’m keeping an eye on the brand new and very expensive Omni 40 as well), I think you can imagine what happened next. Thanks to the battery’s built-in AC port, I’ve achieved my final form: I’ve been able to play Tears of the Kingdom in docked mode while waiting in my car, using the iPad Pro as an external monitor for my Switch.

Is it messy? Yes. Is it also Tears of the Kingdom on a 12.9” display sitting on my lap while I wait in my car? Yes.

All I needed to do was plug the Covert Dock Mini into the battery, connect the docked Switch to the capture card, and plug the capture card into the iPad Pro. The dock’s minimal power consumption means I can play with this setup for hours at a time, which will be handy in the future when I’ll have to wait in my car for hours again or, say, I’ll be on a plane without a compatible power socket nearby.

Of course, this battery has also been useful for other things – like powering my MacBook Air when I forgot my MagSafe charger, topping up my iPhone or iPad Pro, or recharging my Steam Deck and ROG Ally. There’s also another – “classic Ticci”, someone would say – use case: relying on the battery to charge the iPad Pro while wearing XReal glasses to work with a giant version of iPadOS in front of my eyes. But that’s a story for another time.

It may be a mess of cables, but it’s fully portable.

In the words of my friend Myke Hurley, “this is a much more portable setup than trying to record a podcast on an iPad”. As is often the case, Myke is right. As someone who’s obsessed with portability and freedom from desks, the jungle of cables I often find myself dealing with may not be a pretty sight, but it works. The combination of the Omni 20+ and Orion has enabled me to play Nintendo Switch games on a bigger screen, at a higher resolution, with better audio, and – of course – the freedom to do so anywhere I am.

Perhaps in a few months, I’ll be able to do the same on an OLED iPad Pro. Until then, I’ll be using Orion and iPadOS 17 to play some Super Mario and switch to my email client via Stage Manager if I need to. What a time to be alive.

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It’s been years since I took a serious run at handwritten notes on the iPad. However, that changed with my recent experiments with the Boox Tab Ultra, which led me back to the benefits of jotting down handwritten notes as a quick capture system while I work. That’s why Aspropad’s new Rock Paper Pencil bundle of a nano-textured iPad screen protector and replacement Apple Pencil tips that mimic the feel of paper caught my eye. I’ve had bad luck with screen covers that feel like paper in the past, but as I’ll explain below, Astropad has created a unique package that offers the closest experience to writing or drawing on paper that I’ve ever tried while also being easy to use.

The out-of-the-box writing and drawing on an iPad is a mixed bag. The Pencil hardware’s sensors, combined with the iPad’s excellent screen, make it feel like you’re actually inking the surface of the iPad. However, one detail gets in the way of the experience for a lot of people; it’s not like writing on paper.

The trouble is with the iPad’s slick glass surface and the Apple Pencil’s smooth, plastic tip. They work in perfect harmony with iPadOS, but for many people, whether they’re taking notes or sketching, the plastic on glass feels unnatural compared to paper.

I’ve always been a more aspirational Apple Pencil user than an actual user of the device. I’ve dabbled with taking handwritten notes in apps like Goodnotes and doodled in Procreate and other apps ever since the iPad debuted, but that’s a tiny sliver of what I do on an iPad.

Exploring Rock Paper Pencil with Apple’s Freeform app.

Recently, however, I’ve been drawn back to the Apple Pencil by the Boox Tab Ultra, of all things. My experiments with the Tab Ultra, which I explained on AppStories, have been driven in no small part by the fact that the iPad Pro has remained largely untouched for five years.

My Boox experiment is ongoing and started as an alternative research and writing device. Lately, though, I’ve taken the experiment a step further by setting the tablet up on a DraftTable V2 by Elevation Lab for taking handwritten notes as I work. It’s not something I do every day, but it’s a nice way to quickly capture thoughts without switching to another app that might distract me from whatever I’m in the middle of doing.

The Boox has the advantage of great battery life, but the iPad has system-wide support for Scribble and apps like Notes and Freeform that work with the Apple Pencil. So when I saw Astropad had developed a special Apple Pencil tip that mimics a ballpoint pen that works with its screen cover that’s designed to feel like paper, I knew I had to try it.

The Rock Paper Pencil folio for storing the screen protector when it’s not in use is built to last.

Rock Paper Pencil’s design is excellent right down to its packaging that opens like a book to reveal the screen cover, a sturdy folio for storing it, and two Pencil tips. The experience of setting Astropad’s system up couldn’t be easier either. Its screen cover attaches to the iPad with magnetic strips that attach along the long side of the iPad. Just line things up, place the screen on your iPad, and you’re finished. There aren’t any bubbles under the cover to smooth out or anxiety about ruining the cover if you get it lined up wrong and have to try again because the cover is as easy to take off as it is to apply. That’s a big deal because it’s not true of many other iPad screen covers that imitate paper.

The screen protector connects to the iPad with magnetic strips.

Astropad’s cover is so easy to remove that if you have times when you don’t want to use it, it’s easy to take off and store in the folio pocket that comes with it. Having taken the cover off and reapplied it several times over the past week, that’s exactly how I plan to use it.

Comparing the Rock Paper Pencil tip (left) to the Apple Pencil’s (right).

The other component is the replacement Apple Pencil tip. Installation is a simple matter of unscrewing Apple’s Pencil tip and screwing Astropad’s on in its place. The bundle comes with two, which are made of metal and look a lot like the tip of a standard ballpoint pen. Astropad says its tip is more durable than Apple’s, which I expect is true since it’s made of metal, but I have only used it for a week, which isn’t long enough to comment on its longevity.

The experience of using the new Pencil tips along with the cover is the closest thing to paper that I’ve ever tried on the iPad. I’ve spent time taking notes in a variety of apps. I also tested how Astropad’s tip works with a variety of brushes. In every case, the experience was by far the best I’ve had with an iPad screen cover. The texture of the cover combined with the Pencil tip feels a lot like paper, providing a pleasant degree of friction.

I don’t draw, but Rock Paper Pencil is great for planning projects in Freeform or an app like MindNode.

The surface of the iPad remains firm, too. I’ve tried screen covers that had a mushy feel before, but despite Rock Paper Pencil’s narrow metal tip, it doesn’t feel like I’m pressing the Apple Pencil into a mini plastic pillow, which is great. The tip’s metal color sets it off from the rest of the Pencil, which allows for more precise placement on the screen, too. Of course, all of the Apple Pencil 2’s features, like tilt and pressure sensitivity, also work with Astropad’s replacement tip.

I haven’t found the effect of Rock Paper Pencil on my iPad Pro’s screen image to be meaningful.

Other screen covers that I’ve tried also had the disadvantage of creating a prism-like spray of colors on the screen or significantly dimmed or softened images on the iPad. Astropad’s cover is superior in this respect, too. Sharp edges like text are slightly softened by the textured cover, but colors remain true, there’s no odd color distortion effect, and the screen remains bright. As a result, I’d take the cover off to watch a movie or do precise editing of photos, but its matte finish is perfectly fine for tasks, like text editing and reading, for example.

The bottom line is that Rock Paper Pencil is the first iPad screen cover I expect that I’ll continue to use regularly. I love the texture for note-taking or reading and highlighting text in apps like Matter. Just as important, though, is that using Rock Paper Pencil doesn’t mean fully committing to a paper-cover lifestyle. I can just as easily remove the cover, tuck it in the included sleeve, and put it on a shelf until I need it again. That flexibility is at least as important to me as the actual feel of the cover/tip combination, making Rock Paper Pencil as fantastic an alternative for occasional note-taking and art dabbling as it is for more serious handwritten note-takers and artists.

Rock Paper Pencil is available now from Astropad for the 11-inch iPad Pro and iPad Air for $39.99. You can also pre-order Rock Paper Pencil for the same price for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro (3rd generation and later), iPad mini (6th generation), and iPad 10.2-inch 7th-9th generations).

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Matthias Hochgatterer’s Home+ 6 for the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch is one of the most powerful HomeKit apps around, offering automation based on functionality exposed by Apple’s HomeKit framework that its own Home app doesn’t even use. The app also does a terrific job of surfacing sensor data that is buried deep in the Home app, like details about the air quality in your home if you have a sensor that monitors that.

Home+ 6.2 includes a new Smart Group dedicated to battery health.

With version 6.2 of Home+, Hochgatterer has added a new section to the app that reports the remaining charge for any battery-operated HomeKit accessories, such as window and door sensors. The new section, which color codes its battery icons according to the remaining charge, is accompanied by a new set of small, medium, and large-sized widgets that can be customized to show all of your battery-operated devices or a subset picked by you. Like the smart section in the main app, the rings around each device icon are color-coded, making it easy to pick out any with low batteries.

The accessories and scenes widget has added room identifiers.

Home+ also offers device widgets that have added the name of the room to which they’re assigned, making it simple to tell accessories apart in the widget. However, the accessory and scene widgets are not compatible with iOS and iPadOS 17’s new interactivity. Tapping an accessory or scene will trigger it, but the Home+ app opens in the process. Having gotten used to iOS and iPadOS 17’s interactivity, I hope Home+ adds support for it in the future.

Version 6.2 is a small update for Home+, but one I appreciate all the same. Battery data is too buried in the Home app, and with Home+’s new widget and smart section, I now know I have a Hue dimmer switch that needs my attention. Plus, if you haven’t checked out Home+ in a while, it’s worth exploring its automation tools, which are some of the best available in any HomeKit-based app.

Home+ 6.2 is available on the App Store for $9.99, which is a 30% discount from its usual price.

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In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

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Source: Apple.

Today, Apple unveiled a new, more affordable Apple Pencil that charges via USB-C and supports many of the features of the two previous-generation Apple Pencils, but not all of them.

The new USB-C model looks a lot like the second-generation model, except it doesn’t charge wirelessly. Instead, the end of the Pencil can be pulled back to reveal a USB-C port for charging. However, like the second-generation Pencil, the new model attaches magnetically to the side of compatible iPads, which puts the Pencil into sleep mode to preserve battery power.

The latest Pencil also supports tilt sensitivity and hover, which was introduced with the latest iPad Pro models, but pressure sensitivity and double-tap to switch tools are not supported. Apple isn’t offering free engraving, either.

The new Apple Pencil is $79 ($69 for education) and will be available beginning in early November. According to Apple’s press release, the accessory is compatible with all iPad models that have a USB-C port, including iPad (10th generation), iPad Air (4th and 5th generations), iPad Pro 11-inch (1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generations), iPad Pro 12.9-inch (3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th generations), and iPad mini (6th generation).

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Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

Ever since WWDC 2022, when Apple showcased Resident Evil Village, the company has been eager to highlight console and PC titles that are coming to its platforms. Sometimes, it can be a little hard to keep track of what’s coming, so today’s Game On focuses on recent big-title release news as well as other recent updates in the world of Apple gaming.

Before looking at the titles coming next to Apple’s platforms, let’s take a quick look back at one of the all-time classic iOS games: Machinarium. The game, from Czech studio Amanita Design, which was followed up a few years ago on Apple Arcade by Pilgrims, started on the Mac and other platforms, but was also an iPad gaming pioneer, debuting on the tablet in 2011, with its unforgettable hand drawn style.

However, like a lot of games, Machinarium hadn’t seen an update in a long time. According to Touch Arcade, the game hadn’t been touched since 2019 but was updated last week with controller, Metal rendering, and Core Audio support. If you love puzzle games and haven’t played Machinarium, you can buy it on the App Store and play it on iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS for $5.99.

Source: Capcom.

Skepticism about whether Apple will be successful in attracting console and PC-level games to its platforms is warranted, given the company’s track record with such games. However, they continue to push back, with Tim Cook recently telling The Independent in the context of an interview about the Apple Vision Pro that:

There’s significant excitement about our role in gaming, and we’re very serious about it. This is not a hobby for us. We’re putting all of ourselves out there.

Apple’s last self-proclaimed hobby was the Apple TV, which took a very long time to graduate from that role but is now part of the company’s videogame strategy.

Also, just before iOS and iPadOS 17 were released, Jeremy Sandmel, Apple’s Senior Director of GPU Software, and Tim Millet, Apple’s VP of Platform Architecture, were interviewed by IGN and emphasized the advantage of Apple silicon and its Metal framework across the iPhone, iPad, and Mac as a unified gaming platform:

So we really look at these many generations of SoC architecture across the phone, across the iPad, across now, Apple Silicon Macs. And we’d see that as part of one big unified platform, a graphics and gaming platform in particular.

Fort Solis. Source: Dear Villagers.

And judging from the announcements, the pace of top-shelf releases is beginning to pick up and include the iPhone more often than in the past. Among other notable upcoming releases:

• The RPG hit Baldur’s Gate 3, which was released on other platforms in early September, hit the Mac on September 21st.
• Fort Solis, which debuted in August on the PS5 and Windows PCs, is due to come out on the Mac at the end of this month.
• Death Stranding was announced at WWDC, but it was only recently revealed that the game will be available for the iPhone 15 Pro, too, beginning December 2nd. The game will also be available on the M1 and later iPads and Macs.
• Capcom revealed that Resident Evil Village, which debuted on the Mac last fall, will come to M1 and later iPads and iPhone 15 Pro at the end of October as a separate purchase from the Mac version, and that the Resident Evil 4 remake will debut on the iPhone 15 Pro, M1 and later iPads, and M1 and later Macs as a single, universal purchase.
• Apple’s iPhone event also revealed that Assassin’s Creed Mirage would be coming to the iPhone 15 Pro as well.
• Stray is slated for release on the Mac at some point too.

There may be other big releases coming that I’ve missed, but that alone is a pretty healthy lineup to go with other titles that are already available. It will be interesting to see if others are added to the release roster in the coming weeks.

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A simple setting can be used as a workaround for clamshell mode in iPadOS 17.

Fernando Silva of 9to5Mac came up with a clever workaround to have ‘clamshell mode’ in iPadOS 17 when an iPad is connected to an external display. The catch: it doesn’t really turn off the iPad’s built-in display.

Now before readers start spamming the comments, this is not true clamshell mode. True clamshell mode kills the screen of the host computer and moves everything from that display to the external monitor. This will not do that. But this workaround will allow you to close your iPad Pro, connect a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and still be able to use Stage Manager on an external display.

Essentially, the method involves disabling the ‘Lock / Unlock’ toggle in Settings ⇾ Display & Brightness that controls whether the iPad’s screen should lock when a cover is closed on top of it. This has been the iPad’s default behavior since the iPad 2 and the debut of the Smart Cover, and it still applies to the latest iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard: when the cover is closed, the iPad gets automatically locked. However, this setting can be disabled, and if you do, then sure: you could close an iPad Pro and continue using iPadOS on the external display without seeing the iPad’s built-in display. Except the iPad’s display is always on behind the scenes, which is not ideal.¹

Still: if we’re supposed to accept this workaround as the only way to fake ‘clamshell mode’ in iPadOS 17, I would suggest some additions to improve the experience.

First, you can use this one-tap shortcut to quickly open the page in Settings where you can toggle the ‘Lock / Unlock’ switch. Add this shortcut to your iPad dock or Home Screen, and you’ll be able to set that display preference very quickly. You should do this just before connecting an iPad to an external display if you want to use it in “clamshell” mode.²

Lock / Unlock

Open the Display & Brightness page in the Settings app.

Get the shortcut here.

Second, iPadOS 17 introduces a new automation trigger in Shortcuts that lets you fire off Shortcuts actions when an external display is connected. So if I were to use this method, I would first create a ‘Display Connects’ trigger and assign a ‘Set Stage Manager’ action to the automation. This way, as soon as an external display is connected, we know that Stage Manager will be enabled automatically.

Last, I would take advantage of the same automation trigger to do the opposite: when an iPad is disconnected from the external display, you probably want to re-enable the setting that automatically locks the iPad’s screen when the cover is closed. To do this, I’d create an automation with the trigger ‘Display Disconnects’ and use the ‘Lock / Unlock’ shortcut I linked above as the action to run. This way, whenever you disconnect an iPad from an external display and open its cover again, you’ll be inside the Settings app right away, ready to re-enable the Lock / Unlock toggle. All Shortcuts automations in iPadOS 17 can run without a confirmation step now, which makes this workaround more reliable than in previous years.

Ideally, Apple should just go ahead and build a native clamshell mode for iPadOS, which is my one complaint left this year after the company improved Stage Manager considerably. But until that happens, I think I’m going to use this hacky workaround so I don’t have to see my iPad’s display in the corner of my desk when I’m working with my Studio Display.

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Stage Manager on iPadOS 17 beta 1.

I’m in Cupertino for WWDC this week, and after yesterday’s whirlwind of announcements and surprises, I had some time to sit down with my 12.9” iPad Pro, install iPadOS 17 beta 1 on it, and try the improved version of Stage Manager. As you know, I have a…complicated history with the iPad’s latest multitasking system. Before coming here, I was worried Stage Manager would be left untouched without any updates for at least another year.

I’ll cut to the chase: Apple listened to feedback about Stage Manager and – at least so far – implemented the key improvements I wanted to see. I’ve been using Stage Manager on my iPad Pro since yesterday afternoon, and I even tested it on a portable external display that I brought with me for this trip. If this early, limited experience is of any indication, I think I’m going to be happy with Apple’s revised version of Stage Manager for iPad by the end of the summer. But then again, caution is necessary given how last year’s beta evolved over time.

The one aspect of last year’s Stage Manager that Apple undid in iPadOS 17 is also the most important in my opinion: you now have much greater freedom in terms of window sizing and placement.

Based on what I’ve seen so far, Stage Manager for iPad is still based on different size classes for apps, which means that when you resize a window, you’re effectively choosing from a list of invisible presets that control how small or big a window can be and how its contents are laid out. However, compared to iPadOS 16, it feels to me as if the process of resizing a window is smoother and more lenient than before. You still see a window “blink” as it gets resized, but I’m under the impression that there are more “intermediate steps” when it comes to the sizes you can choose from. I understand why resizing an iPad app cannot be as pixel-precise as resizing a Mac one, but as long as Apple figures out a system to make layouts more flexible given the limitations of iPadOS, I’m good with that.

There’s even better news on the window placement front: unlike the original Stage Manager, you can now almost freely place windows anywhere and make them overlap as much as you want if necessary. The “almost” part is necessary since I believe there is still a rail-based system underneath Stage Manager, but in iPadOS 17, it’s like those rails have gotten way denser than iPadOS 16, giving you a lot more options for placing a window somewhere and making it stay there. Which, as I argued last year, should be the whole point of a windowing-based multitasking system.

Stage Manager in iPadOS 17 can be an overlapping fest, if you want to.

Stage Manager in iPadOS 17 is considerably less aggressive than its iPadOS 16 counterpart when it comes to deciding where windows you place onscreen should be. Or in other words: in iPadOS 17, Stage Manager sort of doesn’t decide on its own anymore. When you make a window bigger and drag it to the left side, you can cover the strip and hide it; if you change your mind, drag the window back to the right, place it anywhere you want, and you can show the strip again. Want to make a window small and tuck it in a corner of the screen? You can do that now and Stage Manager will not “intelligently” attach it next to another window. Want to use a workspace with a mix of large and small windows, precisely positioned in specific areas of the screen? iPadOS 17’s Stage Manager lets you do that.

Some of you may be thinking right now “Freely movable windows, what a concept!” – and you’re right, but still. It’s rare to see Apple completely reverse course on a major functionality they just introduced the previous year. I’m pleased to see this is the case with Stage Manager in iPadOS 17.

To give you more examples, in my tests I tried replicating some of the issues I had with last year’s Stage Manager to see what they’d be like in iPadOS 17. Take this screenshot from iPadOS 16, for instance:

Here’s what I wrote:

In this configuration, the strip gets hidden, and there is no way for me to make these two windows overlap to regain more space onscreen. Stage Manager will not allow them to overlap.

In iPadOS 17, I can replicate the same layout…

…or I can just grab the Music window, drag it just a little to the right, make it overlap with Safari, and the strip is shown again:

The list of examples goes on. Last year, I complained about being unable to drag a window to the top left corner of the screen without accidentally activating the strip. This year, I can make a window as small as I want it, drag it to the top left corner, and it just stays there without accidentally triggering anything:

Also last year, I noted that it was impossible to lay out four windows in a grid in the same workspace without making them overlap. As part of the additional resizing options in iPadOS 17, that’s possible now:

A real grid of windows is possible now.

I’ve also been able to appreciate the additional options for window placement when using Stage Manager on an external display. Last night, when I was using the iPad Pro with my C-Force portable display, I was able to take a small Music window, drag it to the bottom right corner of the screen and…it stayed there. I know: imagine that. Yet, for all those of us who had to suffer through the first version of Stage Manager for a year, all these small victories count. And given how they fundamentally alter the foundation of Stage Manager, I don’t even think they’re that small.

Small windows on external displays now stay where you put them.

Lastly, I want to mention keyboard shortcuts. In iPadOS 17, I’m happy to see that you can Shift-click app icons in the dock, App Library, and the strip to instantly add a window to the current workspace. Shift-clicking has been available in Stage Manager for macOS since last year, and I always thought that its absence on iPadOS was odd; now, not only is Shift-clicking supported on the iPad, but it’s also consistently available throughout all the places from where you may want to open an app.

The addition of Shift-clicking fixes one of my biggest gripes with Stage Manager on the iPad: now, drag and drop is no longer the only way to bring a window into an existing workspace. This keyboard shortcut considerably cuts down the time spent interacting with Stage Manager, which is a good thing when all you’re trying to do is getting work done on your iPad.

It’s too early in the iPadOS 17 cycle to be able to confidently say whether Apple’s second take on Stage Manager addresses all the issues I reported last year. But today – two days into using the updated Stage Manager on my iPad Pro – I can see that Apple is on the right path towards improving the worst aspects of last year’s version and listening to the most common complaints from power users.

There are still bugs with Stage Manager and, look, this is not surprising given this is the first beta of iPadOS 17. However, it feels like part of the philosophy behind Stage Manager has changed. It’s almost like Apple is willing to make concessions to power users without giving up on the underlying vision for a system that can neatly organize different workspaces and modernize the concept of overlapping windows.

I wrote last year that Stage Manager could be salvaged, but only if Apple wanted to truly understand the problem behind it. It seems like they did, and because of that, I want to give it another chance.

You can follow all of our WWDC coverage through our WWDC 2023 hub or subscribe to the dedicated WWDC 2023 RSS feed.

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Today, Apple released Final Cut Pro for iPad alongside Logic Pro. I’ve been testing the app for about a week with sample projects from Apple and some drone footage I shot with one of my kids during the winter holidays. Like Logic Pro for iPad, Apple has packed a lot of sophisticated features into Final Cut Pro for iPad, but with one crucial difference. Whereas Logic Pro projects can be sent back and forth between the iPad and Mac versions of the app, Final Cut Pro projects cannot.

Managing Final Cut Pro for iPad projects.

Final Cut for iPad projects can be opened in Final Cut for Mac, but once they’re on the Mac, they can no longer be opened on the iPad. Nor can projects started in Final Cut Pro for Mac be opened on the iPad. That will be a significant downside for people who already work in Final Cut Pro for Mac, but for creators with a mobile-first workflow or who want to try Final Cut Pro for the first time without paying the Mac version’s steep price, compatibility will be a non-issue.

My early experiments with Final Cut Pro for iPad with some drone footage I took in December.

That’s the camp I fall into. I don’t edit a lot of video, and except for testing Final Cut Pro for iPad, I would probably have dropped my drone clips into iMovie, added a few transitions, and called it a day. That sort of editing is absolutely possible in Final Cut Pro, too. However, the app allows you to do far more, as the two sample projects I’ve been studying make clear.

Final Cut Pro’s default layout. Source: Apple.

Like Logic Pro for iPad, Apple has done an exceptional job designing a complex app in a way that feels at home on the iPad. The screen is divided into three parts:

• A preview player, which can be taken fullscreen or moved to picture-in-picture
• A browser for selecting video clips, effects, transitions, titles, audio, and other assets
• A timeline for editing your video

Each section of the app is adjustable, allowing users to hide what they don’t need and shrink or enlarge them as needed, making the best use of the iPad’s limited screen space.

Final Cut Pro’s inspector panel.

There’s also an inspector panel that can be displayed along the left side of the screen with details about the clips in your timeline, along with volume, animation, and multicam elements that can be toggled on and off in the timeline section of the app. A jog wheel can also be displayed along either edge of the screen. By default, the jog wheel is a tiny floating element that stays out of the way until it’s tapped and expands in a semi-circle along the edge of the screen. It’s possible to really crowd the iPad’s UI, but by resizing and hiding elements until you need them it’s easier to focus on one aspect of your video at a time.

Having used iMovie in the past, I immediately felt at home in Final Cut Pro for iPad. Of course, there are many more features and options in Final Cut Pro, but the overall structure and editing process are similar, which made it easier to get started.

Final Cut Pro’s jog wheel is an incredibly natural feeling way to review clips.

The jog wheel and Apple Pencil hover support are two of my favorite features of the app. When the jog wheel is expanded, it’s incredibly fast to select a precise edit point, moving quickly by spinning the wheel with a fast swipe or slowly advancing the frames one by one. There is an extensive list of keyboard shortcuts for navigating your timeline, too, which is often a better approach when using an iPad in a Magic Keyboard. The neat thing about hover is that you can skim through your timeline footage quickly without moving the playhead. When you find what you’re looking for, simply tap the top of the timeline to jump the playhead to that position, and then zero in frame-by-frame using the keyboard or jog wheel.

Final Cut Pro’s multicam support. Source: Apple.

Final Cut Pro for iPad takes advantage of Apple silicon’s machine learning capabilities to enable several features. The app supports the following:

• Multicam editing, allowing users to sync multiple camera angles, edit them, and switch between them
• Scene Removal Mask for pulling subjects from the background of a clip and placing them against a different backdrop
• Auto Crop, which crops a project to social media-friendly aspect ratios while preserving the important parts of a shot
• Voice isolation to clean up noisy audio

Another fun feature is Live Drawing, which lets you write on top of a video using the iPad’s familiar drawing tools. What you write is automatically animated, appearing on the screen as though you were writing it live. Your handwriting is a separate layer in the timeline, which you can edit just like any other part of your video.

Exporting from Final Cut Pro for iPad.

In addition to editing, Final Cut Pro for iPad can be used for capturing footage too. The app’s camera interface includes manual controls for focus, white balance, an exposure offset, and a zoom dial. There are also overexposure indicators and grid overlays. Finally, when it’s time to export your video, Final Cut Pro supports popular social media video aspect ratios and resolutions outputting to Apple ProRes, HEVC, and H.264.

I have mixed feelings about Final Cut Pro for iPad. As someone who hasn’t done a lot of video work, the app strikes me as a great place for someone to start who wants to go beyond what apps like iMovie can do. The $4.99/month or $49/year subscription with a free one-month trial also makes advanced video production accessible to a wider audience than the Mac version, which costs $299.99. The app is also perfect for anyone whose workflow is primarily on mobile devices too.

Am I saying that Final Cut Pro for iPad isn’t a ‘pro’ app? Not exactly. There are plenty of people for whom the iPhone and iPad are the sole devices they use for making videos.

However, not having the option to move a project back and forth will hamper the ability for users to get the most out of both apps, which is a negative to anyone who wants to use both. I’m sure there are plenty of people working with Final Cut projects in offices on Macs who would like to take those projects project home with them on an iPad instead of on a laptop but won’t be able to. The same goes for students using school Macs during the day who want to edit on an iPad after class. Whatever the roadblock to round-tripping Final Cut Pro projects between a Mac and iPad is, I hope it’s resolved because until it is, the lack of flexibility will likely mean most users will stick to one hardware setup or the other and view the iPad version as the lesser of the two.

Final Cut Pro for iPad is available on the App Store with a free one-month trial, after which the app is $4.99/month or $49/year. Final Cut Pro for iPad requires an iPad with an M1 chip or later and iPadOS 16.4 or later.

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Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

Source: Apple.

Earlier this week, Apple announced a series of new accessibility features coming to its OSes later this year. There was a lot announced, and it can sometimes be hard to understand how features translate into real-world benefits to users.

To get a better sense of what some of this week’s announcements mean, I spoke to David Niemeijer, the founder and CEO of AssistiveWare, an Amsterdam-based company that makes augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) apps for the iPhone and iPad, including Proloquo, Proloquo2Go, and Proloquo4Text. Each app addresses different needs, but what they all have in common is helping people who have difficulty expressing themselves verbally.

What follows is a lightly edited version of our conversation.

Let me start by asking you a little bit about AAC apps as a category because I’m sure we have readers who don’t know what they do and what augmented and alternative communication apps are.

David Niemeijer: So, AAC is really about all ways of communication that do not involve speech. It includes body gestures, it includes things like signing, it includes texting, but in the context of apps, we typically think more about the high-tech kind of solutions that use the technology, but all those other things are also what’s considered AAC because they augment or they are an alternative for speech. These technologies and these practices are used by people who either physically can’t speak or can’t speak in a way that people understand them or that have other reasons why speech is difficult for them.

For example, what we see is that a lot of autistic people is they find speech extremely exhausting. So in many cases, they can speak, but there are many situations where they’d rather not speak because it drains their energy or where, because of, let’s say, anxiety or stress, speech is one of the first functions that drops, and then they can use AAC.

Source: Apple.

We also see it used by people with cerebral palsy, where it’s actually the muscles that create a challenge. [AAC apps] are used by people who have had a stroke where the brain system that finds the right words and then sends the signals to the muscles is not functioning correctly. So there are many, many reasons. Roughly about 2% of the world population cannot make themselves understood with their own voice.

Proloquo for iPad. Source: Apple.

What’s the history behind AssistiveWare’s apps?

Niemeijer: Well, we actually got started in 2000, but at that time, our focus was on computer access technology for the Mac, helping people with physical impairments who couldn’t access their computers. That’s how we originally started. But 2009 is when we first released Proloquo2Go on iOS, but we already had an app called Proloquo on Mac since 2005, which was also in the same category.

Could you tell me a little bit more about your apps? What do they do, and how do they address some of these challenges?

Niemeijer: So, I would say we have two types of apps. We have an app that is for people who don’t speak and do read and write, and that’s called Proloquo4Text. And then we have several apps that are designed for people who do not read and write but need speech but that are symbol supported. So they allow people who can’t read to still learn and compose messages. And they’re also designed in such a way that they help you with learning language and learning or growing towards using the alphabet. And those apps are used especially by children but sometimes also by people with brain damage. And again also, autistic people may be fully literate, but when there’s too much going on at the same time, they might find it super helpful to actually see buttons with words there rather than having to construct them letter by letter.

Proloquo for iPhone. Source: Apple.

What excites you about the accessibility features Apple announced this week, and where do you see your apps adopting the new technologies?

Niemeijer: There’s a lot of exciting news, but I think there are two areas that are most exciting. The first is Personal Voice. There have been technologies like this on the market for a while, but there are some challenges in using them.

One challenge is that [existing technologies] typically require high-quality headsets for recording, not like Personal Voice that lets you just grab your iPhone and start.

The other part is that because of the costs involved, people often need to apply for funding, and those two things actually pose significant barriers. And where people are going to lose their voice, they need a certain amount of time to come to grips with that idea. If there are then additional barriers that prevent them from starting to record their own voice, what often happens is that they start too late and that they start doing this by the time they’re starting to lose their voice already, which means that the quality of the recordings is going to be a lot lower.

And I think the whole concept of Personal Voice, the ease with which you can make the recording, the fact that you don’t have to either look for funding or spend money on it, it takes away those barriers. So what I’m hoping is that it becomes so easy that people just do it at the stage where it’s not too late to do it.

I also think that the whole idea of privacy – of not having what you record go to the cloud and then be processed there – is really exciting.

And finally, voice is really a key part of people’s identity. It’s important for them personally but also for the people that love them. And so anything that makes it easier for someone to have a voice that sounds like them is really powerful.

I’ve already seen some reactions from our community, especially those people that are part-time AAC users, which means they sometimes speak, and sometimes they use a device. They love the idea of being able to, at no cost, easily record their own voice so that they can sound like themselves. So that’s a whole category that would not typically get any funding today, which makes other solutions challenging from a cost perspective. So, I think that’s a group that will be really excited about it.

For us as developers, we don’t know yet what it will take to integrate this Personal Voice feature, but it definitely sounds like something that’s interesting to do.

What’s also exciting about this is, as I mentioned, there are other companies that do similar things, but as a developer, that means I need to include this SDK for that company and that SDK for another company. When there’s a new iOS version, I need to get new versions of those SDKs and test them again. That’s been a barrier for us to include this kind of technology in some of our products. And so having a first-party solution from Apple that addresses this will lower the barrier for us to offer this kind of feature to more users. So I think that’s a big plus from a developer perspective.

Assistive Access. Source: Apple.

How about Assistive Access? I’ve got to imagine that having the ability to put your app in an Assistive Access setting would help with keeping people who use the app, especially children, focused on your app in settings like schools.

Niemeijer: I see Assistive Access as a really nice extension from what we have with Guided Access. Guided Access for the last decade allowed you to lock someone into an app, and block out certain parts on screen, but it didn’t allow you to switch back and forth between multiple apps. And being able to set something up where a user can switch between two apps is actually really interesting for us because it allows people to kind of go back and forth between two or three products that are really valuable to them, rather than that they need someone else to come in, unlock one and lock in the other. So I think it really gives people more autonomy but in a safe kind of environment.

I also expect that for the elderly population, this is going to be huge. That’s not our primary target group, but looking around me and also reading what other people say, including in my own team, there’s a lot of potential there. So I see this not just as a boon for people with cognitive disabilities but for anyone who doesn’t need all those power user features and is afraid to get lost.

And having a more forgiving environment also means that people are going to use technology more. Because if you go to someone today who is a little fearful of technology, and they see all the options they have there, they might just not use this product, or they might not use this particular app because they’re afraid they might break it or get stuck in a corner. And an environment like Assistive Access should eliminate a lot of that fear and give them the essential functions that they’re really looking for. So I think it’s huge.

That leads really well into my next question, which is something you’ve written about in the past – the democratization of communication. What’s your perspective on how devices like the iPad and the iPhone have democratized communication?

Niemeijer: In the days before iPhone, in a country like the US, only a fraction of the people that could have benefited from this kind of technology got access. Devices would cost anywhere from two to three thousand dollars for a small little handheld iPod touch kind of device to ten to fifteen thousand dollars for more of an iPad-like device. And when I say ‘like,’ they were heavier and clunkier but with a bigger screen than the small devices.

So what happened was that by putting this kind of technology on consumer devices, it de-stigmatized the fear of a school. A student might have one of those devices, but when they went out to the playground, it was locked in the cupboard because, God forbid, it got damaged because it was $15,000. The moment the iPod touch started being used in schools, and later the iPad, suddenly it could be taken to the playground.

Kids would suddenly be the cool kid because they have the device, whereas before, they were the weird kid that had a clunky device. Younger kids suddenly got access because these dedicated devices, where before, the cost of them typically meant that you might be eight or ten years old before you would get anything. Now, a two-year-old or a four-year-old can get a device, and the earlier in your development that you get access to a piece of communication, the more opportunities you have in terms of language development. In terms of learning, you’re not going to miss out. So that’s been really big.

The other part was that the kind of people who got access expanded. In the past, it was typically people with cerebral palsy and people with physical disabilities that would get funding and would get these devices, but with first the iPhone, iPod touch, and then the iPad, this really opened up to people with Down syndrome, autistic people, and people were also suddenly able to make that decision, because they could buy the device in an Apple Store, and then go the App Store, even if a professional would say, “I don’t think he’s ready yet for this,” or “I don’t think it’s a good choice.” So that really democratized access, made it more affordable, and today, the number of people who get access to this technology has multiplied maybe by a factor of 10 every year.

We’re still nowhere near where everyone who would benefit from the technology can actually get it, but we’re so much further ahead than before the App Store.

Source: Apple.

Where do you hope technology will take AAC apps in the future?

Niemeijer: I think one of the biggest challenges is in the educational environment. What we see is that, especially in the US, schools are required by law to provide these kinds of devices to provide communication, but teachers are struggling to use that effectively in the classroom and support the students that use this kind of technology effectively.

What we’re trying to do is work toward them actually being helpful to the teacher. So in our latest product, Proloquo, we actually significantly expanded the default vocabulary with a lot of the words necessary for the curriculum, and I think if we want AAC to further take off from a technology perspective, we really need to look more at how we can help teachers benefit from it, and not only have yet another thing that they’re responsible for in the classroom.

You make apps that are specifically targeted at accessibility, but what advice would you give to your fellow developers who maybe aren’t making accessibility apps but really want to incorporate some of Apple’s accessibility features in their own apps? Where should they start, and what are the kind of things they should be thinking about to do more with their own apps?

Niemeijer: One of the things I think to think about is how making your app accessible is not only good in terms of it’s a good thing to do, it’s not only good because you’ll get more customers who would otherwise not be able to use your app, but it can actually help you in your development and testing. If you make sure that every element in your app is accessible, for example, for a VoiceOver user who cannot see the screen, that also means that with the tools that Apple provides, you can actually build automated tests to see if your app function correctly.

To give you an example, some of our apps cover quite a few languages, and for the App Store, you need to upload screenshots in multiple device sizes for multiple languages. You make a change to your app, and things look slightly different, so you have to do it again. So what we did is we used those accessibility features to automate navigating the UI so we could automatically capture the screenshots. And what used to take a few days, it now runs on a machine for a few hours independently.

So it cuts both ways. You get better products, you get more accessible products, but you can also actually enhance the quality for everyone.

And sometimes, you don’t yet see the use of certain things, but then Apple introduces something like Voice Control, where you can actually speak to your device to interact with it. That opens a whole other kind of use for it. Automation features typically make use of these kinds of technologies.

So, I would say it’s one of those things when you’ve never done it, it looks really scary, but it’s actually really easy to do. And Apple provides a really great foundation. If you use standard elements, you get most accessibility features, like 95% for free, and the other 5% is not going to keep you working through the night.

When you make custom elements, you need to do more work. But again, it’s manageable, and the benefits to users and also to being able to deliver good quality, well-tested software are huge as well. So we do it for every product we do, even if we are not necessarily expecting that this product is going to be used by this category of people who would need this particular piece of accessibility. We see this as something that’s a must-have for whatever we do.

Thanks to David Niemeijer of AssistiveWare for joining me to talk about Apple’s upcoming accessibility features, and thanks to Apple for arranging for today’s interview.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

Yesterday, Primate Labs released Geekbench 6, the suite of benchmarking tools for Apple and other vendors’ hardware. According to the company:

Geekbench tests have always been grounded in real-world use cases and use modern. With Geekbench 6, we’ve taken this to the next level by updating existing workloads and designing several new workloads, including workloads that:

• Blur backgrounds in video conferencing streams
• Filter and adjust images for social media sites
• Automatically remove unwanted objects from photos
• Detect and tag objects in photos using machine learning models
• Analyse, process, and convert text using scripting languages

In addition to updating benchmark workflows, Primate Labs says Geekbench includes modern file types and file sizes that reflect current computing tasks on Macs, iPhones, iPads, and other devices. The company also changed its multi-core benchmark to include tasks that span multiple cores to align the tests with how modern devices typically tackle a job.

My time with the new benchmark apps has been limited, but running them on my Mac and iPhone went smoothly. It’s worth noting that the apps are significantly larger, and it take longer than before due to the changes made to the underlying benchmark tests. However, it’s great to see Primate Labs working to make its tests reflect modern usage patterns and hardware.

Geekbench 6 for Mac is available as a direct download from Primate Labs. The iOS and iPadOS versions of the app are available on the App Store.

→ Source: geekbench.com

For the past eight years, Six Colors’ Jason Snell has put together an ‘Apple report card’ – a survey that aims to assess the current state of Apple “as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple”.

The 2022 version of the Six Colors Apple Report Card was published yesterday, and you can find an excellent summary of all the submitted comments along with charts featuring average scores for different categories here.

Once again, I’m happy Jason invited me to share some thoughts and comments on what Apple did in 2022. MacStories readers know that last year didn’t exactly go as planned. While iOS 16 delivered a meaningful update to the Lock Screen for people who care about customization and the iPhone 14 Pro came with substantial improvements to the display and camera tech, the iPad story was disappointing and confusing. This is reflected in my answers to Jason’s survey, and it’ll be a recurring topic on MacStories in 2023. At the same time, I was also impressed by Apple’s performance on services, concerned by the evolution of the Shortcuts app, and cautious about the company’s newfound approach to HomeKit.

I’ve prepared the full text of my answers to the Six Colors report card, which you can find below. I recommend reading the whole thing on Six Colors to get the broader context of all the participants in the survey.

Mac

How would you rate Apple’s performance in the Mac in 2022? ⇾ 4/5

Comment on the Mac

In 2022, I rediscovered the pleasure of working with macOS and having the freedom to install any app I want without judgement or limitations.

Ultimately, there are two reasons why I can’t fully embrace Macs and, in particular, MacBooks as my main computing devices: I like convertible computers (like iPads) too much, and Macs don’t have a touchscreen.

My question for 2023 and beyond is: can Macs become iPads sooner than iPads can become as capable as Macs? Rumors are unclear at this point, but it sounds like we’re entering a transitional phase that’s going to last a few years. For now, I can’t use a Mac full-time because I don’t want to be always be forced into the laptop form factor.

iPhone

How would you rate Apple’s performance on the iPhone in 2022? ⇾ 5/5

Comment on the iPhone

As part of my yearly theme for 2023, I’ve been playing around with Android lately, mostly to get familiar with the platform again and know what I’m talking about. I purchased a Google Pixel 7, used it for a couple of weeks, and returned it. The reason? This experiment confirmed to me that the iPhone still is my original love, that I like iOS too much compared to Android, and that the degree of focus and refinement Apple puts on the iPhone platform is vastly superior compared to the Mac and iPad (not a surprise, given how much money the iPhone makes them).

The iPhone is Apple’s crown jewel, and it showed in 2022. I love my iPhone 14 Pro Max and how the iOS 16 UI is optimized for it. The Dynamic Island is Apple at its best: instead of trying to hide an even larger sensor cutout, they outright embraced it, turning it into an innovative interface element that combines hardware and software to achieve the unique interplay of distinct components Apple is well known for. We’ve seen the examples of third-party developers getting creative with the Dynamic Island; personally, I mostly rely on it for timers, shortcuts, and music or podcast playback controls, and those use cases alone justify its existence for me. I hope Apple does even more with it in iOS 17.

The always-on display has been a success for me too, allowing me to more easily keep an eye on music playback and incoming notifications in a way that wasn’t possible before. I like to keep the Lock Screen dimmed without the wallpaper shown behind it when the screen is locked. When I’m working at my desk, being able to glance down at the time or see a Live Activity for Timery has also been a great help in my everyday work.

The one aspect of the iPhone experience I’m still not fully convinced by is photography. More specifically, how iOS processes the images captured by the iPhone’s camera. For the past few years, iPhone photos have had that particular iPhone “look” that often feels kind of boring and muted, and I’d like Apple to improve this aspect of the experience.

On balance, and especially after having tried Android again, it’s apparent to me that it doesn’t get any better than iOS and iPhone when it comes to Apple’s focus, design ethos, and innovation on mobile devices. This is where Apple never drops the ball.

iPad

How would you rate Apple’s performance on the iPad in 2022? ⇾ 1/5

Comment on the iPad

Speaking of dropping the ball: I’m sorry to say this, but that’s exactly what the company is doing with iPad and the iPadOS platform. Unless the company course-corrects its decisions with Stage Manager in the near future, shows they can still innovate in terms of hardware, and, more importantly, starts listening to the concerns of power users, I’m afraid even the most die-hard iPad users like myself will have to accept reality and consider other options.

My comments here are going to focus on the iPad Pro line. 2022 was supposed to be a huge year for pro iPad users, who expected Apple to finally show how the powerful M1 hardware of the 2021 iPad Pro could be put to good use. Instead, we got another half-baked narrative in both hardware and software that orbits a confusing lineup with a muddled collection of accessories and a variety of mixed signals.

On the hardware front, we saw yet another revision of the same iPad Pro hardware we’ve had since 2018: no second Thunderbolt port, no changes to Apple Pencil, no mini-LED display on the smaller iPad Pro, no front-facing camera on the landscape side, and, of course, no new screen sizes. The iPad Pro is a beautiful piece of hardware, and it’s an absolute joy to use as a tablet. But when I’m working with a keyboard on it, the lack of a landscape camera for Zoom calls or a second Thunderbolt port stings.

The biggest problem for the iPad in 2022 was its software story. I don’t think I need to get into the details of Stage Manager again or how Apple shipped an incoherent, confusing multitasking interface that gets in the way of getting work done more than facilitating it. I’ll say this: I think it’s great that I can now use my iPad Pro with an external display and have a separate set of app windows on it. The problem is everything else: in practical terms, aside from more concurrent windows onscreen, iPadOS 16 doesn’t let me get more things done on a daily basis compared to iPadOS 15. I can’t stop using macOS if I want to record my podcasts with Audio Hijack. There are still websites and web apps that don’t work well in Safari for iPad. Mail is not as advanced as its Mac counterpart. Due to the closed nature of the App Store for iPadOS, there are way too many utilities that can’t exist on iPadOS because Apple won’t allow them. And, of course, there’s the fact that iPadOS got a brand new multitasking system (yay!)…that doesn’t trust to know what I’m doing, constantly tries to re-arrange windows for me, and added yet another layer of UI to an already overcrowded iPadOS. Sigh.

I want to continue loving the iPad, but, at the end of the day, I also need to get my work done and I’m tired of having to rely on separate machines (an iPad Pro and Mac mini) to do all the things I need to do. At the moment, the iPad seems to be stuck in this limbo of “more than a tablet but not quite a desktop-class computer”, and I think it’s time for Apple to do some soul-searching and make up its mind. The device is called “iPad Pro”, but this gray area surely doesn’t help pro users at all.

Apple Watch

How would you rate Apple’s performance on the Apple Watch in 2022? ⇾ 4/5

Wearables

How would you rate Apple’s performance in Wearables overall in 2022? ⇾ 4/5

Comment on Wearables

Not giving this category 5 stars only because I continue to think Apple should make a new version of the AirPods 2 for people who dislike the redesigned third-generation AirPods. Maybe that’s what the rumored AirPods Lite (AirPods SE?) are. Otherwise, the second-generation AirPods Pro are incredible and I have no complaints.

Apple TV (Hardware/OS)

How would you rate Apple’s performance on Apple TV hardware and tvOS in 2022? ⇾ 3/5

Comment on Apple TV

I continue to be somewhat mystified by the Apple TV as a physical product you can buy. Sure, they made the remote nicer in recent years and the tvOS UI exhibits all the best traits of Apple software (easy to use, smooth, consistent with other platforms), but at the same price point (if not lower), competition from Amazon and Google is matching (and, in some classes, going beyond) Apple’s offerings with features such as better integration with TV sets (Fire TV Cube) or a better remote (the Alexa Voice Remote Pro, which supports finding the remote via voice and has backlit keys at night). I think the Apple TV is overpriced for what it does, but, at the same time, the tvOS interface is nice and the Apple TV doubles as a HomeKit hub on my local network, which is a good enough reason to continue to use it and upgrade it over time. I just wish Apple was a little more creative with it; maybe I just need to wait a couple of years.

Services

How would you rate Apple’s performance in services in 2022? ⇾ 5/5

Comment on Services

I’m very happy with Apple’s expansion as a services company in the past few years. In fact, I hope Apple does even more and continues to grow in this field. Offering native apps for their services on different platforms is key to attracting customers who may like Apple’s service offerings without actually using Apple hardware. The company has long offered native apps for Apple Music and Apple TV on Android and smart TVs, but as of this month, they’ve even rolled out native Windows clients for Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Devices (not to mention the previously announced iCloud integration for Windows). I applaud this decision as it shows an understanding (and acceptance) of the fact that people may like Apple’s content but, at the same time, prefer non-Apple hardware. I’d go even further and say that Apple should make a native Apple Music app for Amazon’s Fire TV devices (there isn’t one at the moment, which surprised me while setting up my Fire TV Stick). Looking ahead at the future, I’m very optimistic that Apple’s services division understands the importance of integration across different types of hardware, and I think we’ll continue to see similar announcements in 2023.

HomeKit/Home

How would you rate Apple’s performance in HomeKit/home tech in 2022? ⇾ 3/5

Comment on HomeKit/Home

As a new homeowner, HomeKit and, broadly speaking, home automation have been on my mind a lot over the past few months. And “by a lot”, I mean I’ve spent weeks researching every single accessory, bridge, and otherwise connected device I want to install in our new home.

After years of renting, we finally own a place and we want to do things right in terms of using the latest home automation standards while also future-proofing our apartment as much as possible. As it turns out, I couldn’t have picked a better time to buy a house: 2022 marked the official arrival of the Matter automation standard, which Apple (one of the companies behind it) embraced with a twofold approach: a redesigned Home app, and the rollout of a new home architecture to improve wireless communication between devices and accessories. Except a few things here didn’t quite go as planned, which is why I’m taking a wait-and-see stance here.

The mysterious “underlying architecture” for Home that was rolled out with iOS 16.2 recently has been already pulled by Apple as several users reported it bricked their HomeKit setups and caused all kinds of accessories to stop responding. It’s unclear what happened here: I’m one of those people who took a leap of faith and clicked the ‘Upgrade’ button and nothing happened, so consider me lucky, I guess? Still, it surely looks like Matter support for the HomeKit framework was going to need a little more time in the oven, and this whole situation isn’t ideal. I’m excited about Matter and its promise of interoperability between devices, and I’ve been trying to purchase new accessories from companies that have implemented Matter or have officially confirmed that they will work with Matter. But I would have expected Apple to have a smoother rollout on their side of things.

Then there’s the Home app, which received a substantial redesign in 2022 that made it easier to use, faster, more compact, and nicer to look at. I like it. I think Apple has done a good job slimming down the experience while making different accessories easier to recognize with new icons and key data points (such as security status or temperature) quicker to see at a glance. In my opinion, the best aspects of Home’s native integration with iOS remain Siri and Control Center: they’re both incredibly fast ways to control accessories and scenes with some visual feedback shown onscreen, which is not something I can say about Alexa (which we also use as we went with two Amazon Echos as a surround system for our TV).

What disappoints me about the Home app is that we still don’t have interactive Home Screen widgets for it. Clearly Apple has a private API for making interactive widgets that third-party developers still can’t access (as seen in the Shortcuts and Contacts widgets for the Home Screen), but if you want to have quick access to some of your accessories from the Home Screen, you’re stuck with some third-party options based on hacks and workarounds to “control” devices from the Home Screen. Perhaps Apple is waiting to release a brand new version of WidgetKit with support for inline interactions on the Home Screen before they revamp their widget offerings, but still, the absence of these control methods sticks out.

Overall Reliability of Apple’s Hardware

How would you rate the overall reliability of Apple’s hardware in 2022? ⇾ 4/5

Apple Software Quality

How would you rate the overall quality of Apple’s software, including operating systems, bundled apps, and sold apps, in 2022? ⇾ 2/5

Comment on Software Quality

Most of my concerns about Apple’s software quality this year are about the poor, unfinished, confusing state they shipped Stage Manager in. I’m not going to rehash all that. Instead, I’d also point out that I was hoping to see more improvements on the Shortcuts front in 2022, and instead the app was barely touched last year. It received some new actions for built-in apps, but no deeper integration with the system. I continue to experience crashes and odd UI glitches when working on more complex shortcuts, and I’d like to see more polish and stability in the app.

Developer Relations

How would you rate the overall relationship between Apple and its third-party developers this year? ⇾ 4/5

Social/Societal Impact

How would you rate Apple overall in terms of social impact? Consider anything you deem appropriate, including education and green initiatives, commitment to accessibility, corporate diversity and treatment of the work force, and political/policy stances. ⇾ 3/5

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About a month ago, during my holiday break, I purchased a Google Pixel 7 as a way to re-familiarize myself with Android.¹ To say that I found the ecosystem worse than I remembered would be an understatement. It’s not just about the fact that – as Gruber and Birchler noted – most Android apps suck compared to their iOS counterparts; it’s that the entire OS lacks cohesiveness.

Google has been focusing on visual customization and Google Assistant-based improvements over the past few years, which I think is a reasonable strategy. And, objectively speaking, I do appreciate the greater freedom Android grants power users who care about aspects such as split-screen multitasking, total control over default apps, or theming. But the whole experience feels fragmented, and as a result crude, when it comes to using your phone with apps in everyday life. The general baseline of quality for design and expected system features is simply higher on iOS.

This is why every year in my annual iOS reviews I make a big deal about the latest design changes and developer APIs coming to iOS: the rising tide of Apple’s developer and design tools raises all boats on the iOS platform. When you’re using an iPhone months later with the new OS on it, everything feels consistent at a base level and then developers and designers can infuse their craftsmanship in the apps they make. By lacking that baseline and the developer craftsmanship, using apps on Android feels like installing free apps from GitHub repos. Sometimes they get the job done, and at some point they will receive updates, and good for you if you just want to use that kind of software. But personally, those apps don’t make me happy I spent $1000 on a phone. Visually and functionally, they are subpar.

I have a feeling that most critics of Gruber’s latest story on art in software will focus on this part, which is, in fact, my favorite takeaway from the piece:

Art is the operative word. Either you know that software can be art, and often should be, or you think what I’m talking about here is akin to astrology. One thing I learned long ago is that people who prioritize design, UI, and UX in the software they prefer can empathize with and understand the choices made by people who prioritize other factors (e.g. raw feature count, or the ability to tinker with their software at the system level, or software being free-of-charge). But it doesn’t work the other way: most people who prioritize other things can’t fathom why anyone cares deeply about design/UI/UX because they don’t perceive it. Thus they chalk up iOS and native Mac-app enthusiasm to being hypnotized by marketing, Pied Piper style.

As part of my platform explorations lately (you may have noticed I recently wrote about Apple’s apps for Windows), I’ve been thinking about this a lot: where do you draw the line when it comes to the artistic value of a piece of software versus the practicality of having to use software because you need to get your job done?

If your job depends on it, can you use something that isn’t necessarily well-designed – that doesn’t ”make your heart sing” – but that makes you more efficient and, ultimately, pay the bills? In simpler terms: what happens if you prefer the Apple ecosystem for UI and UX but you’re feeling hamstrung by it at the same time?

This has, of course, been on my mind lately because of iPadOS 16. I fundamentally dislike Stage Manager, and every time I sit down at my desk with my beautiful Studio Display and elegant Magic Trackpad and Keyboard accessories, I feel conflicted about an operating system that looks great, feels nice – much, much nicer than Windows 11 – but doesn’t work the way I want.

This is where, I believe, the conversation around art applied to software gets murkier. Historically (and I’m going to oversimplify here, but bear with me – this is a blog), the debate surrounding the role of “art” in society has been largely split between those who only perceive the aesthetic value of an artistic creation and those who believe a piece of art should also contain social, political, and economical commentary to push our species forward. You can go to the Louvre and just enjoy the Mona Lisa for what it is, or you can listen to American Idiot and find meaning in the lyrics. You can play Call of Duty and just have a good time, or understand how Celeste isn’t just about climbing a mountain.

In bringing this back to software, it’s evident that – again, historically – Apple doesn’t believe in art as a veneer to make something “look good”. Art – whereby “art” we refer to the human care behind the design of software – is intrinsically tied to the technology that powers the computer. It’s the intersection of technology and liberal arts: skew toward one side more than the other, and you risk of losing the balance many of us like about Apple. Art in Apple’s software isn’t some secret ingredient that can just be added at the end of the process, like a spice: great design is the process itself. Case in point: the Dynamic Island.

There is no doubt in my mind that the essence of iPadOS – how menus appear, lists scroll, buttons are tapped, heck, even what a pointer should look like – has been designed with more taste, thought, and care than anything in Windows 11. There is no checklist that can quantify when an interface “feels” nice. The iPadOS UI, particularly in tablet mode, feels nicer than any other tablet I’ve tried to date.

The problem is that an iPad, at least for people like me, isn’t supposed to be a companion to work that happens somewhere else. It is the work. And ultimately, I think it’s fair to demand efficiency from a machine that is supposed to make you productive. I feel this every time Stage Manager doesn’t let me place windows where I want on an external display; every time I can’t place more than four windows in a workspace; every time I can’t record podcasts like I can on a Mac; every time a website doesn’t work quite right like it does on a desktop; I feel it, over a decade into the iPad’s existence, when developers like Rogue Amoeba or Raycast can’t bring their software to iPadOS.

We can’t talk about art in software in a vacuum. As a computer maker or app developer, you have to strike that balance between the aspirational and the practical, the artistic and the functional – the kind of balance that, by and large, Apple is achieving on the Mac. Unfortunately, when it comes to iPadOS, I feel like Apple has been prioritizing the artistic aspect over the functional, and it’s not clear when that will be rectified.

So, you see, I’m struggling with this. Over the past year I’ve realized that the computer for me is a convertible: a tablet that can transform. The more I explore other platforms, the more I believe that iPadOS looks and feels nicer, but it’s also getting in the way of me being able to get my work done. Maybe this has been true for a while and Stage Manager was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. You can’t separate art from the technology, but, at the end of the day, there’s also work to be done. Pragmatism kicks in. I’m conflicted, and I keep going back to this question:

What’s worse? Being begrudgingly productive or happily inefficient?

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Saving articles and links from the Internet for later isn’t new, but it’s something that has drawn renewed interest from developers over the past year or so, including the makers of Matter, who are reexamining the approaches of the past through a modern lens.

An early version of Instapaper on the iPad.

Apps like Instapaper and Read It Later, which became Pocket, pioneered saving web articles for later. The original iPhone ran on AT&T’s EDGE mobile network in the US and coverage was spotty. Read-later apps saved stripped-down versions of articles from the web that could be downloaded quickly and read offline when EDGE was unavailable. The need to save content offline because of slow and unreliable mobile networks is far less pressing today, but collecting links and time-shifting reading remains popular.

I do most of my Matter reading in the evening on my iPad mini using dark mode.

Today, classics like Instapaper and Pocket are joined by Matter, which I’m reviewing today, plus Readwise Reader, which is currently in public beta, and a long list of link organizer apps like GoodLinks, Anybox, and Cubox, all of which include their own reading modes and are the spiritual successors to web services like Delicious and Pinboard. The result is that users have more choices than ever. That’s fantastic because, as I’ve learned from MacStories readers, no two people take the same approach to what they save and how they read and process it.

Matter wasn’t always as focused on the reading experience as it is today.

Of the many options available today, one of my favorites is Matter, which wasn’t always the case. Early on, Matter put a heavy emphasis on social media following and sharing, which got in the way of the reading experience more often than not. However, the company changed course, and as new features steadily rolled out, I found myself reading in Matter more and more often. Today, it’s my primary reading app after my RSS client.¹

Matter’s text parser is excellent.

The critical component of any read-later app is its text parser, and Matter’s is excellent. I’ve never used a read-later app that didn’t occasionally have an issue with a certain website or article, and your experience will depend on the source material you feed the app. However, I’ve been sending Matter a steady diet of tech and and other news articles for over a year and have been happy with the parsing results.

Some of Matter’s style settings.

I’m also a fan of the app’s overall design on the iPhone and Mac, although less so on the iPad. Reading in Matter on the iPhone is great. The app includes light and dark modes, direct access to the system brightness setting, eight font sizes, six fonts, and three line spacing options. That’s not a lot of choices, but it’s been enough to suit my needs. Best of all, the single-column layout of articles fits nicely with the size of the iPhone’s screen.

Matter’s wasted space reminds me of Twitter on the original iPad Pro.

The same isn’t always true with the iPad. The iPad mini is small enough that the experience of reading is similar to using a big iPhone. However, when you move up to a bigger iPad, lists of articles and the articles themselves gain big margins in both portrait and landscape modes. I’d love to see Matter make better use of the iPad’s screen, including the option of a two-page view in landscape. I’d also prefer that the app’s tab bar be moved to a sidebar that could be hidden, similar to what Matter does on the Mac, where the web app’s sidebar opens up space to expose more features when viewing your queue. Overall, though, the design of Matter gives me what I want from a read-later app: an uncluttered article in a font that I like at a size and with spacing I find comfortable for reading.

Matter reading materials are divided into three sections.

Matter organizes your reading into three primary areas:

• The Library, which includes a queue of everything you’ve saved for later
• Subscriptions, which includes your email newsletter subscriptions you send to the app, stories from writers you follow in Matter, and any RSS feeds you’ve added to the app
• Staff Picks, which are curated by the Matter team

Each section has a tab devoted to it and can be set as the default that opens when you launch Matter. I spend the vast majority of my time in my queue, reading the materials I’ve saved from around the web, followed by the subscriptions tab, where I send a few email newsletters and follow the work of a handful of my favorite writers.

I rarely dip into the curated Staff Picks but have noticed that the choices are greatly improved from the early days of the app when the picks seemed tailored to appeal primarily to Silicon Valley VCs. Today’s picks are far more diverse and venture far beyond the tech sphere, which has made it a much better way to discover something interesting that I might not otherwise find on my own.

Each of Matter’s tabs has a couple of different views.

From your queue, you also have the option of backing out to a Library view where you can jump back to your queue, view any articles that you’ve marked as favorites or archived, or to which you’ve added highlights. The Library also lists any tags you’ve added to articles, so you can access them with a tap of the tag. Similarly, the subscriptions view can be viewed as a list of Sources, so you can access just one writer’s material or an RSS feed. Also, the staff picks tab can be switched to a Weekly Roundup view of the best stories the Matter team has collected during the past week.

Matter’s filtering and sorting options.

Read-later apps share a problem with email clients. Articles, like messages, stack up, hiding older stories under layers of new material. Matter handles this gracefully with multiple ways to filter and sort your queue, plus offline full-text search. Your queue can be filtered by:

• Quick reads, which are the shortest articles in your queue
• Lindy, which surfaces material with the oldest publication date
• Unread
• Read
• Tag

However, I’ve found that Matter’s sort options are even more powerful than its filters because they go beyond simple date-added sorting. Matter has options for sorting by word count, publication date, and author/publication. You can also shuffle your queue to help resurface older materials or sort your queue manually, which I use whenever I’ve saved a lot of stories in a short time period and want to prioritize a few articles for reading first. A quick swipe to the right on a story in your queue will also send it to the top of the list when sorted manually, which I like a lot. The queue also includes a Resume button that displays just those stories that you’ve begun and abandoned, which is handy for picking up where you left off or abandoning something you aren’t enjoying by deleting or archiving it.

A few of the ways stories can be archived.

Speaking of deleting and archiving, Matter makes it much easier to archive articles than delete them. This is something I’ve seen in a lot of apps like Matter and don’t like. I treat my reading queue like my email. It’s an inbox full of material very little of which is worth keeping. You can delete a story from Matter’s three-dot menu button while reading an article or by long-pressing a story in your queue, but archiving is also available in the toolbar at the bottom of every article and by swiping left on a story from the queue. Perhaps most readers are collectors who want to keep everything ‘just in case’, but my default action when I’m finished with a story is to delete it, not save it.

Bulk editing my queue.

Another handy way to manage a long reading queue is with Matter’s bulk editing feature, which is available from the three-dot menu button in your queue. Matter doesn’t support Apple’s native two-finger swipe-to-select gesture, but it’s still a faster way to tag, archive, delete, or send items to a Kindle.

Bulk editing has become my solution for dealing with articles I don’t want to keep. If I want to save something, I archive it from a story’s toolbar. For everything else, I periodically sort by ‘Read’ and bulk delete everything I don’t want.

One of my favorite features of Matter is the ability to listen to what you’ve saved. The app uses a synthesized voice that isn’t as good as a human narrator or the AI voices Apple is using for Books. However, I’ve found that it’s still a good alternative to podcasts when I’ve run out of episodes to listen to or feel like I’ve fallen behind with my tech news reading.

Matter’s audio player.

The option to play the audio version of a story can be found by long-pressing an article in your queue or using the three-dot menu button from inside an article. Once audio playback begins, a player appears as a banner at the bottom of the screen. As the audio plays, the text is highlighted, following along with the words as they’re spoken. You can still scroll around in the article all you want while you listen and return to the spot being read by tapping the location button in the player.

The player can also be expanded with a tap to reveal controls to toggle playback, skip among articles, and jump thirty seconds forward or fifteen seconds back. There’s also a draggable progress scrubber, playback speed controls, and access to a full list of upcoming stories in your queue. However, you can’t manage the order of playback from the player. That has to be done with your queue’s sorting and filtering controls before you start playback. Another cool trick is that you can highlight an article you’re listening to by pressing the up and down volume buttons simultaneously, which will highlight the sentence being spoken.

Highlights, sharing a quoteshot, and adding a note to highlights.

If you’re the sort of person who likes to highlight what you read and take notes, Matter has other options too. Tapping and dragging on the iPhone or iPad’s screen or dragging across text on the Mac and selecting the popup highlighting option highlights the text and adds an icon to the article showing that highlights are available. Tap on the icon, and a highlights-only view opens, which can be exported for sharing in Markdown format and includes title, author, and publication information, along with a link to the original story.

Tapping on a highlight also provides options to add a note or share, copy, or delete it. Notes can be added at the article level instead of to highlights too. The sharing option includes quoteshot image choices in two sizes and with multiple background colors that can be tweeted or shared as an image. Alternatively, you can simply share highlights as text. Highlights and notes can also be synced with third-party services like Obsidian, Notion, Logsec, Readwise, and Roam for anyone who has adopted those apps as part of a research system. On the Mac, you can even highlight articles on the web directly, bypassing Matter’s reader and sending your highlights to any of those connected apps.

Matter also supports exporting articles to a Kindle using the email address Kindle owners are given by Amazon for importing materials to the device. Once connected to your Kindle, you can send individual articles to the Kindle from the share button in the app’s toolbar, or in bulk, from Matter’s bulk editing mode that I covered above. It’s worth mentioning, too, that Matter supports printing and exporting articles as PDF files.

Sharing an article with Shared with You using iMessage.

Matter’s sharing options extend beyond sending highlights to people or posting them on social media. Matter supports sharing an article’s original link using the share sheet or sending it directly to Twitter. Not long ago, Matter also adopted Apple’s iMessage-based Shared with You functionality to allow users to add articles directly to someone else’s queue. As a publisher, I’m not thrilled that this republishes an article to a Matter URL resulting in the recipient never visiting the publisher’s website, but since it’s one-to-one sharing and not a publicly distributed link, I can live with it.

That aside, I’ve found that Matter’s Shared with You feature is more interesting in concept than practice. Although Federico and others with whom I use iMessage use Matter, I haven’t found myself sending articles to their Matter queues. That’s because I’m most likely to share something time-sensitive in iMessage, not something I’ve saved for later. However, if you do find yourself sharing links to others from Matter, Shared with You is worth trying because it saves your recipient from having to scroll back in a message thread for something you sent when they’re ready to read it.

Matter’s web app.

I haven’t spent much time on Matter’s Mac app in this review because, although the iPad version of the app will run on Apple silicon Macs, Matter doesn’t have a native Mac app. Instead, you have to access your queue from a web browser. The web app is superior to running the iPad app in compatibility mode because Matter has a Safari extension that lets you add articles to your queue, tag them, add a note, send to Kindle, and more. Plus, the extension includes keyboard shortcuts making it easy to manage your queue as you browse. I’m also a fan of the design of Matter’s web app, which puts controls in a sidebar, which is something I’d like to see done with Matter’s iPad app. Another nice touch is that saving to Matter, toggling Matter’s reading view, and highlighting articles are also available by right-clicking in Safari.

No Matter native Mac app means no share sheet extension for RSS clients or other sources of links I’d typically send to Matter.

However, the downside of relying on a web app is that if you’re not in a browser window, the only way to save an article is to copy its URL and paste it into the Matter web app, which is cumbersome, or open it in Safari first, so the extension is available – also cumbersome. Although a lot of the articles I save start in a browser, most are discovered in an RSS app or on social media, and because Matter doesn’t have a native app, there’s no way to save articles from those apps via the share sheet or Shortcuts.

Matter’s sole action is lonely and could use some friends.

Shortcuts is another sore spot with Matter and, really, most read-later apps I’ve used. Matter includes a single action to add items to your queue on iOS and iPadOS. That’s great, but it assumes that Matter is the final destination for all the links I save, which is rarely the case. With tagging and rich metadata associated with each saved article, I’d love to be able to get links back out of Matter after I’ve read them in bulk as part of a broader automation. That way, I could send .webarchive versions of my archived articles to DEVONthink or create a markdown list of articles I want to link on MacStories, for example. Instead, I let to try to anticipate what I’ll want to use elsewhere up front, so I can also send the link to an app like Anybox. That’s a shame because Matter’s focus on providing an excellent reading experience would make it the perfect front-end for processing articles for which I have other uses. The integrations for saving highlighting to other services help, but it’s far too inflexible compared to what could be done with Shortcuts.

Finally, I’d like to see Matter beef up the way it lets you follow authors. Whether an author who writes for a particular site is available to follow is very hit or miss, which leads me to conclude that authors are being added manually instead of drawing directly from article bylines. I like that I can follow many of my favorite writers, but the benefit is undercut by the absence of the ones I can’t.

Matter’s strength simple queue and advanced features like audio playback.

Matter’s greatest strength is its single, highly-filterable and sortable queue. It doesn’t try to impose its view of the ideal way to process reading material on me or make me jump through a bunch of hoops to find what I’ve saved, which I appreciate. Coupled with a terrific reading environment, the option to listen to articles, and powerful highlighting and note-taking, Matter has quickly become my favorite way to read. The app’s unique blend of features and focus set it apart from apps that try to do too much by being everything to everyone and those that lack the imagination to consider what readers want in 2023.

Still, I’d like to see Matter do more because, at least when it comes to my work, reading is rarely the final step of anything I do. With third-party integrations for highlighting and notes, Matter is part of the way there, which is encouraging. However, we’ve seen apps go down the path of one-off third-party integrations before, and it never works well because users always want more or different integrations, and what’s popular changes rapidly. The solution is Shortcuts. Exposing the highlights, notes, and other metadata about articles through Shortcuts actions that users can integrate with anything they want is far more sustainable and scalable.

Matter is available on the App Store as a free download. On January 15th, some of its features, including “HD text-to-speech, fluid highlighting and note-taking, integrations, full-text search, options to personalize Matter, and priority support” will cost $8/month or $60/year, which you can read more about on their website.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

Freeform is a brand new iPhone, iPad, and Mac app from Apple that lets users create multimedia boards on an infinite canvas that include text, images, drawings, links, files, and more. It’s an ambitious entry into a crowded category of apps that take overlapping approaches, emphasizing everything from note-taking to collaborative design to whiteboarding.

As is so often the case with Apple’s system apps, Freeform falls squarely in the middle of the landscape of existing apps. Freeform isn’t going to replace apps that are deeply focused on a narrow segment of apps in the blank canvas category. Instead, Freeform is targeted at a broader audience, many of whom have probably never even considered using this sort of app. For them, and for anyone who has felt constrained by more linear, text-based ways of exploring ideas, Freeform is a perfect solution.

At first blush, Freeform’s spare interface may give the impression that it’s a bare-bones 1.0 release, but that’s not the case. The app is easy to use and impressively feature-rich for a new release. So, let’s dig into the details to see what it can do.

A Non-Linear Approach

If you’ve spent much time in Apple Notes, you’ll immediately see that Freeform shares much of its DNA. Both handle text, drawings, links, and files in similar ways. The similarities will make Freeform feel familiar to Notes users, but it’s the differences where things get interesting.

There’s overlap in the way Notes and Freeform handle different kinds of media, but Notes is far less flexible.

Freeform handles many of the same types of media as Notes, but Notes is strictly a linear text-first affair. In contrast, Freeform takes an object-based approach that liberates users from the structure of text, allowing them to place elements anywhere on the app’s canvas, which it refers to as a board.

Boards and Objects

Boards viewed as icons and grouped by date.

On the iPad and Mac, Freeform’s document view uses its sidebar to divide the boards you create into four collections: All Boards, Recents, Shared, and Favorites. Selecting a collection displays its boards on the right, where the toolbar allows users to view boards as icons or a list that can be optionally grouped by the date they were last edited, a feature that was added to Notes in Apple’s fall OS updates, and sorted by either date or name.

Searching the contents of my boards.

The app’s toolbar is also where you can create a new board, select multiple boards for duplication or deletion, and search for a board. Search returns results for text found in the name of your board and inside the document, but it doesn’t return results based on the contents of files added to your board or the text in images.

The iPhone’s compact interface.

The iPhone’s interface is similar to the iPad and Mac versions but with the sidebar occupying its own screen and some toolbar items hidden behind a three-dot menu button.

It’s also worth noting that on the Mac, there’s no easy or obvious way to access your boards from Finder. There isn’t a dedicated folder in iCloud Drive or anywhere else. Instead, you’re meant to access your boards strictly from within Freeform.

Freeform’s toolbar is where you’ll find everything you need for adding items to a board.

Once you’ve created a board, getting started is straightforward but a little different depending on the device you’re using. On the iPhone and iPad, a board’s toolbar includes buttons to add a drawing, a sticky note, a shape, text, or an image. On the Mac, the drawing button is replaced by one to add files. You can add files to a board on the iPhone and iPad, too, but on those platforms, the option is included in the drop-down that appears when you select the image button. Likewise, you can also add drawings to a board on the Mac, but only via your iPhone or iPad.

Using the Scribble tool, you can also easily access dictation.

On all three platforms, each kind of item you can add to a board has its own set of unique controls too. One of the most interesting is drawing on the iPad, which is its own mode. Tap the drawing button, and you’re in drawing mode until you exit it. The feature works a lot like drawing in Notes, with some important differences. For example, Freeform doesn’t include a ruler for drawing straight lines or a highlighter but includes a crayon and a tool for creating color-filled shapes. Also, both apps support the iPad’s Scribble pen that converts handwriting to text, but Freeform’s implementation adds a dictation button to your drawing tools, which makes it easy to switch to voice-based input.

Freeform does not do handwriting text recognition the way Notes does.

However, unlike Notes, you can’t copy handwriting as text, straighten your handwriting, or search its contents. Your handwritten notes exist solely as an image in Freeform, unless they were immediately converted to text using the dedicated Scribble pen. It’s a shame handwriting is less versatile in Freeform. I get that the app’s focus is on drawing and visual communication, but the lack of text recognition is still surprising, and something I hope is added in a future update.

Sticky notes.

Freeform’s sticky note button lets you add square notes with a 3D curled effect in seven colors to your board. Of the tools available in Freeform, sticky notes have the fewest options but are handy for leaving notes for someone collaborating on a board with you or for yourself if you’re working on a board across multiple sessions.

Freeform lets you decorate your boards with colorful farm animals if you’d like.

The shape tool goes far beyond what you may have used in Notes. In addition to standard shapes, it includes lines, arrows, and hundreds of clip art-style outlines of objects, animals, food, and a lot more. Tapping on a shape displays a popover with formatting options, including fill color, borders, and text. Freeform even has tools to combine shapes and mask images with them, which appear in a popover when you select multiple images or an image and shape.

When I began testing Freeform, I didn’t expect to have much use for its shapes. However, they’re a handy way to draw attention to a passage of text and group items together visually. Moreover, the ability to combine shapes and mask images adds a lot of room for creative mashups beyond the simple ways I’ve used shapes.

There are a lot of text formatting options in Freeform.

The text tool is about what you’d expect. Tapping it adds a text box to your board that you can double-tap to add text. Like the app’s other objects, tapping a text object opens a popup with formatting controls, like text color, font, font size, justification, list styles, indentation, and more.

If I want to change the default style for text boxes to the American Typewriter font in bold, I can do that with ‘Save as Insert Style.’

The default style for the text and shape objects can be changed, too, which is a great touch. Define a block of text or shape with the font, line widths, colors, and other options you want, and then choose ‘Save as Insert Style’ in the Style section of the object’s right-click or three-dot menu. The next time you add a text box or shape, it will use your newly defined style. Styles can be copied and pasted from one object to another too.

Freeform uses the new photo and video picker on the Mac.

The image button provides access to photos and video in your photo library, the camera of your iPhone or iPad, scanning with the iPhone or iPad, or adding a web link manually. On the iPhone and iPad, this is where you can also add files to a board. Once added, images can be resized, cropped, and previewed. Text that appears in a photo can be selected and copied, but only when previewing an image.

A board of some of the many file types I’ve tried with Freeform.

Finally, I’ve tried adding a long list of files to Freeform, and it works with a surprisingly long list. You can add PDFs, JPEGs, PNGs, Adobe RAW images, TXT and RFT files, ZIP and .7z archives, WAV, MP3, and AAC audio files, GIFs, MP4 video files, iBook and EPUB files, .webarchive files, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote files, and, I’m sure, even more formats. What’s more, audio and video files can be played inline or opened in a separate preview for playback. About the only files that I could find that wouldn’t work in Freeform were DMGs and custom, app-specific formats.

One word of caution, though. Freeform isn’t a replacement for managing files or Apple’s sharing and collaboration tools. That’s because adding a file to a Freeform board creates a copy and, on the iPad or iPhone, previewing and then opening that file from the board in its default app creates yet another copy, which makes it easy to lose track of your latest version of a document. To make matters worse, the copies that Freeform creates have long nonsense, UUID-based filenames that will make it harder to find the duplicates. On the Mac, Freeform only offers previews of embedded files, which open in a full-screen preview, which is annoying but doesn’t create troublesome duplicates.

Editing and Navigating Your Board

To test Freeform, I decided to document a typical trip down an Internet rabbit hole and see how the app handled it. I started with the album I was listening to on Apple Music, Soft Sounds from Another Planet by Japanese Breakfast. I hopped over to Pitchfork to read their review of it, dragging a paragraph from the review onto my board, along with a link. Next, I saved a couple more reviews that I wanted to read later, plus links to music videos I found on Apple Music and YouTube. My final stop was Japanese Breakfast’s festival schedule for 2023, which led me to look up a couple of the festival locations in Apple Maps.

Aligning objects with the help of Freeform’s guides.

With a bunch of objects laid out roughly on the canvas, I began dragging them around, adding some notes and arrows as I went. Freeform makes the editing process simple. There’s an option to turn on a grid to help align objects that’s accessible from the drop-down menu connected to your board’s title. Objects snap to the grid, and guidelines appear, making it easy to align one object with another.

Selecting multiple objects offers a large number of ways to align them relative to one another.

If there’s a group of objects you want to align in relation to each other, drag your finger across them on the iPhone or iPad (or click-drag on the Mac) to select multiple objects. A popover will appear with several alignment options for making things neat and tidy.

Each object’s three-dot menu is full of a long list of other options and actions.

Objects can also be grouped, so they can be dragged around as a unit or locked in place once you have them where you want them. Additional options for every object or group of objects can be accessed from the three-dot menu button in the popover that appears upon selection or by right-clicking. Among the highlights are the ability to add a description to images, video, and audio files for accessibility purposes, adding shadows and rounded corners to images, constraining proportions of objects, like images and rich links, and the ability to move items or groups of items forward and back among the layers on your board.

Freeform’s zoom options.

It doesn’t take long to fill a screen when editing a board, but there are plenty of ways to deal with even the largest boards. On the iPhone and iPad, you can pinch to zoom on the screen and swipe on the canvas to reveal open areas. On the Mac, you can do the same with trackpad gestures. The iPad and Mac also include zoom controls in the bottom left corner of the screen set to predefined zoom percentages, plus Zoom to Fit Content and Zoom to Selection, the former being perfect for getting a bird’s eye view of a board and the latter being excellent for editing a specific region. Another handy navigation trick on the iPad and Mac is the ability to tab between objects if you have a keyboard attached.

Sharing and Exporting

Sharing a board works like iOS 16’s collaboration features do in other system apps.

Freeform uses Apple’s latest collaboration tools to invite someone to join you in creating a board. I haven’t used this feature extensively, but the process of sharing a link to a board using iMessage was straightforward.

Boards can be exported as PDFs, which works as well as can be expected for a multimedia document. Links are preserved, but audio and video files are reduced to image thumbnails. While not perfect, PDFs are ubiquitous and a good way to share a board with someone who doesn’t use Apple devices.

Freeform’s simple interface makes it easy to get started, but offers deep tools for making the most of your boards.

Freeform is great, especially on the iPad, where it takes full advantage of the Apple Pencil. When I’m organizing my thoughts, I tend to do so with text. It’s what comes naturally to me as a writer. However, I’ve always been curious about canvas apps, especially when organizing a project that involves a mix of other media like images, audio, and video.

What grabbed me most about Freeform is how easy it is to get started. As I’m sure you can appreciate from this review, this is a deep app filled with a long list of options and multiple ways to organize your boards. As important as those details are to making Freeform a robust app, it’s equally important that those tools stay out of the way. The tools you need are always a tap or click away, but tucking them away in popovers and context menus has the dual advantage of making the app less intimidating to get started with and keeping the focus on the content on your board.

That said, I’d like to see files handled better. If I create a board and embed a spreadsheet, I want to interact with the canonical version of the document, not a copy. A copy is fine if a file is for reference purposes only, but for evolving documents and collaborative projects, there should be a single source of truth for embedded documents, so they can change along with the information on the board.

I’d also like to see Shortcuts supported. Actions for creating, finding, exporting, and adding content to boards would all be useful for power users.

I suspect dark mode fans would like to see support for a dark canvas added too. Freeform adopts a dark UI for its document view and toolbar, but an option for a dark canvas would be a lot easier on people’s eyes in dimly lit environments.

Those are all pretty minor quibbles, though. I’ve really enjoyed playing around with Freeform. I’ll still stick to my outlines and note-taking for most projects because that’s just how I think. However, I’ll be playing around with Freeform a lot more too. The app’s flexibility and availability on every Apple platform provide the kind of flexibility that encourages creativity no matter what device you have with you.

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Stage Manager in iPadOS 16.2.

Ever since I last wrote about iPadOS 16, I have continued using Stage Manager on my iPad Pro. As I wrote in October, I like the idea behind Stage Manager more than its implementation. Despite the flawed design of its multitasking concepts and bugs I still encounter on a daily basis, it’s undeniable that Stage Manager lets me get more things done on my iPad by virtue of its concurrent app windows.

With today’s release of iPadOS 16.2, the idea behind Stage Manager achieves the full vision first presented in June, while its design and technical implementation remain stuck in an unpolished, half-baked state. Which is to say: conceptually, I love that Stage Manager in iPadOS 16.2 allows me to extend my iPad to an external display and put four additional windows on it; I’ve waited years for this feature, and it’s finally here. Technically speaking, however, the performance of this mode leaves a lot to be desired, with frequent crashes on my iPad Pro and an oft-confusing design that, I will reiterate, needs a rethinking.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve learned to live with Stage Manager, accept its quirks, and use what’s good about it to my advantage. As I recently wrote for Club MacStories members, I’ve put my money where my mouth is: I’ve gone all-in with Stage Manager on my iPad Pro and completely rebuilt my work setup around the M2 iPad Pro and Apple Studio Display, using Universal Control to seamlessly control iPadOS from a nearby Mac mini. (You can read the full story here.) After all, no other device in Apple’s ecosystem can effortlessly turn from a tablet into a laptop and into a desktop workstation like the iPad Pro can.

I’ve been working toward this vision for iPad modularity and contextual computing for the past several years. So now that Stage Manager has unlocked the final piece of the puzzle with external display integration, how good is it in practice?

And more importantly: was it worth the wait?

Working with Stage Manager on External Displays

Unlike the “basic” version of Stage Manager, which was brought to older iPads after Apple announced at WWDC that it couldn’t be done due to technical concerns, external display support in Stage Manager has remained exclusive to iPad models with an M1 SoC and above. Only the 2021 and 2022 iPad Pros, plus the M1 iPad Air can run Stage Manager on external displays with resolutions up to 6K. Every other iPad that is otherwise compatible with the “single-screen” version of Stage Manager (using four windows at once on the iPad’s display) but does not have an M1 chip or later will continue to be limited to basic mirroring on external displays.

If your iPad has access to Stage Manager on external displays, but you don’t want to use it, you can always disable it in Settings ⇾ Displays by selecting the connected display and enabling ‘Mirror Display’ instead.

The new display settings for a connected display in iPadOS 16.2.

From an iPadOS standpoint, there’s an immediate design consideration worth pointing out: when an external display is connected to the iPad, Stage Manager does not create a separate, bigger Home Screen like, say, macOS creates a new desktop. Instead, on the external display you’ll get an empty workspace with your dock where you can place windows and switch between app sets; it’s not a full Home Screen in that you cannot place app icons or widgets on it.

This is the “Home Screen” on an external display. It’s an empty space with the same dock as the iPad shown at the bottom.

To me, this feels like a waste of space. In my new office setup, I have the iPad Pro propped up on a Smart Folio in front of the Studio Display, which I VESA-mounted to the wall. When I’m doing something on the iPad’s display (perhaps because I’m using an app that works better with touch input) and there are no windows on the external display, that space is just…there, serving no purpose other than waiting for app windows to be dropped in. In future updates to iPadOS, I hope Apple will unlock the ability to place widgets and icons permanently on external displays even when they don’t have any active windows.

The worst offender when it comes to wasting space on external displays, however, is the recent apps strip. That UI element, as we know, is affected by dozens of design and technical issues that make it a subpar app launcher. In iPadOS 16.2, none of the complaints I had about the strip have been addressed by Apple (you still can’t right-click window thumbnails to see a menu with multitasking options and multi-window management is too confusing, for instance). Even worse, on an external display you’ll be limited to five thumbnails for app sets despite the additional space. In the screenshot below, you can see how, in spite of the empty space around it, the strip doesn’t show me more than five thumbnails for my workspaces.

On a Studio Display, this as far as the strip goes. It can’t show more than five app sets at a time.

The fact that Apple hasn’t addressed any of the core complaints¹ I had regarding Stage Manager goes beyond the strip and is true for the entire feature. This suggests the company finds Stage Manager good enough as it is. There are still no Shortcuts actions to move, combine, or resize windows; even on a large external display, Stage Manager still stubbornly insists on repositioning windows on your behalf; you’ll still come across weird keyboard bugs that are related to how app developers can’t know whether their windows are running in Stage Manager or not. And while, over the past two months, I noticed that Stage Manager stopped crashing on my iPad Pro while in “single-screen” mode, I’m afraid to report that, at least once a day, Stage Manager crashes when I’m working with the Studio Display connected to my iPad.

To sum up: everything that I wrote in October about Stage Manager’s design and underlying flaws still applies today, but I have to keep using it if I want to be more productive with my iPad Pro. If I want to work with more than two windows on my iPad, I don’t have any other option.

The one specific aspect of external display integration worth calling out is how moving windows between screens and launching apps from different displays works in iPadOS 16.2.

To move a window from the iPad to an external display, you can either use the multitasking menu and the ‘Move to Display’ button, use drag and drop to grab it by its “title bar” (which is still too difficult to grab) and move it there, or hit the new keyboard shortcut for ‘Move to Other Display’. Of all these methods, I prefer the dedicated keyboard shortcut, but any of them works well and will put the selected app in a standalone, single-app workspace on the other display.

The new addition to the multitasking menu in iPadOS 16.2 is ‘Move to Display’.

And here’s the equivalent for a window on an external display.

It’s a slightly more complicated story when it comes to launching apps and workspaces. For starters – and I’m happy this has been fixed in time for the release of 16.2 – if you hit ⌘Space, Spotlight will appear on the display where the pointer is placed. If you trigger Spotlight on the external display and launch an app, the window will open directly on the external display; if the window is part of an existing workspace from another display, the entire workspace with all its windows will be transferred over. So, if you have Safari and Notes in a workspace on the iPad, open Spotlight on the external display, and search for “Notes”, the whole workspace will reopen on the external display.

The same is true for clicking icons in the dock: based on the example above, if you click the Notes icon in the dock shown on the external display, the entire workspace comprised of Safari and Notes will be moved from the iPad to the external display.

It takes a while to get used to this mechanism – which is, unsurprisingly, not explained in the iPadOS UI at all – but I think it’s the right call. In designing Stage Manager’s multi-screen experience, Apple has prioritized keeping workspace integrity over opening individual apps. In practice, when I’m working on my iPad and dealing with windows across displays, I find this behavior useful since it lets me maintain the state of my workspaces and quickly swap them between screens. I still would have preferred a ‘Move Workspace to Other Display’ context menu² in the strip to this mystery UI, but once you know how it works, it makes sense.

That is, effectively, all that needs to be said about the unique aspects of external display integration with Stage Manager in iPadOS 16.2. What we have today is still the Stage Manager from two months ago, with a couple of refinements, and much better performance for external displays compared to betas from earlier this year. Although I still experience occasional crashes with my Studio Display, the feature is, in my opinion, stable enough for everyday usage now. If you tried Stage Manager on an external display in the summer, found it too unreliable, and made up your mind to never use it, I urge you to try it again with iPadOS 16.2.

I have been working with Stage Manager and its external display integration full-time for the past month; even though I could choose to run my iPad in classic Split View-Slide Over mode and only use Stage Manager on the external display³, I chose not to. I’ve embraced Stage Manager, and as I noted two months ago, I can’t deny it feels great when everything works as it’s supposed to. Being able to have, say, Spring, Messages, and Ivory open on my iPad’s display while I’m working with Obsidian, Notes, Safari, and Reminders on the Studio Display for a total of eight concurrent windows is terrific. The same goes for keeping a music workspace on the iPad while browsing my RSS feeds in ReadKit on the Studio Display, or watching a YouTube video on the external display while browsing my Mastodon timeline on the iPad.

My music workspace on the Studio Display. The apps are Music, Marvis, and MusicBox.

This is an iPad.

The larger surface area of the Studio Display has enabled me to use app windows in their full-size layouts more often, which in turn has resulted in faster interactions with apps and less time spent clicking around toolbars or menus.

I don’t love the implementation of Stage Manager, but as far as the raw potential it unlocks is concerned, the benefits are palpable in iPadOS 16.2. The ability to dock an iPad at a desk and watch it spawn a windowed environment on an external display further blurs the line between the concepts of “portable” and “desktop” in iPadOS – an operating system that is now capable of supporting two deeply different interaction paradigms that, however, end up being complementary to each other. That’s something only the iPad can do in Apple’s ecosystem today, and likely for the foreseeable future too.

Ultimately, at the end of 2022, this is where I stand with my iPad Pro and Stage Manager: this feature needs a lot of work and refinements still, but as I’m typing this story in Obsidian, I realize I’ve finally achieved the setup of my dreams, which seemed impossible just a few years ago. My iPad can now be a tablet, a laptop-like device with a Magic Keyboard, or turn an external display into a desktop environment. The same piece of glass can yield three distinct computing experiences, all powered by the same OS.

Yes, Apple still has a lot of work to do: I should be able to use Stage Manager on an external display in clamshell mode instead of having to see my iPad’s display at all times; I shouldn’t be forced into preset sizes for my app windows; I should have the same flexibility I have on macOS when it comes to running shortcuts system-wide with a keyboard shortcut. And that’s not to mention the plethora of visual oddities, technical quirks, and developer concerns I covered two months ago. The path ahead for Stage Manager is still long and filled with many design- and performance-related questions.

And yet, flaws notwithstanding, I look at my desk now and I’m happy: the dream of a modular computer I had years ago is now a reality. It’s been a bumpy road to get to this point, and Apple’s work has merely just begun, but I know this:

It feels great to call iPadOS my home again.

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Around this time every year, I tend to start fiddling with my RSS setup. Last year, I drastically simplified my setup, and it worked well. Still, with Twitter’s fate uncertain, I thought it would be an excellent time to reexamine what various sync services and apps have to offer to refine my RSS reading experience.

One of my goals with this year’s experiments is to find better ways to filter and sort the articles in my feeds. Folders are a useful top layer of organization, but I’ve wanted more control over my feeds for a while now, especially when I’m busiest. One way to accomplish advanced filtering is server-side with an RSS sync service, but support for them by third-party RSS apps is limited. That’s why I was excited to see that ReadKit 3.1 has added a new smart folders feature.

The app, which I covered in MacStories Weekly in 2021, has everything you’d expect from a modern RSS client, including support for a long list of RSS services, a built-in RSS engine that doesn’t require a separate service, read-later functionality, and more. However, what sets ReadKit apart is its thoughtful gesture and keyboard-driven interface that makes scanning through lots of feeds easy. Now, with smart folders, anyone following a long list of feeds can also create complex filters to pull a subset of the most relevant stories from their feeds.

Setting up a smart folder.

Smart folders can match any, all, or none of the filters you apply. Those filters include text matching in article titles, content, and URLs, folder titles, feed titles, author names, and precise or relative publication dates. Within each text-based filter, you’ve got several matching options too:

• Contains
• Not contains
• Begins with
• Ends with
• Is
• Is not

Date filters are flexible, too, allowing you to specify articles from before or after a precise date or within or outside a certain number of days, weeks, months, or years.

My dedicated Pokémon smart folder.

Moreover, filters can be nested, allowing for even more complex rules. For example, I created a smart folder dedicated to Apple’s current betas by nesting filters that search for any of several keywords related to them while also requiring that every article mention ‘Apple.’ Another nice touch is that you can receive notifications based on your smart folders, which I expect will be handy for time-sensitive topics.

The biggest downside of smart folders is that they currently don’t sync between devices. iCloud sync for ReadKit’s built-in RSS service, as well as its smart folders, is planned for a future release, but currently, you’ll need to set them up on each device where you use the app.

ReadKit’s design is optimized for fast browsing and an superb reading experience.

Version 3.1 offers other new customization features too. The size of the text in your articles list and the article itself can be adjusted independently. Plus, thumbnails can be switched between small, medium, and large versions.

Also worth noting is that ReadKit now does automatic database management that its developer, Balazs Varkonyi, says will keep extensive collections of feeds running smoothly. There are now separate options to purchase lifetime licenses of the iOS and iPadOS versions of ReadKit and the macOS version too.

I’m impressed with the depth of customization options that smart folders open up in ReadKit. Smart folders, along with the existing keyboard and gesture-driven navigation, have catapulted ReadKit into power-user territory. I’m glad iCloud sync is planned because anyone who reads their feeds across multiple devices will appreciate the convenience of only setting up smart folders once. However, I’d also like to see Shortcuts support added to the app in the future too.

ReadKit 3.1 is available on the App Store as a free update for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad..

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Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

Stage Manager in iPadOS 16.1.

This article wasn’t supposed to go like this.

iPadOS 16 is launching to the public today, and it carries a lot of expectations on its shoulders: for the first time since the introduction of the original iPad in 2010, Apple is embracing a Mac-like windowing system that lets you use up to four windows at the same time on the iPad’s screen. You can even resize them and make them overlap. If you’ve been following the evolution of the iPad for a while, you know that’s very unusual.

But the reason this story was meant to be different isn’t to be found in Apple’s design philosophy for iPadOS 16. Typically, MacStories readers would expect a full-blown ‘The MacStories Review’ to go alongside a new version of iPadOS. That’s what I’ve been doing for over seven years at this point, and I don’t like breaking my writing patterns. When something works, I want to keep writing. That’s precisely why I had to stop writing about iPadOS earlier in the summer and until last week.

Stage Manager, the marquee addition to iPadOS that lets you multitask with floating windows, started crashing on my M1 iPad Pro in mid-July and it was only fixed in early October. When I say “crashing”, I mean I couldn’t go for longer than 10 minutes without iPadOS kicking me back to my Lock Screen and resetting my workspaces. And that was only the tip of the iceberg. For nearly two months, I couldn’t type with Apple’s Magic Keyboard or use keyboard shortcuts when Stage Manager was active. Before it was pulled by Apple and delayed to a future release, external display support in Stage Manager was impossible to rely on for production work. The list goes on and on and on.

Normally, I would use the introduction of my iOS and iPadOS reviews to tell you how I’ve been living and working with the new operating system every day for the past three months. I’ve always tried to publish annual OS reviews that are informed by practical, consistent usage of a new operating system which, I hope, has led to highly opinionated, well-researched stories that can stand the test of time. That kind of story hasn’t been possible for me to produce with iPadOS 16 yet.

Effectively, I’ve only been able to sort-of use iPadOS 16 with Stage Manager on my M1 iPad Pro again for the past two weeks. Before that, it’s not that I didn’t want to use iPadOS 16 and Stage Manager because I hate progress; I literally couldn’t unless I was okay with my iPad crashing every 10 minutes. So, at some point over the summer, I made the call to revert to Split View and Slide Over – which are still the iPad’s default multitasking mode in iPadOS 16 – and I’d check back in on Stage Manager on each beta of iPadOS 16. It was only around two weeks ago that, despite some lingering bugs I’ll cover later, I was able to finally leave Stage Manager enabled and go back to where I was when I published my iPadOS 16 first impressions article in July.

Think about my position this way: there’s a hole from early August to early October in my typical “reviewer summer” during which I couldn’t use the biggest addition to iPadOS 16 at all. The fact that Apple delayed, slimmed down, and kept iterating on Stage Manager until the very last minute seems to suggest I wasn’t the only one desperately trying to make it work.

I started using iPadOS 16 and Stage Manager again two weeks ago; what kind of “review” should this be?

It’s important for me to offer this context upfront for two reasons: this is not the complete MacStories review of iPadOS 16 I wanted to publish today; and, equally important, I also know that the majority of people haven’t been testing Stage Manager for nearly five months like I did.

See, this is the tricky part for me here: despite the many design flaws of Stage Manager, its plethora of technical issues, and in spite of the features that were cut from it, when I had to get work done over the past two weeks on my iPad Pro and Stage Manager performed as intended, windowing on iPadOS felt nice. I felt like I was back in July, just before the public beta of iPadOS 16 came out, and I – ever the optimist – looked at Stage Manager as the beginning of something new that Apple would surely refine and polish over the coming months.

All this to say: I’m fully aware that many of you are going to upgrade to iPadOS 16 today, use it for 10 minutes, think it’s mostly okay, and wonder “why was Viticci so upset about this”?

That leaves me with two options. I could tell you how bad Stage Manager was this summer, how testing it and repeatedly running into bugs and roadblocks nearly drained my enthusiasm for the iPadOS platform, and how much feedback I reported to Apple about it. But that wouldn’t be an interesting or useful story. Or I could just accept the hand I was dealt and write about the experience I’ve had with Stage Manager (again) for the past two weeks – bugs, missing features, flawed foundation, and all.

I chose the latter: it’s in my nature to optimistically look forward at what’s coming next without dwelling on the past; I also think it’s the more nuanced and useful approach that, hopefully, MacStories readers will appreciate.

For better or worse, Stage Manager is showing us the trajectory Apple has chosen for the future of the iPadOS platform, and it’s one designed for modularity, power users, and multiple input methods. Plus a whole lot of weirdness. And bugs.

Let’s dive in.

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What Is Stage Manager?

Stage Manager is an optional new multitasking mode for iPadOS 16 that is disabled by default and not as extensive as Apple originally demoed it at WWDC earlier this year.

Also available on macOS Ventura, Stage Manager is a windowing environment that lets you use up to four app windows on your iPad’s screen at once, with the ability to organize those windows into workspaces. Windows can overlap, and you can even resize them. Stage Manager looks similar to traditional macOS windowing and multitasking, but there are several limitations in place to – according to Apple – “get things done with ease”. For instance, you’re limited to four windows in the same workspace, and there’s no real free-form resizing. Stage Manager does not replace Split View and Slide Over. Instead, it’s a specific mode you need to enable yourself, and when it’s active, classic Split View and Slide Over are not available.

Stage Manager in action.

That’s Stage Manager in a nutshell: it’s an optional mode of iPadOS designed to let you work with more apps at the same time with a windowing system that resembles macOS, but that’s also fundamentally different from it. As I’ll explain later, depending on what you want from a laptop that supports windowing, this approach has its long list of pros and cons.

You can activate Stage Manager in two ways. The first is to head over to Settings ⇾ Home Screen & Multitasking and flip the Stage Manager switch under the Multitasking section. Opening this section immediately reveals the structure of Stage Manager with a preview of a sample workspace that shows you two elements you can customize.

Customizing Stage Manager settings.

By default, a Stage Manager workspace is comprised of three distinct parts: the actual workspace with your app window(s) in it; the classic iPadOS dock at the bottom; and a vertical strip of recently used apps and workspaces displayed as live thumbnails on the left edge of the screen. The strip is, along with overlapping windows, one of the defining visual characteristics of Stage Manager, acting as an extension of the regular app switcher (which is still around in iPadOS 16) to give you fast access to up to four recently used apps/workspaces.

The strip is the column of recently used workspaces on the left.

Both the dock and strip can be individually disabled in iPadOS 16 when Stage Manager is active. When you do that, you gain more screen real estate for your windows, and you can invoke both elements by “bumping” the pointer into their respective edges of the screen, but you lose the ability to have persistent “quick launchers” for apps. Keep in mind that if the strip and dock are shown and you resize one of your windows to cover them, they’ll be hidden from view in that case as well.

If you want, you can use Stage Manager with the strip or dock individually disabled.

The second way to enable Stage Manager is from a new toggle in Control Center – the one that looks like a rectangle with three dots next to it.

Use this button to toggle Stage Manager on and off.

You can use this button to switch back and forth between “classic iPadOS” and Stage Manager, which can be helpful for those times when you’re grabbing the iPad from the Magic Keyboard to use it as a tablet and may want to simplify interactions with iPadOS. When doing that, iPadOS will try its best to rearrange overlapping windows as Split View instances; it should also maintain a record of your previous Slide Over configuration when alternating modes.

A workspace with two apps in Stage Manager…

…and the same workspace after returning to classic iPadOS.

The button also supports a hidden gesture: long-press it, and it’ll expand into a configuration tile that lets you toggle the dock and strip without having to open the Settings app.

You can reveal more options in Control Center by long-pressing the Stage Manager button.

The other key elements of Stage Manager are, of course, the app windows themselves. This is where Apple’s approach differs most from macOS’ existing windowing environment and where, ultimately, you’ll have to draw the line as to whether you like working with Stage Manager or not.

When Stage Manager is active, iPad apps do not gain any new UI chrome around them to, say, display a fixed title bar or ‘traffic light’ buttons like on the Mac. Instead, they get rounded corners, keep the multitasking menu (the three dots) at the top of the window, and start floating above a blurred version of your Home Screen wallpaper. Unlike macOS, you do not see your ‘desktop’ underneath nor are the windows floating atop the Home Screen because you can grab a file from it and drop it into a window, or vice versa. Windows simply float and overlap because they’re resizable, and because Apple decided this was the way to accommodate more than two active windows onscreen at the same time. If you’re using one window in a workspace and make it extra small, you’ll get a fog of blurred emptiness behind it.

Your beautiful Home Screen wallpaper…

…will turn into this with Stage Manager.

The floating and overlapping nature of windows in Stage Manager is entirely disjointed from the layer underneath them, which is one of the key differences to understand when comparing Stage Manager itself between macOS Ventura and iPadOS. But there’s more.

In recent years, Apple has historically shown a penchant for bringing existing macOS features to iPadOS and adapt them to the platform with a unique twist. Think of this as the “gimmick” that defines each generation of iPadOS – a unique adaptation that, when Apple does the job well, blends the tradition of macOS and the novelty of iPadOS into something new that is greater than the sum of its parts. If you’re a Pokémon fan, it’s useful to think of these adaptations (the Files app; Slide Over before real floating windows; the pointer; the keyboard cheat sheet, etc.) as the generational battle gimmicks Game Freak is well known for adding to each of their games.

This time around, the unique twist of Stage Manager is twofold. The first part is about how you bring in new app windows onto a workspace. Unlike classic macOS, where clicking an app (or launching it from Spotlight) to open it usually spawns a new window somewhere onscreen, in Stage Manager you have to intentionally create workspaces of multiple windows. Stage Manager doesn’t want you to manage windows too much by constantly piling new ones onto the same workspace as soon as you click an app icon; instead, you have to manually add each window to a workspace, signaling your intention to work with specific app windows one at a time.

This is what I meant by “drawing a line” in terms of whether you like Stage Manager’s design ethos or not. Stage Manager is all about creating discrete workspaces across the system. By default, when you click an icon in the dock or launch an app from Spotlight, it doesn’t get added to your existing workspace in iPadOS 16. Instead, Stage Manager creates a standalone, single-window workspace for it; if you want, you’ll have to add that window to another workspace later.

Every time you click on an app, Stage Manager creates a separate workspace for it instead of opening it alongside your other apps.

At first, this seems like a clever way to create a self-organizing system that doesn’t stack windows upon windows for you to manage constantly; on the other, it adds friction for users who do want to create a mess of windows that they understand. Stage Manager’s workspace-oriented design doesn’t fix the underlying problem of managing windows: it merely swaps it. Now instead of managing windows, you’ll be managing a long list of separate workspaces.

There are ways to circumvent this limitation, which I’ll explain in a bit, but they’re not enough; Stage Manager’s fixation on creating standalone workspaces is one of my biggest frustrations with it. For now, you should keep in mind that Stage Manager supports up to four windows at the same time; as soon as you bring in a fifth one, the “oldest” one in the workspace gets removed and thrown back into the strip/app switcher as a standalone workspace.

In this case, I have four windows open. As soon as I drag in something new, the oldest of the four will be replaced.

When I dragged in Apollo from the dock, Shortcuts was removed from the workspace and put back into the strip (which is hidden).

Stage Manager’s limitation is four windows in a workspace, not four different apps. In this screenshot, you can see I have four Safari windows open. Dragging in a fifth one would replace the oldest Safari window.

The second part of Stage Manager’s twist on multiwindowing is about resizing and placing windows. For multiple decades now, any desktop OS that offers a windowing environment has offered free-form placement and resizing of your app windows. You usually grab a window, place it wherever you want, and make it as big or small as you want within a threshold of minimum and maximum sizes. As I wrote in the past, I’ve never been a fan of manually resizing overlapping windows myself: after a while, I always find that grabbing and resizing windows becomes a chore – yet another thing I need to manage on my computer. That’s why I’ve long preferred tiling systems for multitasking or, alternatively, using launchers and automations that let me resize windows to preset sizes with one keystroke.

Apple seems to agree that managing overlapping windows is a layer of complexity most people shouldn’t need to fret over, but their proposed solution with Stage Manager is an odd hybrid of free-form resizing and presets that, in my opinion, will require months of refinements in the future.

Stage Manager is windowing on rails. First, there’s no pixel-based resizing of windows: when you grab a window from any of its edges or the pull indicator displayed at the bottom of a window, you can only resize it based on a predetermined set of dimensions based on size classes. You cannot precisely control the exact size of a window; you can only move it along a scale of fixed smaller or bigger sizes. A video explains this well:

As someone who’s gotten used to working with two sizes of Split View for several years, even though I’m surprised by Apple’s decision, I can live with it. The visual effect you get when resizing iPad windows isn’t as jarring as it used to be in earlier betas of Stage Manager; it’s just a bit odd to realize you’re forced to choose between preset sizes that are a byproduct of how iPad apps are written. On a 12.9” iPad Pro, windows tend to support up to 7 sizes on the horizontal axis and 5 vertically, but the numbers may change depending on the combination of the two and type of app you’re using.

Where Stage Manager’s…opinionated design comes up as a sticking point is in how you make multiple windows overlap in the same workspace. You see, the reason it’s called¹ Stage Manager is that in addition to managing how many windows go into a workspace, it also wants to manage the placement of windows on the, well, stage. In practice, this means that Stage Manager does not offer you real, entirely user-controlled free-form window placement: rather, you can signal your intention as to where, more or less, you’d like a window to go, but Stage Manager will always intervene and adjust the position of overlapping windows based on its own criteria.

Basically: the thing moves windows around on your behalf.

According to Apple, Stage Manager was designed like this to remove friction from users so they don’t have to think about carefully placing windows onscreen. The problem is that I believe there’s a fundamental misalignment between Stage Manager’s design and the users it’s been designed for. The people who are going to enable Stage Manager to use overlapping windows are, by and large, the kind of folks who want to carefully place windows onscreen. My concern is that Stage Manager dangles the allure of free-form window placement in front of you, only to take control away from you as soon as you try to arrange a workspace in a particular way you like that may not match Apple’s “guidelines”.

There are instances in which Stage Manager’s “automatic” window placement feels nice because it tries to keep as many windows visible as possible. However, after five months spent testing it in some form or another, I feel like Stage Manager gets in the way of getting work done more than it actually helps. In many ways, Stage Manager’s windowing behavior feels like the multitasking equivalent of the iPod shuffle without buttons: a sleek idea in theory, but a poor experience in everyday life.

As I’ll explore in the next sections, this is the most controversial aspect of this first version of Stage Manager: it seems to be designed for a middle segment of the professional iPad user base – people who want overlapping windows, but only just a smidge of them – that I’m not sure exists. But at the same time, if you learn how to cope with Stage Manager and take advantage of its core idea alone (four apps at once!) it can be useful and save you a time when jumping around between apps.

So, now that we’ve established what Stage Manager is, what does working with it actually feel like, and where does its implementation fall short?

Working with Stage Manager

When it comes to discussing Stage Manager’s potential for iPad productivity, it’s important to note how much this feature was designed to take advantage of iPadOS 16’s new display scaling tech.

On supported models, display scaling lets you increase your iPad’s virtual pixel density so you end up with smaller text and UI elements, but also more space onscreen for apps and content. Available in Settings ⇾ Display & Brightness ⇾ View, the option is indeed labeled ‘More Space’ and is reminiscent of the functionality Macs have offered for decades.

Stage Manager at the iPad Pro’s default resolution.

The same workspace with display scaling enabled.

Display scaling can be used with regular Split View as well², but I think it shines with Stage Manager given that you’re going to be placing multiple windows onscreen and thus will benefit from a larger content area. Let me break down some interesting numbers and details of Apple’s implementation.

When display scaling is enabled on a 12.9” iPad Pro, its resolution increases from 2732x2048 pixels in landscape mode to 3180x2384.³ That’s 16% more space on either side of the device, allowing you to fit more and denser elements along the horizontal and vertical edges of the screen. Here’s where it gets fun. Consider a workspace in Stage Manager with a single app window that’s resized to be as big as it can without covering the strip and dock, like this:

This is the default size that new windows will use when they’re opened in a new workspace. When display scaling is set to ‘More Space’, the default size of an app window is 2732x2064 – almost exactly the native resolution of the iPad’s entire display. This means that in Stage Manager with display scaling enabled, it’s almost as if a stage contains the iPad’s entire display, with additional content surrounding it on four sides. This is some nice math on Apple’s part and I find how these numbers work together quite pleasing.

I enabled display scaling on my iPad Pro months ago and I haven’t looked back. Regardless of Stage Manager, if your eyesight allows you to use smaller and denser interface elements, my recommendation is to try the ‘More Space’ setting and see how you like it. I recently disabled display scaling to take screenshots for this story, and I was shocked by how large and wasteful apps looked when set at the iPad’s native resolution.

When working with Stage Manager on my iPad Pro, the action I find myself repeating most often on a daily basis is adding windows to an existing workspace. There are multiple ways to do this but, unfortunately, the one method I would have liked to use isn’t supported. There are also some odd inconsistencies that I’ll try my best to cover here.

First, there’s the regular app switcher, which you can still access with a three-finger swipe up or Globe+Up on a Magic Keyboard. The app switcher in iPadOS 16 shows you a live preview of your workspaces (good) but doesn’t let you drag and drop windows between workspaces (bad). This is one of the many missing features from Stage Manager at the moment, and it’s especially odd given that you can combine windows in the app switcher when using classic Split View.

Then you have the strip. Tap and hold a window thumbnail in the strip, drag it away, and it’ll morph with a cute 3D animation into a live preview of the window that you can drop into your workspace. As you’re dragging a window around, you’ll have live previews for all the other windows in the workspace too, which will bounce around as per Stage Manager’s way of placing things onscreen for you.

What if you don’t want to use drag and drop? The strip has you covered there too: hold Shift, then click a window thumbnail, and instead of taking you to that window’s separate workspace, the selected window will be immediately added to your existing workspace. Using the Shift key as a modifier for Stage Manager’s behavior when clicking windows is a good idea that, unfortunately, has only been implemented in the strip.

As I’ve mentioned above, you may be in the situation where the strip is hidden (whether because you hid it or a window is covering it) and want a faster way to bring an app into the workspace you’re in. This is where good old drag and drop comes in.

In a somewhat ironic turn of events, the fastest way to add any app you want to a workspace in Stage Manager is the same method we’ve been using since iOS 11 in 2017: pick up an icon from the dock or Spotlight and use drag and drop to add it to your workspace. When you do, the most recently used window from that app will be added to the stage.

This method works, and I’ve been using it a lot, but I feel like I shouldn’t be doing this: there should be new and better ways to search for an app and immediately add it to a workspace. For instance, I don’t understand why Shift-clicking is not supported when clicking an app icon in the dock or Spotlight. Just like Shift-clicking a window in the strip adds it to a workspace right away, so too should be the case when Shift-clicking apps elsewhere.

I also don’t understand the visual differences between dragging a window from the strip VS dragging an icon from Spotlight or the dock. When I drag a window from the strip, Stage Manager shows me a live preview of the window itself and other windows in the workspace remain visible:

This is a window I’m adding from the strip. Everything has a live preview.

Conversely, when dragging from the dock or Spotlight, you get the old-school behavior: all windows get blurred, including the ones already sitting in the workspace – almost as if live previews aren’t supported anymore when you’re using drag and drop to add windows.

Adding the same window via drag and drop.

Because of this perplexing design choice, the functionally-superior solution (Spotlight lets you search for any app you want) is technically-inferior to the strip because it’s not the latest fancy tech Apple created, which is a shame. Dragging windows from dock or Spotlight should maintain live previews in Stage Manager, just like the strip does.

You thought we were done talking about all the different ways to add windows to workspaces in Stage Manager? Wrong assumption. If there’s one thing Apple loves, it’s adding layers upon layers of interaction to existing iPadOS UI conventions; Stage Manager follows this unfortunate tradition.

But first, another brief aside on the improved and redesigned multitasking menu in iPadOS 16.

Still with me? Alright. As I was saying, there is a new ‘Add Another Window’ button in the redesigned multitasking menu, which activates the…

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…fifth way to add a window to a workspace in Stage Manager. Click the button, and your workspace will open with a curtain-like animation that reveals the system app switcher in between your windows.⁴

This transition is pretty slick, and I like that I can also invoke it from the keyboard using a hotkey. There is, however, another complication worth observing here. Let’s say you’re hovering with the pointer over a group of windows rather than an individual one; despite the fact that you can seemingly choose which one you want to add to your workspace by selecting it with the pointer, the whole stack of windows will be added to your current stage instead. Meaning: if you select a workspace with two windows in it, two windows will be added to your current workspace – not one.

Speaking of the keyboard: it may not seem like it, but the windows in between the “curtains” support keyboard selection too. Use the arrow keys to navigate them and click Return to choose a window you want to add. It’s easy to miss, but you’ll notice that windows get a gray highlight around them when they’re selected from the keyboard:

Do you see it?

We’re about halfway through this story and, as you can see, I’ve already brought my fair share of practical examples of aspects of Stage Manager that aren’t working right, are inconsistent, or are just oddly implemented.

I’ll tell you: there’s more of that coming in the next two sections.

But at the same time, I have to be honest: over the past two weeks, once I was able to get Stage Manager to work on my M1 iPad Pro, there have been times when working with up to four apps at the same time has been useful and, ultimately, nice.

Working with Stage Manager is unmistakably different from the primitive windowing experiences we had in iPadOS 15 in the form of center windows (which now spawn as regular windows in Stage Manager) and Quick Note (which is unchanged). Stage Manager tries to position windows onscreen for you (and very rarely succeeds at that) and gives you minimal controls to adjust your workspace the way you want it. When the combination of these two aspects worked as intended, I had an okay time with Stage Manager.

Last week, I was keeping an eye on Apple’s announcements for the new iPads and I had Obsidian, Messages, Spring, and Safari in the same workspace. That’s something I could never achieve with Split View and Slide Over before. Stage Manager arranged the Messages window so a part of it would peek through from behind Obsidian, and thanks to the floating nature of windows, I could see that new texts from my friends were coming in while I was doing something else because the window was active in the background and chat bubbles were moving in the transcript. I could see that happening in real-time on the side of my workspace, and that was great because I didn’t have to constantly switch between different instances of Split View.

A busy Stage Manager workspace with four different apps at once.

The same applies for when I’m researching an article for MacStories or building a shortcut: I can leave Safari, Obsidian, Files, and Shortcuts in the same workspace, drag and drop content between those windows with touch or the pointer, and take advantage of some of the new keyboard integrations in iPadOS 16. For example, if a window is in the background but a part of it is visible, I can hold ⌘ and click UI elements in it (like, say, liking a tweet in Spring) without bringing it in the foreground – just like on macOS.

Or take context menus: in iPadOS, you can Control-click any item to instantly bring up its associated menu without having to long-press it or right-click it from the trackpad. iPadOS 16 is full of small, yet convenient desktop-class enhancements (which I’ll cover in a future story) that, when paired with Stage Manager in the right conditions, truly yield a hybrid tablet-laptop experience that I’ve always wanted from my iPad Pro. The list of examples goes on and on, but I don’t need to describe the benefits of multiple windows in fine detail to the MacStories audience.

All this to say: desktop-style windowing undeniably has its advantages on iPadOS too, which I’ve been able to experience myself in my regular usage of the iPad Pro. The core idea behind Stage Manager is useful to me; the problem is the actual implementation of it.

This first version of Stage Manager is plagued by several misguided design choices, a confused direction, and the general sense that this entire functionality has been rushed and slimmed down to meet a marketing deadline.

The Strip’s Failures

Speaking of misguided design in Stage Manager, allow me to go through the flaws of one of its key visual elements: the recent apps strip.

App pickers on iPadOS are the equivalent of Google’s messaging apps: a new one comes out every couple of years, lasts a couple of years without changes, then either gets replaced or abandoned and the cycle starts again. With the Stage Manager strip, Apple wasted an opportunity to create a simplified app picker that could scale well for intermediate and advanced users alike; instead, they launched a feature that is both too confusing for non-expert users and too limited for pros. There are multiple layers to this, so let me get through each one.

For starters, the implementation of Stage Manager itself works against the very premise of the strip. The strip was seemingly designed to act as a handy, always-visible preview tool and launcher for your workspaces. But on iPadOS 16, Stage Manager has an inexplicable tendency to hide the strip by either resizing windows or moving them around because it thinks that’s what you want. So on the one hand, you may find yourself wanting to keep the strip visible at all times, but on the other Stage Manager will make it downright impossible to keep it pinned there.

Don’t take my word for it: go ahead and try using Stage Manager with the strip always enabled. Even when you have two windows open – and, therefore, technically enough space to make them overlap and see the strip – Stage Manager will cover it. This goes back to Stage Manager’s insistence on “taking care” of windows for you – except here it goes against one of its own features, sort of like an immune system rejecting something it doesn’t know.

In this configuration, the strip gets hidden, and there is no way for me to make these two windows overlap to regain more space onscreen. Stage Manager will not allow them to overlap.

The fundamental misdirection of the strip sits deeper at a design level: it is both overstuffed with hidden options based on invisible gestures, and it doesn’t cover the obvious basics at all.

For example: the strip doesn’t show you the names of apps and windows; it doesn’t support closing windows or quitting apps contained in it; despite being a new feature of iPadOS, it doesn’t support modern interactions like, say, displaying a context menu when right-clicking a window. Apple could have used an easy-to-discover context menu in the strip to close the selected app, or add it to the stage, or find all windows belonging to it, and they decided against it.

But the worst aspect of the strip, in my opinion, is that despite its tactile nature, it only supports one-way dragging of windows. In iPadOS 16.1, you can only drag a window from the strip into a workspace and from a workspace back into the strip as a standalone window. You cannot drag a window from a workspace on top of another window in the strip, forming a new workspace on the fly; similarly, you cannot combine windows from the strip itself by dragging window thumbnails on top of each other. As a result, creating workspaces in iPadOS 16 feels clunky and laborious: you always need to remove a window, switch to another workspace, then drag the previous window in from the strip.

Instead of refining the strip’s direct manipulation, Apple crammed all sorts of window management functionalities into it – some of which are inconsistent with each other. Strap in: we’re going deep into the rabbit hole of window management in iPadOS 16 here.

When Stage Manager is active, you lose access to the Shelf – the interface element Apple debuted in iPadOS 15 to view all open windows for the same app. The strip doubles as an Exposé-like window picker, with a collection of semi-related implementations. If you want to see all the windows a particular app has open across the system, you have to press Globe-Down (the same hotkey that activates the Shelf) or click on the icon of an app in the strip. Doing this will “filter” the strip to show you all the workspaces where an app has windows open. From here, you can grab a window and drag it into your workspace or click it to open it.

Click on an app icon in the strip…

…and the strip becomes a window picker.

You can also get to this screen by right-clicking an icon in the dock and selecting ‘Show All Windows’ but, as I mentioned above, you can’t right-click a window thumbnail in the strip itself. You can also view open windows for an app by clicking it once in the dock but only if that app is the one in the foreground.

Still with me? I hope so because more exceptions are coming.

Occasionally, you may notice that the strip will display multiple windows for the same app as a 3D stack rather than standalone items. Like this:

Apparently, this is called a “pile”. Stage Manager does this when the same app has multiple windows open across the system but only if they’re single-window workspaces. I’m guessing this was designed so that you can quickly cycle through windows in the stack, but this is my personal speculation. I don’t understand the motivation behind this design; the “pile” terminology is also not explained at all in iPadOS 16.

Parts of the strip also bleed into the classic app switcher (i.e. the grid of open apps). In iPadOS 16, if you click on the tiny app icons underneath window thumbnails in the app switcher, you’ll get a filtered view similar to the strip that shows you all the windows currently open for the selected app. The only problem: in the public version of iPadOS 16.1, sometimes you may click one of those small icons and find yourself staring at an empty screen:

Dude, where are my windows?

As it turns out, a bug causes this view to be scrolled, hiding your windows. Swipe right on the trackpad, and your windows will appear:

Oh right, they’re just hiding.

Lastly, the strip also serves as the area where the only iPadOS UI element to create new windows for an app exists. The only problem: this is another half-baked feature that has been implemented exactly backwards from the way I would expect it.

In iPadOS 16.1, there is no system-wide keyboard shortcut accepted by all apps to ‘Create New Window’. Instead, the only way to reliably create a new window is to ‘Show All Windows’ first, then click a ‘+’ button displayed at the top of the strip:

The only button to create new windows for a feature based on windowing is hidden in a sub-menu nobody is going to discover.

That’s right: to create a new window for an app, you have to find its other windows first and – of course – the window gets created in a separate workspace, losing your current context. Given the fresh start that Stage Manager presented, Apple could have gone for a new system-wide keyboard shortcut, or a more discoverable ‘Create New Window’ button in an app’s context menu, or, heck, even a Shortcuts action; instead, they hid the button to create a new window behind a filtered view of the strip. Who’s going to find it?

This is how I feel about the Stage Manager strip: it doesn’t do what I’d expect it to do as a pro user, and the things it does are either inconsistent, in the wrong place, or too difficult to discover. From a design and functional standpoint, it feels like it gets pulled in too many directions with no clear vision behind it. Credit where credit’s due, I suppose: at the very least, that perfectly encapsulates the current state of Stage Manager in iPadOS 16.1.

Stage Manager’s Flawed Design, Bugs, and Litany of Missing Features

I don’t think I’ve made it obvious enough to understand the sheer amount of technical issues and challenges I’ve encountered while trying to work with Stage Manager.

For context and posterity, let me lay them all out. What follows is a list of fundamental design problems that Apple will need to rethink, features that are missing from Stage Manager right now, and bugs that made it to the shipping version of Stage Manager in iPadOS 16.1.

Grabbing windows is too difficult. Five months into Stage Manager, I still struggle to perform one of its most basic actions: grabbing windows with the pointer to move them around.

Stage Manager was added to iPadOS as a mode that was meant to “just work” with the existing design of iPad apps with no further optimizations in terms of design and developer technologies. As a friend recently put it: windows happen to iPad apps under Stage Manager. Developers have no idea that their apps are running in windowed mode, and they cannot specifically optimize their app’s experience or design for Stage Manager.

Visually speaking, this means that iPad apps in Stage Manager do not change their appearance to accommodate a title bar that serves as a clear anchor point for users to place their fingers/pointer and grab a window. Per Apple’s HIG parlance, iPad windows in Stage Manager don’t have a frame.

You see this window?

This is the part you can grab.

Instead, you have to guess that the “title bar” you can use to pick a window up and move it around is the invisible area around the multitasking menu that is not delimited by anything. There is no visual indicator that tells you “this is where you can grab a window”. You could grab the multitasking dots as a shortcut, and that sometimes work, but you also risk accidentally triggering the multitasking menu if you do that, which is not ideal.

Once again, it comes down to the fact that Stage Manager was tacked onto the existing design of iPad apps without a redesign of the UI chrome that goes around windows – because, typically, there is none on iPadOS. Apple could have created an API for developers to add a title bar with proper multitasking controls to their apps, but they didn’t. They could have supported the “sloppy” gestures of the Quick Note floating panel to move windows around with two-finger swipes, but they didn’t. With Stage Manager windows, Apple wants to have their cake and eat it too: they’re hoping that Stage Manager’s automatic window placement will eschew the need to move windows around manually, but, at the same time, they’re also hoping that users will somehow figure out where windows are supposed to be grabbed.

This approach is not good enough.

Sometimes when I grab a window to place it on the left of the screen, I activate the strip instead. Speaking of moving windows around, I’ve noticed that I frequently activate the strip by accident when trying to place a window on the left side of the screen. The best part? If you accidentally trigger the strip, the animation will reset the window size you set for the item you’re dragging, forcing you to resize the window manually again.

You can “freely” move windows around, but only horizontally, and only in the right conditions. Speaking of moving windows: Stage Manager does support pixel-based repositioning to place a window exactly where you want it, but this method only works on the x-axis and only if a window in the background is covering “enough space” to justify this necessity.

There doesn’t seem to be a a precise rule here, and it’s difficult to describe this in an article. A good way to understand what I mean, however, is the following: make a window as large as it can be, then place a floating window on top of it. In this case, because the background window is covering a lot of space, the foreground one can be moved with pixel-precision, but only horizontally.

This half-baked, obscure system is not good enough either.

Creating a new window for an app in the same workspace is impossible. Imagine that you’re on a Mac, you’re using Safari, and you want to create a new, separate Safari window next to the current one. It’s easy enough: you can either click File ⇾ New Window in the menu bar or press a keyboard shortcut to do the same. The window will open in front of you, without losing your current context.

With Stage Manager in iPadOS, it’s impossible to do this with a single action.

If you want to create a new window for an app already in your workspace, you have to click ‘Show All Windows’ and hit the ‘+’ button, but the new window gets thrown into its own, separate workspace – which also becomes the active one, so you get taken out of your existing workspace. At that point, you have to switch back to the previous workspace, grab that window from the strip, and drag it where you wanted it in the first place.

This is madness: all these operations just to create a new blank window for an app in the same workspace. To which some of you may reply with: but what about drag and drop?

Oh yes, you could use drag and drop to create a new Safari window in the same workspace: grab the Safari icon from the dock or Spotlight, drop it in the workspace, and there you go – another Safari window just spawned. Except that doesn’t work if Safari already had other windows open elsewhere in iPadOS: in that case, drag and drop will pick up the most recently used window of that group and move it to your current workspace. So, drag and drop is not a reliable, consistent way to create a new window for the same app in the same workspace either.

Even with the current design of the strip and Stage Manager, there could have been ways to avoid this scenario: a setting to always create new windows in the same workspace instead of a separate one (macOS Ventura has it); a system-wide keyboard shortcut to create new windows (macOS has it); forcing drag and drop to always create new windows instead of having a mixed behavior. None of these potential solutions were adopted by Apple in five months.

As it stands now, creating new empty windows for the same app is too convoluted. Apple should rethink this aspect of Stage Manager on iPad.

Here’s a bonus one: sometimes, when I drag an existing window from the window picker in the strip onto a workspace, my current windows shrink…

…so if I drag too much, I end up covering all of them, and I have no idea where I’m dropping the new window.

Stage Manager is obsessed with creating new workspaces. I mentioned this multiple times in the story, but it bears repeating here: Apple needs to fix this Stage Manager obsession with opening apps in new, separate workspaces rather than adding them to your existing one.

This is a problem that is shared with Stage Manager on macOS Ventura too: every time you launch an app from Spotlight, or the dock, or follow a link to an app – whatever method you use to open an app, Stage Manager defaults to opening it in a standalone workspace. As a result, you’re forced to do the dance of switching back and forth between workspaces to re-add an app from the strip, which is a slow, tedious operation that gets old after a few days of working with Stage Manager on iPadOS.

As I mentioned above, there should either be a setting to alter the ‘app open’ behavior in Stage Manager or a keyboard modifier (Shift-clicking app icons), or, ideally, both.

There’s no way to quickly preview all the windows in a workspace. One of the unsung heroes of classic macOS windowing is Mission Control: with a single gesture or keyboard shortcut, you can “explode” your windows and get a useful bird’s-eye view of all the open windows on your system. It’s a genuinely good idea that I use dozens of times every day.

There’s no equivalent for previewing all windows contained in a Stage Manager workspace. So if your windows are overlapping and some of them are hidden and you want to confirm what’s behind the foreground one, the only way is to manually cycle through them all, one by one, with a keyboard shortcut. Or, God forbid, try to resize them all so you can see a portion of each window onscreen. That is, until Stage Manager decides to shuffle your carefully-constructed window layout around for you.

You cannot combine windows from the app switcher or strip. I also mentioned this before: direct manipulation of windows is nowhere to be found in the app switcher or strip when Stage Manager is active. You cannot grab windows and drop them onto other ones to create workspaces from the strip or app switcher, which is a missed opportunity – especially considering that the app switcher supports creating regular Split Views with drag and drop.

To use Stage Manager, I have to disable Predictive Text in keyboard settings. This is perhaps the worst Stage Manager-related bug I’ve encountered to date, and it’s still here in the shipping version of iPadOS 16: if I want to use Stage Manager, I have to disable Predictive Text in Settings ⇾ General ⇾ Keyboard.

For whatever reason, if QuickType predictions are enabled, my Magic Keyboard often stops typing into text fields of third-party apps, doesn’t trigger keyboard shortcuts, or generates a random collection of layout- and keyboard-related bugs in apps. The only way I was able to write this story on my iPad with Stage Manager was by disabling this setting; I can’t even imagine what the experience will be like for iPad users who don’t know about this and decide to try Stage Manager.

A slightly different flavor of Magic Keyboard + QuickType bugs involves the Messages app. It comes in many shapes and forms. One of them is the Compose field floating in the title bar of the Messages window.

Sometimes, the Compose field just disappears and I have to force-quit Messages.

Other times, my text editor window goes completely blank when I switch to a different app.

Another keyboard-related bug in the Messages app.

Stage Manager’s automatic window placement makes it impossible to use four apps at once in a grid. The title says it all: due to how Stage Manager is built on top of an invisible grid and how it enforces specific window sizes, you can’t turn a 12.9” iPad Pro into a grid that shows four active apps at once as quadrants. Try as you might, you won’t be able to create such layout – even if you decide to hide the strip and dock.

The only way to place four windows onscreen without making them overlap is the following:

What is this, TweetDeck for apps?

Stage Manager loses your context when you close the last window in a workspace. In the current version of Stage Manager, when you close the last window in a workspace, you’ll be unceremoniously kicked back to the Home Screen with no further explanation. I find this behavior inelegant and confusing. Given Stage Manager’s love affair with workspaces, perhaps it would have been preferable to remain in an empty workspace with the strip next to it, or switch you back to the most recently used workspace, or show the app switcher. Anything, really, except bouncing you back to the Home Screen with no additional explanation.

Windows randomly cover the dock, strip, or both. I also mentioned this multiple times in the story: Stage Manager very often decides to cover the recent apps strip or dock just…randomly, forcing you to re-adjust the size of a window to bring them back. I’m not kidding when I say I probably have to do this hundreds of times each day.

In this case, I opened the new Weather app for iPad and it just…decided to cover my dock.

There are layout bugs when you switch your iPad orientation. When you rotate your iPad from landscape to portrait, windows in Stage Manager will gain a black bar along the bottom edge. The only way to make these black bars go away is to manually resize a window.

You get a black bar! And you get a black bar! And you get a black bar!

Oh, and when you switch orientations, your window layout is reset, too.

You cannot cycle through full-screen and floating layout for a window anymore. One of my favorite aspects of the Stage Manager betas this summer has been removed in the public release of iPadOS 16.1: you can no longer repeatedly press Globe-F to cycle through a window in full-screen or floating mode.

I loved that keyboard shortcut as a way to temporarily focus on a full-screen window and then return it to floating mode; for whatever reason, this is not possible anymore. It makes sense that the one thing I liked about Stage Manager was removed.

A phantom software keyboard appears when sharing items with the share sheet. When sharing photos, links, text, or documents with the share sheet in Stage Manager while using a hardware keyboard, a part of the software keyboard appears at the bottom of an app’s window:

Hi, random piece of keyboard.

Full-screen apps like Settings do not work well with Stage Manager. If you come across an app that was never optimized for Split View and Slide Over, like Apple’s own Settings app, prepare to have an…interesting time with it in Stage Manager.

The best way to describe this is that legacy full-screen apps do not support being resized to different dimensions; the only “size” you can switch Settings to while in landscape mode is, basically, the app’s portrait mode. Which of course means that you’ll be looking at some very small text and UI elements with apps that are still built this way.

Prepare to squint with Settings in Stage Manager.

The Camera app – another legacy full-screen one – has a similar issue, but with even more hilarious consequences:

Where is external display support? What was, arguably, the main reason why many of us were looking forward to Stage Manager and windowing on iPadOS – native support for external displays – is not launching today alongside iPadOS 16.1.

As I noted in July, external display integration was extremely buggy and based on another set of wrong design assumptions, so I’m glad Apple was able to see the problems with this feature and delay it until later in the year. Still, I can’t help but think that this was a missed opportunity on Apple’s part to present a coherent, unified vision for desktop-like windowing on iPad, which greatly reduces the potential applications for Stage Manager for power users who have long wanted to go beyond a single-screen experience. For now, we’re back to pillarboxing on external display mirroring.

There are no Shortcuts actions for Stage Manager. I saved the saddest missing aspect of Stage Manager for last: there is no integration whatsoever with Shortcuts to open, resize, and move windows in Stage Manager.

Since last year, Apple has offered Shortcuts actions on macOS to find windows, extract properties from them, and resize them. This has allowed Mac power users to create useful automations that deal with moving windows around and quickly assembling their favorite workspaces and layout modes. The ‘Find Windows’ and ‘Resize Window’ actions are completely absent from Shortcuts in iPadOS 16.1, which continues to have no knowledge of multiple windows for the same app.

This is another missed opportunity on Apple’s part; I hope it’s something that gets rectified soon in the iPadOS 16 cycle.

A Shaky Foundation Meets a Rushed Launch

At the end of all this, here’s how I feel about Stage Manager: Apple started from a good idea – make the iPad more useful by using more apps at once – and botched the execution in iPadOS 16.1 with an over-designed, poorly tested, muddled constellation of missing features, bugs, and confusing interactions.

The first version of Stage Manager fails to make iPad multitasking more intuitive for newcomers and more flexible for power users. Today, I struggle to understand what kind of market Stage Manager is supposed to serve.

There’s the seed of a valid idea behind Stage Manager: create a continuum between the Mac and iPad that allows power users to go beyond what iPadOS has offered thus far. But that idea has been paired with the worst technical implementation of multitasking I’ve seen from Apple in the several years I’ve been using and writing about the iPad.

Windowing on iPadOS can work and be useful; Stage Manager fails to make it so. The underlying idea is sound; the delivery system, in its current form, is not.

It’s been five months since we first saw Stage Manager on iPadOS, and instead of having answers, I’m left with more questions. What happened to the team that created Slide Over, pointer support, context menus, and which tastefully adapted longstanding macOS conventions to a modern, hybrid platform? Has anyone at Apple tried working with Stage Manager on their iPad Pro for longer than 30 minutes? Are they genuinely happy with it? Is there an iPad equivalent of the Pro Workflow team at Apple? How will new iPad users who enable Stage Manager and have no idea of its intricacies react to its obscure design and limitations? And:

Why do I get the sense that Stage Manager was designed in a vacuum to “look good” on macOS⁵ and later ported, without much thought, to iPadOS?

Like I said before, there have been moments in my tests with Stage Manager when I felt like it could be something that would make me more productive. But that’s because, after five months of iPadOS 16, I’ve realized that I like windowing more than I like Stage Manager. Stage Manager doesn’t make it easy to be a feature that iPad users can rely on – let alone “love”. At least not in this buggy, unfinished version.

As it stands now, I don’t know if I’ll keep Stage Manager enabled on my iPad Pro because I’m not sure it’s worth the aggravation. This feature does not meet the high bar Apple set with its previous iPadOS functionalities. I do encourage MacStories readers and iPad users to try Stage Manager; at the moment, however, my recommendation is to not use it for production work or other critical tasks on your iPad.

The single question that is looming over Stage Manager is this: can it be salvaged in its current form?

I think so, but not unless Apple is willing to understand the problem. The company needs to take a long, hard look at Stage Manager’s shortcomings and start acting on a long list of fundamental design problems right away. There are several places where Apple could start, and there’s a lot of work to do. Still, there is potential for iPadOS to be a platform where you can use windows or Split View or full-screen apps, where you can seamlessly move between keyboard and touch input, and where you can have an experience that is consistent with macOS, but vastly more portable. I just don’t think Stage Manager, in this version debuting in iPadOS 16.1, is the right vessel to carry that vision forward.

That, ultimately, is my biggest gripe with Stage Manager: it lacks a cohesive, grand vision behind it that was instead there in previous versions of iPadOS. Stage Manager makes iPadOS feel disjointed and broken, an erratic OS confusingly looking for an identity that used to be within reach.

In the short term, Apple will probably justify the issues of Stage Manager by saying that it’s a specific mode for a small subset of users, that it’s disabled by default, and that they’re working on it. All those things are true. But I also have the feeling that Apple underestimated how hungry iPad users were for a new take on multitasking on their $1200 portable computers that would finally take advantage of the iPad’s powerful hardware.

(Plus, a shipped feature, even if disabled by default, is still your feature: you should be proud enough of it to put your name on it.)

My hope is that Apple will be open to this feedback, iterate on Stage Manager in the iPadOS 16 cycle, and go back to the drawing board for real iPadOS windowing and a developer API next year. There’s a long list of fixes and design tweaks that should be implemented in the meantime; but if the future of iPadOS involves the coexistence of full-screen apps and windowed apps, it’s the foundation itself that has to be rebuilt. I can’t stress this enough: like on macOS, developers need to have a proper framework to optimize their iPad apps for windowing. As I’ve explained in the story, this would benefit Apple’s own apps, too.

Right now, Stage Manager is just another mode that was tacked onto existing iPad apps, disabled by default, slimmed down in scope, and shipped with a plethora of bugs. It’s disheartening to see Apple fumble this opportunity so badly, and one has to wonder why it was even necessary to keep pushing for Stage Manager in 2022, but that’s a story for another time.

I still strongly believe in the iPad as a platform that needs to exist in my life. Despite the incredible renassaince the Mac is living at the moment, the iPad continues to be the only device that gives me that unique sense of power and computing freedom when I can sit down with a keyboard on my lap, grab the screen and use it as a tablet, or place it on my desk. That magic never went away.

Stage Manager was a chance to propel the iPad’s vision forward and onto its logical conclusion: desktop-class windowing. But in iPadOS 16.1, Stage Manager’s “windowing” is far from desktop-class. Apple shouldn’t lose track of its North Star for iPadOS and the iPad’s modularity, but this?

This isn’t it.

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The new iPad Pro and iPad.

Last week on Thursday, I received review units of the new 10th generation iPad and 6th generation iPad Pro. I’ve spent the past few days testing and getting work done with both of them – including finishing a big story about Stage Manager I’m going to publish in a few hours on MacStories.

These are relatively easy iPads to review with a fairly straightforward narrative around them. The new iPad Pro is an iterative update that shows us Apple has seemingly hit a plateau in terms of innovation with this particular design – save for one feature that truly surprised me. The new base model iPad is a massive update compared to its predecessor, adding an all-new, iPad Pro-inspired design and a brand new accessory – the Magic Keyboard Folio – that has turned out to be one of my favorite accessories Apple has launched in recent years. I’ve had a ton of fun playing around and working with the new iPad over the weekend; if you’re in the market for an 11” tablet, you shouldn’t sleep on this one.

When considered individually, these new iPads are solid options in their respective categories – each delivering on the different goals Apple set out to accomplish for these product lines in 2022.

It’s when you zoom out and take a broader look at the new state of the iPad lineup that things become…a bit more confusing.

[table_of_contents]

The New iPad Pro

The new iPad Pro with M2 is the definition of a spec-bump update. Put it side-by-side next to the M1 iPad Pro from 2021 and you wouldn’t be able to tell a difference at a glance. It looks the same; it weighs the same (I was sent the 12.9”, 1 TB, Wi-Fi + Cellular version); it uses the same model of Magic Keyboard Apple debuted in 2020. Visually speaking, the only clue that would confirm you’re using a 2022 iPad Pro instead of a 2021 model is that the new one says ‘iPad Pro’ in the back instead of just ‘iPad’. Otherwise, it looks exactly the same as the old one.

The new iPad Pro (right) is identical to the 2021 model, but it says ‘iPad Pro’ in the back instead of just ‘iPad’.

The tech inside the new iPad Pro paints a similar spec-bump-y picture. The new iPad Pro supports Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi 6E, neither of which I was able to test since I don’t have compatible hardware for these wireless radios at home. The new model can also record video with ProRes, a welcome addition for iPad videographers that I also wouldn’t know how to begin testing, and which I know I’ll never use in my typical daily iPad workflow. And then, of course, there’s the updated chip: the Apple M2, replacing last year’s M1.

I don’t have much to say about the M2 since, as you probably know after years of iPad reviews, I’m not the kind of user who’s going to dramatically push its single-core and multi-core capabilities. I’m a writer, and plain text isn’t fancy enough to have that kind of conversation here. But I’ll say this:

• The M2 doesn’t mean anything in terms of Stage Manager performance and stability. You’re still limited to four windows at once in a workspace, and all the bugs and design issues of Stage Manager seen on the M1 iPad Pro and iPad Air are here as well. But I’m going to cover this topic more in depth later today. (Refresh MacStories in a few hours and prepare your favorite kind of beverage: it’s going to be a long one.)
• M2 benchmarks I ran on the new iPad Pro are largely comparable to benchmarks from the M2 MacBook Air that came out earlier this year. In my tests, I got a score of 1845 in single-core performance and 8311 for multi-core. For the sake of context and for posterity, here’s an updated table of benchmarks I captured on iPads I reviewed in recent years:

So far, I’m guessing that everything I just wrote is pretty much in line with what you were expecting from this iPad Pro update. It’s not a redesign of the existing iPad Pro line; it’s a spec-bump with M2, an updated media engine, and better wireless radios.

The surprise of the new iPad Pro, however, is hidden beneath the surface of your expectations. Or rather, slightly on top of it.

Apple Pencil Hover as a UI Input Method

The new iPad Pro comes with a new feature called Apple Pencil Hover that lets the iPad recognize the second-generation Apple Pencil (the existing model) even if it’s hovering within 12mm of the display rather than directly touching it. Wacom tablets have offered similar functionalities for years; Apple brought it to the new iPad Pro without requiring a new version of the Apple Pencil, which I appreciate.

In marketing materials and videos, Apple (rightfully) focused on the potential Apple Pencil Hover has for those who draw and illustrate on their iPad Pro on a regular basis. I can confirm that, for those use cases, Apple Pencil Hover does work as advertised. Start a drawing in Notes, hover with the Pencil over the screen, and as long as the tip of the Pencil is roughly within one centimeter of it, you’ll see a small preview of the selected drawing tool onscreen before leaving your mark with it. It kind of looks like a laser pointer: move the Pencil around while hovering and the preview indicator follows you around; take the Pencil slowly away from the display, and the indicator subtly fades until it disappears.

If you’re an artist or a proficient visual note-taker who relies on Apple Pencil for your drawings and sketches, I think Apple Pencil Hover will be a big deal for you: in addition to previewing lines before drawing them, you’ll also be able to see what a mix of colors will look like before adding a new color to a drawing. Effectively, this preview-oriented aspect of Apple Pencil Hover should result in fewer ‘Undo’ operations and a more contextual, streamlined experience when drawing.

I’m here to tell you, however, that Apple Pencil Hover goes beyond enhancing the typical iPad drawing experience: it’s also a neat way to control the iPadOS UI, adding a new dimension to touch interactions. I was not expecting to use Apple Pencil Hover at all because I’m no artist; its native integration with interface elements across the system turned out to be one of my favorite additions to iPadOS this year – definitely more so than Stage Manager. Allow me to explain.

Apple Pencil Hover has been designed to work out of the box with all the hover effects that developers have already implemented over the past two years for the iPadOS pointer. As a general rule, if an iPadOS UI element – like, say, a button in Files – already supports “responding” to the hovering pointer with an effect, then it’ll work “for free” with Apple Pencil Hover too. Here’s how Apple puts it on its Developer website:

By default, hover gestures work with pointing devices such as trackpads as well as Apple Pencil.

Developers can optimize their apps specifically for Apple Pencil Hover, but even if they don’t, you’ll be able to start using Apple Pencil Hover for “non-artistic purposes” across your favorite apps right away, by simply taking advantage of hover effects that were originally designed for trackpads and mice.

Which brings me to the realization I had over the weekend while testing the new iPad Pro: thanks to Hover, I may start using the Apple Pencil much more often for those times when my iPad Pro is not connected to the Magic Keyboard. That’s because with Apple Pencil Hover, it’s almost as if my fingers – the primary input method for when I’m using my iPad as a tablet – gain hovering capabilities that they otherwise can’t have. Think of it as having a “super-touch” input system that brings the benefits of the pointer and trackpad to the iPad’s classic tablet mode.

I’ll give you a few examples. When using Safari, there are certain interactions that are only possible if you’re hovering with the pointer over specific UI elements. Which means that if you’re using your iPad as a tablet without the Magic Keyboard, those interactions just can’t be accessed. Apple Pencil Hover solves this problem. For instance, while browsing in Safari, hover over a link on a page with the tip of the Pencil and, without having to click or long-press it, you’ll see the full destination URL pop up at the bottom of the page:

You can show full URLs on hover while using Apple Pencil in Safari.

Another interaction that isn’t supported when using the iPad in regular tablet mode is previewing and closing tabs without switching to them. With Hover, you can point the Pencil’s tip toward a Safari tab and wait a second for a thumbnail preview to appear, or you can hover over to the left side of the tab and click the ‘x’ button to close the tab without ever opening it. When I’m using the iPad as a tablet in touch mode, all these operations are clunky: they require multiple steps because my fingers are missing the hover dimension that unlocks those useful shortcuts. With Apple Pencil Hover, the iPad’s tablet mode gets upgraded to a hybrid touch-pointer mode that feels right at home on iPadOS.

Another gesture that works incredibly well with Apple Pencil Hover is scrubbing through videos. Take the YouTube or Netflix websites for example: when watching a video in touch mode with the iPad as a tablet, you can’t preview sections of a video by scrubbing unless you touch the screen. Apple Pencil Hover fixes this. As you’re watching a video in Safari, hover with the tip of the Pencil, and you’ll be able to scrub through and preview its frames without actually skipping backward and forward in the video.

Given that hovering as an interaction method is a relatively new concept on iPadOS, the list of native iPad apps that offer hover-only interactions isn’t long; if anything, you’ll find more websites and web apps in Safari that suddenly work with Apple Pencil Hover – like YouTube and Netflix – because hovering with the mouse has existed on desktop computers for decades.

Now that Apple Pencil Hover joins the pointer in supporting hover-based interactions, however, my hope is that we’ll start seeing more native iPad apps offer new features based on hovering over specific UI elements. That’s the thing about Apple Pencil Hover: after using it as an input method in a handful of places where it makes sense, I want to use it more often and in more apps. I’d also like to see Apple add non-drawing options to the double-tap gesture of Apple Pencil: for example, it’d be cool to simulate clicks and long-presses with a double-tap on the Pencil while hovering.

I wasn’t expecting to like Apple Pencil Hover as an input method for the iPadOS interface as much as I did. But if you think about it, this is precisely the kind of functionality I’m supposed to like: it extends the iPad’s modularity even further, blurring the lines between touch and pointer by leveraging a physical accessory that you can attach to the iPad and carry with you.

I also like Apple Pencil Hover because it’s one of those iPad-first features that you can tell Apple researched, tested, and refined with exquisite care. Unlike Stage Manager, Apple Pencil Hover has a clear purpose, works for both novice and advanced users, and has an API for developers. More of this, Apple.

The New iPad

The new iPad.

The 10th generation iPad is the first base model in years that has caught my attention, for a variety of reasons. For starters, it has created a new slot in Apple’s ever-growing iPad lineup: at $449 for the 64 GB, Wi-Fi model, the new iPad is $120 more expensive than the 9th generation model (which Apple still sells), but $150 cheaper than the 5th generation iPad Air, which starts at $599. The price proposition puts this iPad squarely in between the old iPad and the M1 iPad Air, but some of its features may make it a preferable option to the Air or – for some folks – even the 11” iPad Pro. It’s a strange situation Apple seems to be in right now, so let’s analyze it.

There’s an easy way to think about the new iPad: it’s an iPad Air, with a more vibrant color, and less capable internals that justify its more affordable price tag.

The iPad Air (left) and new iPad (right).

From a mere visual standpoint, the new iPad looks nearly identical to the fifth-generation iPad Air. The two iPads weigh roughly the same: the iPad Air is 19 grams lighter in its Wi-Fi + Cellular configuration, which Apple sent me for review. They’re roughly the same thickness: the iPad Air is 0.9mm thinner than the new iPad. Both differences in weight and thickness are imperceptible in practice. Both iPads have the same display resolution, too, with a 2360‑by‑1640 resolution at 264 ppi in the same 10.9” enclosure. At a glance, you’d be hard-pressed to find any notable differences between these two devices – especially when using them in tablet mode without an external keyboard (more on this later).

A note about colors: as you can see, the blue iPad Apple sent me has an actual, fun blue color that looks unmistakably blue, unlike the iPad Air’s blueish-but-sometimes-gray hue. I like that Apple is using real colors in this iPad generation; I’d like this to become a trend even in other iPad models. Why can’t iPad Air and iPad Pro owners have fun colors too?

The new iPad (right) is a proper blue.

Actual blue.

The flat side of the iPad (right) is also more colorful than the iPad Air’s (left).

Of course, the new iPad looks like a proper generational leap when compared to the base model that precedes it in the lineup – the 9th generation iPad, which Apple is keeping around at $329. The process that Apple started in 2020 with the 4th generation iPad Air and continued with the redesigned iPad mini in 2021 is now complete with the 10th generation iPad: the industrial design pioneered by the iPad Pro in 2018 has trickled down to the base model iPad, which borrows heavily from the implementation Apple used in the Air and mini. Which is to say: there’s no Face ID here, but an elongated top button that serves as a Touch ID sensor; there’s no four-speaker audio but a classic stereo speaker system; there’s no ProMotion (let alone XDR), and there’s a USB-C port, but it doesn’t support Thunderbolt. Compared to the previous base model, the new iPad is a massive upgrade that comes with a modern design and refreshed iPadOS multitasking interactions; it’s very similar to the iPad Air, both in terms of appearance and daily experience with iPad apps.

That said, there’s a long list of differences worth explaining when trying to make sense of this iPad’s place in Apple’s bigger lineup.

Apple’s Family of 11” iPads

This section would be easier to write if Apple had gone with a simpler approach. As it stands now, there are three iPad models in the 11” range: the 11” iPad Pro, the iPad Air, and the new iPad. They all look kind of similar to each other, but they have different price points.

Ideally, each iPad should be additive: the iPad Pro should have the same features of the iPad Air and more, which in return should have the same features of an iPad and more. A good-better-best model, essentially. The problem is that we’re in this odd situation where Apple’s 11” iPads sort-of follow that logic, but there are exceptions that may potentially confuse customers.

Let’s start from the easy stuff, where the differences are clear-cut. The iPad Air’s display is fully laminated; the base model iPad’s is not. Some people are more sensitive to this than I am, but it’s worth noting. The iPad Air’s display also comes with antireflective coating and supports wide color; the new iPad’s doesn’t. Most notably, the iPad Air has an M1 chip that lets it use Stage Manager and display scaling in iPadOS 16; the new iPad is stuck on the A14 Bionic SoC – same as the iPad Air from 2020.

Depending on how you feel about Stage Manager in iPadOS, you may not care about its absence on the new iPad at all because you prefer working with Split View and Slide Over anyway, which I understand. Regardless of Stage Manager, however, it’s undeniable that display scaling and the ‘More Space’ setting supported by the iPad Air makes working on that machine – even with Split View and Slide Over – a more powerful and professional experience than the new iPad, which doesn’t support a denser display resolution.

With display scaling enabled on the iPad Air, the device’s resolution jumps to 2746x1908, which is very close to the 12.9” iPad Pro’s resolution, but in a 10.9” device. Thanks to display scaling on the Air, you’ll be able to fit more content and apps onscreen, which helps when you’re trying to work with multiple apps on a compact tablet connected to a Magic Keyboard.

Split View on iPad Air with display scaling enabled.

Because the new iPad does not support display scaling, the same Split View cannot show a sidebar for GoodLinks on the right, and Safari (left) shows less text.

There’s also the matter of future-proofing your iPad: with the iPad Air’s M1 chip, you’ll also get access to 8 GB of RAM; the new iPad only has 4 GB. Some new features of iPadOS are already exclusive to iPad Pro models or iPads with an M1 like the iPad Air (Stage Manager); it’s very likely that this trend will only continue in the future (see: external display support in Stage Manager).

Then there’s the Apple Pencil story, which is the aspect of the new iPad I dislike most. Despite having switched to USB-C and carrying the same flat-edge industrial design of the iPad Pro and iPad Air, the new iPad does not support the second-generation, magnetically-attached Apple Pencil. Instead, the iPad continues to be stuck with the first-generation Apple Pencil, originally introduced all the way back in 2015. That decision in and of itself is confusing: here you have an iPad that, by all means, has adopted all the key design attributes of the iPad Pro and iPad Air, except for this one feature that is missing and requires you to keep using an accessory from seven years ago. For context, the iPhone 6s came out the same year of the original Apple Pencil.

One almost wonders: if the new iPad doesn’t support the vastly-superior second-generation Apple Pencil, why is it even using the same design of the iPad Pro and iPad Air? After all, one of the reasons Apple moved to flat edges on those iPads was to support a flush magnetic attachment for the Apple Pencil on the top edge of the device. But where it gets worse – if not ridiculous and, arguably, downright user-hostile – is that because the original Apple Pencil was using Lightning at the time, but this iPad doesn’t have a Lightning port anymore, when you want to pair and charge your Apple Pencil you’ll have to a use dongle and a cable. This thing:

Sigh.

Cue the memes. From Apple’s perspective, I’m sure they had their technical or financial reasons for not supporting the second-generation Apple Pencil on a new iPad that looks identical to other iPads that support it. As a user, however, I don’t like this approach, and I don’t think it is a good experience. I would have prefered to see Apple make a modernized, cheaper, less capable version of the Apple Pencil that uses USB-C. Anyway: if you’re a heavy Apple Pencil user and prefer the look, feel, and features of the second-gen Apple Pencil, I can’t recommend the new base model iPad.

Here’s where we enter Weird Territory. One of those potential reasons for Apple to skip support for the second-gen Apple Pencil on the new iPad is the addition of a landscape camera in the center of one of the iPad’s longer bezels. For years now, and especially following the rise of remote working during the pandemic, iPad users have been asking Apple to move the device’s front-facing camera from the shorter’s side to the longer one. Most people who bought an iPad to do video calls from home are probably using a keyboard case with it; when the iPad is in landscape mode, not having the camera face you directly – like on a traditional laptop – has always felt strange. If you need to have one awkward from-the-chin-up angle because the iPad only has one camera, you may as well have it on the orientation you use the least: portrait mode.

Hello there, landscape camera.

So, I’m glad that Apple listened and put the front-facing camera in landscape on the new iPad: it makes for much more “normal” Zoom and FaceTime calls, and this is the way to go. But I have to ask:

Why didn’t the iPad Pro get a landscape camera as well? I find it very odd that, for two iPad models that were introduced on the same day, the one that did not get the much better webcam is the model called ‘iPad Pro’ – the one that, in theory, folks who want to do “real work” from home should be buying.

It’s not that I’m upset the new iPad got a landscape camera: it’s absolutely the right decision in 2022. It’s just that all iPads should have this feature, but Apple chose to bring an improvement to the base model in their lineup rather than their high-end, flagship iPad Pro. Imagine if the iPhone SE4 and the iPhone 15 Pro were introduced on the same day, but only the SE got a brand new Face ID sensor. That’s how I feel about the landscape camera on the new iPad.

The…interesting decisions in the iPad lineup don’t stop here.

The New Magic Keyboard Folio

The new iPad in the Magic Keyboard Folio.

Just like the new iPad isn’t compatible with the modern Apple Pencil, it doesn’t support the 2020 Magic Keyboard either. But in this case, instead of forcing new iPad owners to use a keyboard from seven years ago, Apple created a brand new flavor of the Magic Keyboard called Magic Keyboard Folio that only works with this iPad model and has both more and fewer features than the Magic Keyboard.

The Magic Keyboard Folio is reminiscent of similar solutions from Logitech and Microsoft on the Surface line: it’s a two-piece accessory that eschews the Magic Keyboard’s single-piece floating design in favor of a cover (thankfully, not a rugged case like Logitech’s Combo Touch) with a folding kickstand that attaches magnetically to the back of the iPad, plus a removable keyboard that attaches to a new Smart Connector placed at the bottom edge of the iPad. The keyboard is not backlit, but it otherwise carries the same full-size layout of an 11” Magic Keyboard that even comes with a larger trackpad (it’s one centimeter taller) and an extra row of 14 function keys. You can close the keyboard on top of the iPad as a cover or, if you’re not using it, detach it or fold it in the back of the iPad with the keys facing either in or out.

The keys of the Magic Keyboard Folio feel the same as the ones in the Magic Keyboard, but they’re not backlit.

You can fold the keyboard part of the Folio onto the back cover with the keys facing in, so you won’t feel them when holding the iPad.

There are, of course, trade-offs with this design when it comes to portability and balancing the iPad on your lap. Since the iPad is not floating and is not attached to a back cover that is part of the keyboard structure itself (Apple’s so-called cantilever design), the Magic Keyboard Folio is harder to use on your lap than a regular Magic Keyboard. You have to carefully balance both the keyboard and the adjustable kickstand that holds the iPad, which doesn’t grant the same flexibility or comfort as the Magic Keyboard.

The part that connects the keyboard to the keyboard attachment is made of soft rubber material, so it slightly wobbles around when you’re typing on your lap. If you’re like me and often use the Magic Keyboard while relaxing on your couch with your knees up in front of you, you’ll want to be extra careful when trying to do so with a Magic Keyboard Folio unless you want to slap yourself in the face with an iPad. You can use the Magic Keyboard Folio on your lap, but the Magic Keyboard’s unified design gives you more flexibility and a sturdier structure as far as lap usage goes.

The relocated Smart Connector makes the Magic Keyboard Folio exclusive to this new iPad.

The Folio’s angle can be adjusted to an upright position.

And here’s the Folio’s widest possible angle.

I should point out that the magnets that hold the keyboard part in-place when covering the iPad’s screen aren’t as strong as those seen in the Magic Keyboard or Smart Folio. With very minimal pressure, you can move the cover around like in the GIF below, or detach it if you put your iPad upside down:

The magnets that attach the keyboard cover to the iPad’s display don’t seem too strong. The keyboard attachment with the Smart Connector is, but I found it odd that I was able to move the cover like this.

Case in point: the keyboard stays attached, but the cover doesn’t if the iPad is upside down.

That being said, I like everything else about the Magic Keyboard Folio and more so than I anticipated, to the point where, once again, I’m left wondering why the base iPad model got certain keyboard-related improvements and the iPad Pro got…nothing.

The taller trackpad is terrific, and makes performing multitouch gestures more comfortable than the Magic Keyboard’s smaller trackpad. Keys and the space between them are the same size as on the 11” Magic Keyboard. Then, of course, there’s the row of function keys: opening Spotlight, the app switcher, or controlling media playback and volume is exactly as nice as you can imagine with dedicated keys; it makes working with iPadOS 16 much faster. That is, if you plan on working on a base model iPad rather than an iPad Pro, which is ostensibly the model designed for productivity and keyboard-driven interactions. And yet, its Magic Keyboard still lacks a bigger trackpad and a row of function keys.

The Magic Keyboard Folio (left) and the iPad Air in the Magic Keyboard.

The Magic Keyboard Folio (left) has a bigger trackpad than the Magic Keyboard, plus a function row.

In my tests over the weekend, I have to say that I really liked the Magic Keyboard Folio even with the keyboard detached because of the flexibility provided by the removable back cover with adjustable kickstand. While in tablet mode, the kickstand comes in handy when playing games with a paired controller or leaving the iPad next to you in the kitchen with some music or cooking apps like Mela and Pestle. But what I’ve discovered is that I also love using it as, effectively, a giant PopSocket attached to the back of the iPad that lets me use it in portable mode without holding it with my thumbs over the screen’s bezels.

Holding the iPad from its kickstand is surprisingly comfortable.

This method also works in portrait mode.

The best time I’ve had with the new iPad was exactly that: keyboard detached, iPad in front of my face while relaxing on my new sofa with my hands gripping the Folio’s kickstand. I don’t think Apple intended the Magic Keyboard Folio’s back cover and kickstand to be used this way, but it’s worked well for me when watching YouTube videos, reading articles in GoodLinks, and catching up on Twitter with Spring. I’m enjoying this iPad’s portable mode so much, I’m considering whether it would make for a nicer “media consumption tablet” than the iPad mini.

I wish Apple made a Magic Keyboard Folio for the iPad Pro too. Or perhaps just a similar back cover, even without the keyboard part, for the iPad Pro. But then again, I’m probably partial when it comes to kickstands. If you ask me, they should put them in everything.

A Confusing Lineup in a Transitional Phase?

Considered individually, both the new iPad Pro and 10th generation iPad are solid updates that achieve what they were designed to do. The iPad Pro is a spec-bump update with one very nice surprise in the form of Apple Pencil Hover; it has obvious applications for drawing and sketching apps, but it could also be the beginning of something new as a more general input method for the iPad in tablet mode. The new iPad is a fantastic upgrade compared to the 9th generation model, with a redesign and new features that pit it directly against the iPad Air in terms of value, plus a brand new keyboard accessory that highlights the device’s modularity.

There are two things that concern me when taking a bird’s-eye view at these iPads as part of a bigger lineup in 2022 though.

The first one is potential customer confusion. The way I see it, there’s probably one iPad too many in the 11” range now: while I – the professional reviewer – can discern the fine differences between the 11” iPad Pro, iPad Air, and new iPad, I can’t help but wonder what the average iPad buyer who doesn’t want an iPad mini or a large 12.9” iPad Pro will think when presented with three iPads that, at first glance, look exactly the same. Those iPads share a lot of similar features, except some of the great new ones (landscape camera, better typing experience on a keyboard) are on the entry-level model rather than the premium Pro one. Apple is sending some mixed messages with this iPad lineup, which could use more consistency in terms of accessory compatibility and new hardware options.

I said before that I wasn’t sure about the 11” iPad Pro’s reason to exist anymore, and that feeling has only gotten stronger now that we have a third iPad in the 11” form factor and no big changes on the small iPad Pro (which got Apple Pencil Hover, but no XDR support with mini-LED).

The second concern is related to the one above: I find the lack of notable hardware changes in the Pro line after four years of the same screen sizes and over two years of Magic Keyboard very perplexing. Apple is also sending mixed signals with the iPad Pro lineup these days: the power of Apple Silicon still hasn’t been used by any pro app made by Apple (fortunately, third parties are filling this gap), there haven’t been any changes on the accessory front, and the one hardware feature I would have liked to see – a relocated front-facing camera – was brought to the base model iPad instead. Observing the iPad Pro’s evolution has always been about the tablet itself as much as its accessories; I’m disappointed that we didn’t get any changes on the Magic Keyboard front in the 2022 iPad Pros.

I don’t understand if this relative lull in the iPad Pro ecosystem is the precursor of bigger things on the horizon for next year (perhaps with an even larger ‘iPad Studio’ or ‘iPad Ultra’?), or if Apple has run out of ideas for its flagship iPad line for now. I want to believe in the more optimistic direction for iPad Pro users: I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple progressively phase out the smaller iPad Pro, leaving the 11” form factor for the base model iPad and iPad Air, allowing the iPad Pro line to grow bigger in size.

That’s just my personal speculation. For now, I guess we’ll always have iPadOS 16 and Stage Manager. But that’s a story for another time. Or, actually, later today.

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This morning Apple announced their all-new iPad and iPad Pro lineups via press release and a short announcement video. The new iPad (non-Pro) features new colors and an updated square-edge design that brings it in line with the rest of Apple’s modern iPads and iPhones. The iPad Pro has been upgraded to Apple’s M2 chip, and supports a new “hover” mode on the Apple Pencil. Apple also unveiled a new Magic Keyboard Folio accessory, which includes a detachable keyboard with a trackpad and function keys.

There’s a lot to like about each of these new products, but the details reveal some very strange decisions on Apple’s part.

The 10th Generation iPad

The new 10th generation standard iPad is the last device in the iPad product line to be updated to the modern square-edged case design. However, unlike every other iPad with the new design, the new model does not support the magnetically-connected Apple Pencil 2. The 10th gen has also ditched its Lightning connector in favor of USB-C, which is a nice improvement for everyone except Apple Pencil users.

The Apple Pencil and the New iPad

The original Apple Pencil (which has not been updated today, and is the only Pencil that the new iPad supports) still only charges via its male Lightning connector. On prior iPad models, the Pencil could be conveniently (albeit awkwardly) plugged into the iPad itself to charge. But because the 10th gen iPad has switched to USB-C, users no longer have any convenient charging method.

To handle this unfortunate turn of events, Apple is also releasing a $9 “USB-C to Apple Pencil” adaptor. So the new iPad-to-Pencil charging story is to plug a USB-C to USB-C cable into your iPad, plug the new dongle into the USB-C cable, and then plug your original Apple Pencil into the dongle. This may look less awkward than the old way, but I don’t think it’s an improvement.

Weirdness with the Apple Pencil connection is probably not a good reason for Apple to delay switching to USB-C on this iPad, but the obvious solution was to add support for the Apple Pencil 2 (just like they did on last year’s excellent iPad mini). While the situation is not great, Apple will at least be including the new USB-C to Apple Pencil adaptor in the box for any new purchasers of the 1st generation Pencil.¹

One potential explanation for the lack of Pencil 2 support is that the landscape edge of the device — where the 2nd generation Apple Pencil magnetically connects on other iPad models — has a new addition in the exact location where that connector would otherwise go.

Landscape Camera

In a unique tweak for a redesign that is otherwise similar to its siblings, Apple has moved the front-facing camera to the landscape edge on the new iPad. This is something that iPad users have been clamoring for for years, and it’s good to see Apple finally making it happen. The bad news: this very nice new change is only coming to the non-Pro models. The camera on the new iPad Pros remains on the portrait edge.

Details

While the 10th generation iPad is not getting upgraded to the M-series chips, it is seeing a spec bump to the A14 Bionic. This is the same chip family that debuted in the iPhone 12, so it’s a solid, fairly modern processor (the 9th generation iPad used the A13 Bionic chip).

The new iPad features a 10.9-inch Liquid Retina display with True Tone, an updated 12MP back camera which can shoot 4K video, an Ultra Wide 12MP front camera with support for Center Stage, Wi-Fi 6, and 5G on cellular models. The device can be unlocked using Touch ID via the top button — the same spot that it is located on the iPad Air and iPad mini.

The 10th generation iPad is available to order today, with a starting price of $449 ($599 for cellular). It comes in four bright finishes: blue, pink, yellow, and silver.

The Magic Keyboard Folio

Apple has also introduced an all-new keyboard accessory alongside the 10th-generation iPad. The Magic Keyboard Folio is a two-piece magnetic cover. The back piece can be folded outward to create an adjustable stand for the iPad, and the front piece is a full-size keyboard with a trackpad and a row of function keys.

This keyboard looks incredible. The keys and trackpad have a lot more room to breathe in this design than they do in Apple’s similar Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro. Adding a function key row is fantastic, and the ability to easily detach it will hopefully make the whole rig feel less clunky than the Magic Keyboard. Color-wise, the accessory only comes in white for now.

The Magic Keyboard Folio is available now for $249. Before you run and buy it immediately though, there’s unfortunately another huge caveat to this product announcement: the Magic Keyboard Folio only supports the new 10th generation non-Pro iPad.

That’s right, this all-new, extremely cool accessory is not supported by the new iPad Pro models, which were also released at the same time today. I’m not quite sure what Apple is thinking here, but it definitely feels bad for fans of Apple’s highest end iPad to be walled off from its most interesting new accessory.

The 6th Generation iPad Pro

Also announced today are the latest generation of iPad Pro. The new models come in the usual 11- and 12.9-inch size classes, and have now been upgraded to Apple’s M2 processors. The new chips enable these devices to capture ProRes video, and to support a new “Apple Pencil hover experience”.

The latter is an all-new feature for the second-generation Apple Pencil which allows iPads to sense the Pencil’s location up to 12mm above the display. The iPad software has been updated to support hover states when this occurs, causing the interface item that is being hovered to expand or otherwise change in preparation of an impending touch. The feature looks impressive in Apple’s announcement video, and I’m excited to see how it works in practice once people get their hands on these devices.

Finally, the new iPad Pro models have been upgraded to support Wi-Fi 6E, enabling up to 2x faster download speeds than the previous generation model. You’ll have to have a fast enough internet plan and Wi-Fi equipment capable of handling this to take advantage of it, of course.

The new iPad Pro models are available to order today, with the 11-inch model starting at $799 ($999 for cellular) and the 12-inch model starting at $1,099 ($1,299 for cellular).

This Lineup is Super Weird

As you’ve probably noticed from the many caveats throughout this article, this iPad lineup has some issues. I’m not sure how this happened, but somehow these product lines just seem all mixed up. The lowest-end iPad (not counting the previous 9th generation iPad, which is currently still for sale) has features that the iPad Pro does not. It also has the same design as all of the other iPads, yet lacks the Apple Pencil 2 support which can be found in the rest of them. The brand-new iPad Pro models do not work with the most feature-rich iPad keyboard that Apple sells. That keyboard costs a full half of the base price of the only iPad that supports it.

Hopefully Apple will fix some of these issues in the next models, but for now they’ve left us with a very muddled and confusing iPad product line. We’re sure to be stuck with most of this for at least a year, but I really hope that we see a version of the Magic Keyboard Folio for the iPad Pro before that. The least Apple can do is make sure they’re furnishing their most dedicated iPad users with their most interesting accessories.

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In a statement to Engadget reported by N. Ingraham, Apple said:

We introduced Stage Manager as a whole new way to multitask with overlapping, resizable windows on both the iPad display and a separate external display, with the ability to run up to eight live apps on screen at once. Delivering this multi-display support is only possible with the full power of M1-based iPads. Customers with iPad Pro 3rd and 4th generation have expressed strong interest in being able to experience Stage Manager on their iPads. In response, our teams have worked hard to find a way to deliver a single-screen version for these systems, with support for up to four live apps on the iPad screen at once.

External display support for Stage Manager on M1 iPads will be available in a software update later this year.

In preliminary testing of the update, our Federico Viticci says that the latest beta also clears up many of the bugs users have experienced:

It’s excellent to hear that Apple is expanding the availability of Stage Manager based on the feedback from iPad users. I’m also glad to hear that iPadOS has stabilized. I’ve been using my iPad Pro more often lately and, like many others, have run into frequent crashes and visual glitches in the iPadOS 16.1 betas. It shouldn’t be too much longer before iPadOS 16.1 is released publicly.

→ Source: engadget.com

iPadOS and iOS 16.

Sometimes I truly have excellent timing with my stories.

As you may recall, a couple of months ago in the lead-up to WWDC, I published an article on my experience with using the M1 Max MacBook Pro for six months. That story was born out of a desire to get to know macOS again after years of iPad-only work; as I shared at the time, my curiosity was also the byproduct of Apple’s incoherent narrative for iPad power users for the past couple of years. Great hardware held back by lackluster software had long been regarded as the core weakness of the iPad platform; I hadn’t always agreed with the Apple community’s “consensus” on this, but an M1 iPad Pro carrying MacBook Pro-like specs with no new pro software features to take advantage of it was, indeed, a bridge too far. So when I published that story just in time for WWDC, I did it because a) that’s when it was ready and b) I wanted to bring some chaotic energy into the iPad discourse and see what would happen.

Like I said, sometimes I do have excellent timing with my stories. And in this case, not even my wildest expectations could have predicted that, in one fell swoop a week later, Apple would reimagine iPadOS around desktop-class apps and a brand new multitasking with external display integration, a new design, and – the unthinkable – overlapping, resizable windows with iPadOS 16.

Today, Apple is releasing the first public betas of all the operating systems that will launch to the wider public later this year: iOS 16, iPadOS 16, macOS 13 Ventura, and watchOS 9. We’re going to have overviews of all these public betas today on MacStories.¹ As you can imagine given my annual reviewer responsibilities, I installed both iOS and iPadOS 16 as soon as they became available after the WWDC keynote on my iPhone 13 Pro Max and 12.9” iPad Pro with M1, and I’ve been using them as my daily drivers for the past month.

Obviously, I have some early thoughts and first impressions to share on iPadOS 16: it is fundamentally changing my relationship with the iPad platform and my workflow, which has been untouched for years since the introduction of multiwindow in iPadOS 13. Stage Manager, while still in need of refinements in several areas, is a game-changer for people like me, and it signifies a major course correction on how Apple thinks about iPadOS for power users.

But I should also say that I’m equally intrigued by iOS 16, which marks Apple’s return – after two years – to user customization with a drastic revamp of the Lock Screen, which can now be personalized with widgets, multiple wallpaper sets, and deep integration with the Home Screen, Focus, and even Apple Watch. The new Lock Screen is the proper follow-up to iOS 14 widgets we’ve been waiting for, and it’s going to be the feature that will push millions of people to update their iPhones to iOS 16 right away later this year. Besides the Lock Screen, there are dozens of other quality-of-life improvements to built-in apps and system intelligence that have caught my attention in iOS 16 in the past month, from the welcome updates to Mail and Reminders to system-wide unit conversions based on Live Text, Safari tab groups, and more.

There’s a lot to uncover in iOS and iPadOS 16, and I can’t possibly get into all of it today with this story. All the details and final opinions will have to wait for my annual review in the fall. Instead, below you’ll find a collection of initial thoughts, impressions, and suggestions for aspects of iPadOS and iOS 16 I’d like Apple to improve this summer. As with last year’s preview story, I’m going to include two recap segments at the end of each section with a list of improvements I’d like to see in iPadOS and iOS 16 before the public release.

Let’s dive in.

iPadOS 16

The biggest addition to iPadOS 16 is Stage Manager, a brand new multitasking mode that does not replace the existing Split View and Slide Over systems; instead, Stage Manager is an additional, optional environment that lets you use up to four concurrent, foreground apps. And the kicker: given the iPad’s limited screen real estate, Stage Manager allows you – for the first time in the iPad’s history – to almost freely resize windows shown onscreen and arrange your workspace however you see fit. Those app windows can even overlap with each other.

Stage Manager with four apps open.

I’ll be blunt: when rumors were swirling ahead of WWDC regarding Apple’s intention to bring a Mac-like multitasking feature with resizable and overlapping windows to iPadOS, I didn’t believe them; I was concerned Apple had given up on the mission to reimagine iPadOS multitasking as something entirely unique, abandoning the pursuit of a new take on windowing for a dull copy of macOS’ windowing system. As I wrote in my MacBook Pro story, I never really liked overlapping windows; I’ve historically disliked the complexity that carefully resizing windows entails; from Apple, I would have preferred a more intuitive tiling system based on predefined window sizes and gestures.

I was equally right and wrong in assuming Apple wouldn’t – or shouldn’t – bring resizable app windows to iPadOS. Here’s why: for better or worse, Stage Manager is not the Mac’s traditional multitasking system, carried as a 1:1 port to iPad. In keeping with Apple’s modus operandi over the past few years, Stage Manager is the kind of feature that takes the core of an existing macOS idea and modernizes it for a new audience that is used to the iPad’s more approachable and modular nature. This is demonstrated by the fact that Stage Manager also exists (with some variations) on macOS Ventura, where it doesn’t replace the Mac’s standard window management structure but instead adds to it as a new, standalone mode.

In building Stage Manager, Apple sought to combine the objective benefits of multiple app windows shown onscreen (you can do more things at once) with interaction boundaries designed to eschew the typical complexity of window overlap and resizing.

For starters, when Stage Manager is enabled as a mode in iPadOS 16 (you can do so from Settings and a new toggle in Control Center), you don’t suddenly see a desktop underneath your windows; you see your Home Screen, the window of the app(s) you’re using in the stage (the name of the central area of the screen where windows are), your dock at the bottom, and a strip of recent apps as window thumbnails along the left edge of the screen.

If you want, you can hide the dock and strip from Control Center. In that case, Stage Manager will only show you windows. You can still bump with the pointer into the edges of the screen to show them, though.

Unlike macOS, where clicking an app to open it usually spawns a new window somewhere onscreen, in Stage Manager you have to intentionally create workspaces of multiple windows. That’s the first difference from classic macOS: Stage Manager doesn’t force you to manage new windows by constantly throwing new ones onto the stage as soon as you click an app icon; instead, you have to manually add each window to your workspace, signaling your intention to work with multiple app windows at a time. On iPad Pro, Stage Manager supports up to four apps at the same time; as soon as you bring in a fifth one, the oldest one in the workspace gets removed and thrown back into the strip.

There are a few ways to bring new app windows onto the stage. The first method is what we’ve been doing since the days of iOS 11: you can use drag and drop to grab an app icon from the dock or Spotlight and drop it onto the stage. When you let go, the most recently used window from that app will be placed onscreen, making it overlap with any existing windows in the stage.

You can use drag and drop to add a new app window to the stage.

The second method is the multitasking menu, which was introduced last year and has been redesigned in iPadOS 16 to make it easier to understand and account for different window behaviors in Stage Manager. When you click on the three-dot button in the title bar of an app window, you’ll get a popup menu with text labels. The menu used to only be comprised of icons; I find the inclusion of labels (which was brought in last week’s beta) a welcome change that does a better job at explaining what each feature does.

The updated multitasking menu in iPadOS 16.

The menu includes the following buttons:

• Zoom: this enlarges an app window to make it full-screen, fitting the available area by hiding the dock, recent apps strip, and other windows in the workspace. This feature can also be activated with Globe+F, and it’s meant to be a way to temporarily focus on a specific app in the workspace without removing other windows sitting underneath it. It is, effectively, a temporary override to re-enter a one-app-at-a-time environment without having to remove an app from the stage. I like this approach, especially since you can keep pressing Globe+F to toggle back and forth between full-screen and the window’s previous size and placement. I do this all the time as a way to alternate between “classic iPad” behavior and multitasking within the same workspace.
• Add Another Window: this is how you can add new apps to your workspace without using drag and drop. In theory, clicking this option should slide the workspace away to show you the Home Screen (similar to iPadOS 15) with the ability to pick an app from there. I say “in theory” because right now this button doesn’t always work and often shows me an error message telling me to use drag and drop instead. I guess Apple hasn’t finished implementing it yet. There is also a hotkey to do this from the keyboard, which is shown in the new Stage Manager section of the keyboard shortcut menu that you can find by holding down the Globe key.
• Minimize: with this button, you can remove a window from the current workspace (without closing the app) by minimizing it back into the recent apps strip. I’m not sure if “minimizing” is the best word for this, but its associated ⌘M keyboard shortcut matches macOS, so I assume it makes sense for consistency’s sake.
• Close: this is the big red button that outright closes a window (if an app has multiple windows open) or closes the window and quits the app (if it has only one window open). This feature can also be activated with ⌘W (again, matching macOS) and it’s what you need to use if you want to remove a window from your current workspace without having it end up as a standalone window in the recent apps strip.

So that’s the new multitasking menu, and I think Apple has been doing a pretty good job so far enhancing it with new options, labels, and associated hotkeys compared to last year. There is, however, a third way to bring windows onto the stage, which is based on one of the core elements of Stage Manager: the aforementioned recent apps strip.

The strip is a fascinating UI element that serves multiple purposes in Stage Manager. At a high level, it’s a quick switcher that displays your four most recently used workspaces², which you can switch between by simply clicking one of the window thumbnails in the strip. As you do that, workspaces will fly in and out of the strip with a smooth 3D animation, which is one of my favorite aspects of Stage Manager’s design.

There are other functionalities hidden in the strip beyond previewing and clicking workspaces though. The first one is the ability to add windows to the current workspace by grabbing them from the strip and throwing them onto the stage. The behavior here is similar to using drag and drop from the dock or Spotlight, with one key difference: when you’re grabbing a window from the strip, you’ll see a live preview of the window as you drag it around, and other windows in the stage will try to automatically resize to the left or right to make room for the new window before you drop it.

You can grab windows from the recent apps strip and drop them into the current workspace.

Furthermore, as of last week’s beta and today’s public beta, Apple has integrated a brand new window picker with the recent apps strip as well. Think of this as Shelf 2.0: if instead of clicking on a window thumbnail in the strip you click on the app icon of a window, the strip will morph into a filtered view that shows you just the multiple open windows for the selected app.

Click an app icon in the strip…

…and the strip becomes a window picker. The only problem: this window picker doesn’t have a ‘+’ button to create a new window for the selected app.

At this stage (no pun intended), I don’t think Apple has figured out the design and flow of managing and picking multiple windows just yet: clicking an icon in the strip is a fairly hidden operation; there is a ‘Show All Windows’ button in the context menu you get by long-pressing an app icon, which should bring up the same UI, but sometimes it doesn’t work. As I’ll cover below, I haven’t been able to pick and manage multiple windows when working with Stage Manager on an external monitor either since it always leads to a restart of my iPad Pro in the current beta. However, I do believe Apple is on the right track here. Integrating the window picker with the recent apps strip makes sense from a spatial perspective, and it’s one less UI we have to deal with.

All this brings me to actually working with Stage Manager and going from a system that only supported two simultaneous apps to an environment that lets me use up to four at the same time, with the ability to resize and arrange them onscreen with different layouts.

I won’t lie: Stage Manager is a major paradigm shift for the iPadOS platform, and it took me a while to get used to it. Now that I have, in spite of the issues and bugs that are to be expected at this point in the beta cycle, I can say that Stage Manager is already having a positive impact on how I work on my iPad Pro. It lets me accomplish more things, more quickly, with less friction than before. This isn’t a surprise: by doubling the number of active windows I can see and use at once, iPadOS 16 has halved the steps I need to take to do anything that involves more than two apps.

Just the other day, I was writing this article in Obsidian, checking some reference material in Notes, reading some questions about iPadOS from members in our Discord, and viewing some of my liked tweets in the Twitter app about Stage Manager. Before, I would have had to create two discrete Split Views and switch between them, disrupting my writing workflow in Obsidian while jumping between apps. That’s not the case anymore with Stage Manager, which lets me work with four windows – albeit at a much smaller size – in the same workspace. Those four apps are active windows: the power of the M1 can keep them running at the same time without breaking a sweat, and I can seamlessly switch between them by clicking them or cycling through them with a keyboard shortcut; I can even drag and drop files and other content between them. For an iPad user like me, and especially someone who had grown dissatisfied with the lack of pro features on the platform, the productivity gains yielded by Stage Manager are objectively measurable in the time I spend doing more and jumping between workspaces less.

One of my workspaces in Stage Manager.

I know what you’re thinking, though. Aren’t you the guy who wrote about disliking overlapping and resizable windows just a month ago? Yes, I am. And what’s different now is what I mentioned earlier in this section: with Stage Manager, Apple didn’t simply slap the Mac’s multitasking system onto the iPad; instead, they took the essence of what users like me wanted (more apps onscreen) and reimagined how that kind of workflow should feel like. This is what Apple has done time and time again with macOS features brought over to the iPad; they’ve done it again with Stage Manager.

This is perhaps the most controversial aspect of Stage Manager at the moment: it doesn’t behave like traditional macOS windowing, and it’s a more “guided” environment where the system takes away some freedom from you in order to make the overall experience more pleasant.

For example: with Stage Manager you can’t place an app window exactly anywhere you want: there are “zones” of the stage where windows “snap” (for lack of a better term), and the more windows you bring in, the more Stage Manager will try to, well, manage them for you by rearranging them ever so slightly so that everything can be as accessible as possible. And let me be clear: I do not personally mind this. In fact, it’s one of the reasons I find Stage Manager more intuitive to use than macOS’ classic windowing system.

When you open a new app in Stage Manager, by default it is placed in the middle of the screen, with the dock and strip shown at the bottom and on the left side of the screen, respectively. If I want, I can start working like this and switch between individual apps from the dock, strip, or Spotlight, or I can resize the window to make it smaller. Resizing windows is where Stage Manager feels more similar to macOS. Windows can be resized by hovering with the pointer over any edge of the window, and the pointer will transform into a resize tool that lets you resize a window vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. Alternatively, since this is iPadOS, you can resize a window using touch by grabbing a new pulling indicator shown at the bottom right or left corner of a window (it’s not clear to me right now why the placement of this element sometimes changes).

This is the pulling indicator you can grab with your finger to resize windows.

Here’s where Stage Manager differs from the Mac: when you resize a window, it’s not a smooth live resize like on macOS: instead, windows are resized using size classes, meaning that a window will rearrange its content and UI elements on the fly as you resize. Visually, the effect may appear somewhat jarring at first, but it’s consistent with how app windows have always resized and behaved on iPadOS, and it makes sense to me now. If I make the Safari window iPhone-sized (which is something Stage Manager lets you do in addition to using iPhone apps alongside iPad apps in the same workspace), I know that its top toolbar will become a bottom toolbar and that its sidebar will be hidden. Here’s what this looks like in practice:

While some might have liked to see a brand new UI layout system more similar to macOS, the advantage of Apple’s approach here is that window resizing requires virtually nothing new from developers to optimize their apps for Stage Manager beyond the APIs they are already supposed to support on iPadOS. Obsidian is a perfect example here: the app is far from feeling native on Apple’s platforms, but because its developers did the work to support Split View, Slide Over, and Auto Layout before, it works out of the box with Stage Manager when you resize its window. Make it very small, and Stage Manager will turn it into the iPhone version of the app, running on iPad alongside three more apps in a Stage Manager workspace.

If you want, you can make every window super small in Stage Manager and use iPad apps that look like iPhone apps. I think I have achieved peak Stage Manager here.

As you bring more apps on the stage, you may want to rearrange them onscreen and design a workspace where every app is at your fingertips. In this case, Stage Manager tries to help by subtly moving other windows to make room for a new one or ensuring that an existing window remains accessible even if one is covering it. Consider the interaction below: I want to drag the Reminders window all the way to the right edge of the display, but Stage Manager doesn’t let me do it. The reason: there’s a Timery window underneath it, and when I let go of the Reminders window I grabbed, the system makes a tiny part of the Timery one peek from behind so that I can click it to bring it to the foreground again.

Stage Manager is full of interactions like this, and they’re hard to explain with words – you’ll have to try it yourself to see what I mean. Now, I realize that for many “multiwindowing purists” out there, the idea of the OS moving windows on your behalf may sound like outright heresy. I get it. The way I see it, though, the point of Stage Manager isn’t to achieve pure, fully user-controlled spatial multitasking: Stage Manager wants to help you work with multiple windows and remove some of the burden of placing and resizing windows from you. If that upsets you, I understand. But for someone like me, who literally complained about carefully resizing and placing windows on macOS last month, the “handholding” of Stage Manager is precisely how I hoped Apple could make window management more intuitive in a system where windows overlap.

That said, the complexity of window management isn’t gone completely, even with the adjustments offered by Stage Manager. The one operation I struggle with the most at the moment is grabbing windows and moving them around. Unlike macOS, where windows have a large area at the top that you can grab to move them around, iPad app windows have a smaller, invisible area above the title bar that is supposed to be where you can click and hold with the pointer to grab them. I often fail to find the exact spot where I should grab a window, which results in an accidental click somewhere else in an app’s title bar. I don’t know how Apple can fix this, but something I’d like to see is a behavior similar to the Quick Note floating window on iPadOS: swiping with two fingers on the title bar to throw a window around the screen. Right now, I have to be very intentional about clicking and dragging, and I wish it was easier.

This is the small area of an app window that is draggable. It’s not very comfortable to do with the pointer.

The other aspect of Stage Manager where I’m struggling right now, and which I will have to cover with more stable betas later this year, is its integration within external displays. At long last, Apple is letting us go beyond basic display mirroring when a monitor is connected to the iPad Pro and they’re bringing Stage Manager to external displays as well. This means that, with my 2021 iPad Pro, I can run a whopping 8 apps at once: four in Stage Manager on the iPad, and another set of four on the external display. All the interactions I covered above stay the same, but obviously – depending on the size of your monitor – you’ll have a much bigger canvas to use and manage your app windows.

My iPad Pro and external 4K monitor.

I’m excited about external display integration with Stage Manager: I’m building a new home office space this summer, and I’m already thinking about designing a physical workspace where I can sit down, plug an iPad Pro into my monitor, and use it as a desktop workstation. I’m especially intrigued by the fact that you can use an external monitor with Stage Manager but revert the iPad to traditional Split View and Slide Over: with that kind of “hybrid multitasking”, I could have a more focused environment with two apps on the iPad, then a set of workspaces on the monitor. My problem is that, as I mentioned above, all of this is pretty much theoretical at the moment since external display support has been very crash-y for me in these first three developer betas of iPadOS 16, to the point of being nearly unusable. Whenever I try to pick a window from an app that has multiple windows open and is running on the external display, the whole system crashes and soft-reboots, for instance. I believe Apple is aware of these issues, and I look forward to trying this out again with upcoming beta releases.

When a display is connected, a ‘Move to Display’ button gets added to the multitasking menu.

As they refine this functionality, I also hope they bring more flexibility to it: right now, you can only move one app window at a time from the iPad to the external monitor; you can do so by clicking ‘Move to Display’ in the multitasking menu. You can’t move an entire workspace at once from the iPad to a monitor, nor can you move windows by dragging them across displays, like you can on a Mac.

Here is a screenshot of a giant version of Mail I captured running in full-screen on my 4K monitor.

I should also note that there are other features beyond Stage Manager that are helping reshape the iPad narrative this year. In fact, there are dozens of these additions that Apple marketed under the banner of “desktop-class features” that are coming from macOS to iPadOS to allow for greater feature parity between platforms. I can’t list them all today, but I want to cover a couple of highlights.

The ‘Display Zoom’ setting has gained a new ‘More Space’ option that makes everything a bit smaller to fit more content onscreen. This option, which I enabled right away, is particularly handy in Stage Manager, where the higher resolution lets you see more of every app window at once. On a device where space is at a premium, you’ll probably want to make sure you can squeeze every pixel out of the Liquid Retina Display to see as much content as possible. The difference with the ‘Standard’ zoom level is quite stark, as you can see below.

Standard display scaling.

The new ‘More Space’ setting. You can see how everything is a bit smaller to fit more content onscreen at once. In this mode, the iPad Pro’s virtual resolution goes from 2732x2048 to 3180x2384.

Then there’s the plethora of app features and advanced options Apple brought from macOS to iPadOS this year to make the lives of iPad power users easier. For the first time, Apple is bringing customizable toolbars to iPad apps: already available in apps like Notes, Reminders, and Mail, this longstanding macOS feature has been reimagined for iPad apps so that you’ll be able to put your favorite controls front and center, or perhaps hide the ones you don’t need. I almost couldn’t believe Apple really brought this very specific Mac feature to iPadOS, but they did, and it works well.

Toolbar customization in iPadOS 16.

The Files app is getting a big upgrade in iPadOS 16 with redesigned (and Mac-like) open/save dialogs, the ability to rename file extensions (finally!), quick actions, and a new ‘browser’ UI mode (which developers can also use) that integrates a new document menu and navigation in the folder hierarchy. There is a new, system-wide find and replace menu for apps that deal with text searches. The list of desktop-class improvements goes on and on, and I’ll have to revisit it all for my iPadOS 16 review later this year.

As things stand today, I’m still wrapping my head around all the implications of Stage Manager for my iPad workflow, but, if what I’ve seen so far is of any indication, I feel comfortable saying Stage Manager is going to kickstart a whole new era of my iPad story.

More than ever before, I feel like iPadOS 16 shows Apple is fully embracing the iPad’s modular nature: the very fact that Stage Manager is a mode of iPad multitasking is proof of Apple recognizing the iPad’s strengths in its versatility – its ability to be one and many types of computer, to be the ideal machine for average users as well as power users like me. Stage Manager successfully walks the line of making me more productive without leaving my workspace a mess, which has always been the case for me on macOS. And when I want to go back to using my iPad Pro as “just a tablet”, disabling Stage Manager and switching modes is just one swipe away in Control Center.

In just over a month, Stage Manager and all the other desktop-class enhancements in iPadOS 16 have rekindled my passion for the iPad ecosystem.

What I’d Like to See Improved in iPadOS 16 and Stage Manager

• More stability with Stage Manager on an external display. The system shouldn’t crash when I try to pick a specific window for an app running on an external monitor.
• Offer the ability to transfer an entire workspace from the iPad to an external monitor with a menu.
• Add the ability to drag windows across displays.
• Let me choose where audio should play if an external display is connected. When I connect my external display to the iPad Pro, audio gets automatically routed to the display’s speakers and there is no way to force it to play on the iPad Pro’s (superior) speakers.
• Show a menu when right-clicking a workspace in the strip. This menu could include the ability to move a workspace to an external display, close all the apps in it, or perhaps pin it to the top of the list for persistent access.
• Show the recent apps strip in portrait mode as well.
• Add a ‘+’ button to the window picker to create a new window for the selected app.
• Integrate Stage Manager with Shortcuts. Specifically, I’d Iike to see Shortcuts actions to toggle back and forth whether I want to see the dock and strip in Stage Manager.
• Make it easier to grab an app window and drag it around the stage.
• Add a keyboard shortcut to show the recent apps strip. If the strip is turned off, or if it’s covered by app, you can move the pointer to the left edge of the screen to bring it up temporarily. There should be a keyboard shortcut to do this, just like there is already one to do the same with the dock.
• Make the Safari toolbar customizable too. I find it odd that, of all the Apple apps that support customizable toolbars in iPadOS 16, Safari doesn’t let you customize its toolbar and pin your favorite extensions there.

iOS 16

While I’ve spent the better part of last month using and thinking about iPadOS 16 and Stage Manager (which is going to be the focus of my review this year, as you can imagine), I’m also intrigued by iOS 16 and the features it’ll bring to consumers once it launches. Although I look at iOS 16 as one big feature (the new Lock Screen) followed by a collection of smaller, but nice quality-of-life additions, there’s still plenty to discuss on the iPhone side of things, too.

My impression of iOS 16 is that Apple aims to replicate – and perhaps even exceed – the success of iOS 14 by focusing on user personalization on the one big missing area from two years ago with iOS 14 widgets: the Lock Screen. With iOS 16, you’ll be able to take control of the Lock Screen experience and make it your own by customizing four different aspects of it: the wallpaper, fonts and colors, integration with Focus modes, and – the big addition – widgets.

The new Lock Screen in iOS 16. Notifications now roll in at the bottom of the screen (left), can be made more compact with a swipe down (center), and you can still open the full Notification Center (right).

The first thing you’ll notice about the iOS 16 Lock Screen is that notifications have been relocated to the bottom of the display. Incoming alerts now roll in at the bottom of the screen, and although you can still swipe the list to expand it vertically (thus entering Notification Center), I prefer this look since I find notifications less distracting than before. Even better, you can swipe those notifications down and turn them into a compact ‘badge mode’ that only shows you how many unread notifications you have. When you want to see them again, you can tap the label or swipe up again. Swiping notifications down has already become second nature to me and I can’t believe we’ve gone all these years with alerts persistently displayed front and center on the entire Lock Screen. How did we live like that?

The reason to make notifications less obtrusive is simple: giving the Lock Screen more room to breathe and making the wallpaper and widgets the main protagonists of the first screen you see when you pick up your iPhone. At a high level, there are two main areas you can customize in the iOS 16 Lock Screen: the wallpaper and the upper section with the clock and widgets around it. Entering Lock Screen customization is a new mode that involves long-pressing in the middle of the Lock Screen, which opens a gallery UI where you can create multiple Lock Screens, see the ones you’ve already created, and manage them. If this design reminds you of switching between watch faces on Apple Watch, it’s because the entire system is very much based on that.

Long-press on the Lock Screen to enter the new Lock Screen customization mode, where you can manage Lock Screens and create new ones.

When you create a new Lock Screen, the first thing you’ll see is Apple’s new wallpaper gallery. This page includes a collection of wallpapers created by Apple organized in categories, plus a selection of featured photos from your library, and other color options for gradient-based wallpapers you can create for a more minimalist look. Apple has created a bunch of cool wallpaper packs for the occasion: there are live Weather wallpapers based on conditions for your location; there are Astronomy wallpapers with various shots of the Earth and Moon, including one that zooms in on your current place on Earth; there are emoji wallpapers that let you combine emoji with different, fun patterns, Unity and Pride wallpapers, and more. Even the clownfish are back for this.

The new Lock Screen wallpaper gallery.

Alternatively, you can also get to the wallpaper customzation screen from Settings.

While I’ve never been a photo wallpaper person myself, iOS 16 is making me reconsider thanks to its array of Photos-related options on the Lock Screen. Besides the usual ability to pick any image from your library and use it as a wallpaper, iOS 16’s Lock Screen customization includes a Photo Shuffle mode that can automatically and intelligently shuffle through different categories of photos as analyzed from your library. Once iOS 16 has indexed your photo library, Photo Shuffle will let you choose to shuffle photos of people, pets, nature, and cities found in your library. You can determine the shuffle frequency (including options for hourly or every time you wake your iPhone) or, if you want, avoid the system’s suggestions altogether and shuffle through a group of specific photos you manually select upfront (and which you can tweak over time).

You can set up the Photo Shuffle smart wallpaper choosing from content types found in your Photos library.

Or, you can manually select some photos you like and set up Photo Shuffle based on that selection.

What I like about Photo Shuffle is that it’s “curated randomness”: you’re always going to see a subset of your photos, but the system rotates through them, making your Lock Screen feel new and different according to the refresh interval you’ve set. For instance, I went in and selected 30+ photos of my dogs Zelda and Ginger; thanks to Photo Shuffle, every hour I see a different photo of them on my Lock Screen, and it brings a smile to my face every time. You can imagine the potential of this feature for photos of loved ones or particular places and what it does in terms of making the Lock Screen feel alive and personal. Even more impressive: there’s an optional ‘depth effect’ mode that will create a beautiful overlapping effect with the clock for photos where the subject is clearly separated from the background (they don’t have to be portrait shots). I haven’t seen this effect for my photos yet, but as you can tell from the images John sent me, when it works, it looks very nice.³

Lock Screens with the depth effect enabled. You can see how iOS 16 was able to isolate the subject in these non-portrait photos and create a neat visual effect with the clock.

If this new kind of wallpaper customization isn’t enough, wait until you see what you can do with fonts and widgets. Once you’ve set a wallpaper, iOS 16 lets you customize three parts of the Lock Screen: the clock, widgets above the clock, and widgets below the clock. For the system clock, you can now choose between 8 different fonts (I like the chunky serif one) and pick any color you want for it either via a color palette or the system color picker. The combination of different fonts and colors can lead to Lock Screens that feel wildly different from each other by simply tweaking these two aspects. I think a lot of people are going to spend way too much time fiddling around with this, and I love it. That’s exactly the point of personalization.

Customizing fonts and colors on the iOS 16 Lock Screen.

Widgets are going to be the star of the show here, but I think it’s too early to judge them given that, so far, only widgets for Apple apps can be installed; we’ll have to wait for third-party developers to support them in their apps this fall.

Lock Screen widgets are very similar to Apple Watch complications (in fact, starting with watchOS 9, they’re even based on the same WidgetKit technology) in terms of design and size, but they’re installed and configured with the same interactions previously seen for Home Screen widgets. There are three types of widgets: small inline widgets you can place above the clock, rectangular widgets, and small, circular ones that very much look and feel like watchOS complications. To browse widgets, you can use a widget gallery similar to the one seen on the Home Screen, where you can see live previews of widgets offered by each app installed on your iPhone. Once a widget is on the Lock Screen, you can configure it by entering customization mode and tapping it.

The widget gallery on the Lock Screen is similar to the one previously seen on the Home Screen.

Lock Screen widgets will be a big deal in iOS 16, for a couple of reasons.

First, they’re going to bring useful, glanceable information to the Lock Screen, allowing you to see little bits of content without unlocking your iPhone. In my case, I added widgets for Reminders and Clock, so I can now easily see what else is left in my todo list for the day and what the time is in New York without having to open those apps. The whole ‘glanceable’ design and technology pioneered two years ago is, if anything, better suited for the Lock Screen than the Home Screen: the Lock Screen is indeed what I “glance at” the most during the day, and I love that iOS 16 now lets me make it more useful and personal with native widgets. I have no doubt this feature will be a resounding success among developers and users later this year.

The second, perhaps even more important reason why widgets are a big deal: their design and technological implementation under the hood strongly suggests that Apple is working on an always-on Lock Screen for the iPhone 14 Pro line this year. Just like you can always glance at complications on the always-on face of the Apple Watch, you’ll likely be able to do the same with an iPhone too. If I were to guess, I’d say that the iPhone 14 Pro will always show you the clock, widgets, and the number of unread notifications at the bottom of the screen.

I’ve had fun customizing my iPhone Lock Screen over the past month, but, like I said, I’m waiting for the developers of my favorite apps show off what they’ve been working on. I can only imagine what apps like Timery and Apollo will be able to do with Lock Screen widgets, for instance. So far, I’ve only been able to test two third-party Lock Screen widgets on iOS 16: Parcel, the excellent delivery tracking app, and Lock Screen Contact Widgets, created by indie developer Rihab Mehboob. The latter is especially interesting since it lets you pin your favorite contacts to the Lock Screen for fast access to phone calls, and it’s a first example of the kind of utilities we’re going to see on the App Store later this year.

Speaking of developers and the Lock Screen: another feature I’m excited about, but which unfortunately won’t launch alongside iOS 16.0 in the fall, is what Apple calls Live Activities. As I covered last month, these are special, richer-looking live notifications that float along the bottom of the Lock Screen and which are meant to convey live updates in lieu of sending you multiple, standalone alerts. Apple’s examples at WWDC included getting updates for a basketball game or an Uber you’ve ordered in real-time. While there is no developer API for Live Activities at the moment, Apple itself is using them already for the new Now Playing controls and timers on the Lock Screen, pictured below. The only caveat: Apple’s Live Activities are interactive (you can control music or stop timers), but third-party ones won’t be, so I’ll reserve my judgment on this feature for later this year.

The Now Playing controls and Lock Screen timers have been reworked as special Live Activities in iOS 16.

I haven’t been able to find a useful use case for this yet on my iPhone, but all these Lock Screen changes also tie into Focus, which is getting a substantial upgrade in iOS 16. Essentially, each Lock Screen can now be tied to a particular Focus mode, and you can even combine a Lock Screen, Home Screen, and watch face together so they all become active at once when a specific Focus mode is engaged. In addition, Focus itself is easier to set up thanks to an allow/deny list for people and apps (so you can create a Focus that silences notifications from specific people/apps or allows notifications from them) and Apple is rolling out the ability to hide app content when a Focus is active. These are called Focus Filters, and there’s also a developer API for it. I think you can see where Apple is going with this: imagine turning on your ‘Work’ Focus and instantly getting a specific Lock Screen-Home Screen combo with work apps on it, notifications silenced from specific apps, and things like your work calendar or work email accounts in compatible apps. Again, I haven’t found a use case for this yet (also because I don’t work in an office and don’t commute), but I think extending Focus to app content is a natural evolution for this functionality that I’m keen to try out later this year.

New Focus settings in iOS 16.

The rest of iOS 16 is best described as a collection of quality-of-life enhancements throughout the system and inside built-in apps that, considered together, make the OS smarter, more versatile, and more pleasant to use. I tweeted about this a few weeks ago: one of my favorite additions to iOS 16 is system-wide conversion for units and measurements powered by Live Text. Now, whenever you get an iMessage that mentions Fahrenheit degrees, square feet, or any other unit, you can tap the recognized data detector right away to get an instant conversion based on your locale. This even works in the copy & paste menu for selected text and supports time zones too; I absolutely love these Live Text additions, and I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve already relied on this feature to convert international times I received in an email or found in a tweet. Units are recognized everywhere, including in photos and still video frames (also new in Live Text).

System-wide conversion for units and time zones is one of my favorite additions in iOS 16.

I’ve been impressed by the updated Reminders app in iOS 16, and I’m glad I decided to switch back to it full-time months ago. In iOS 16, smart lists have been vastly improved with the ability to filter more criteria, have conditions that match any or all filters, and exclude lists or tags from a smart list. You can pin smart lists to the top section of the Reminders sidebar for faster access, and the Today view has been redesigned so that it now automatically groups tasks based on the time of day, similar to how the Things app does it. Something that I also think I’ll spend some time learning and setting up this summer is support for reusable and shareable checklists: Reminders in iOS 16 lets you share entire checklists with other people as templates, and I’m thinking of ways I could use this to, say, share media recommendations or guided itineraries for people visiting Rome. Reminders continues to grow into a very capable and modern task manager for all kinds of people; I think we’re going to see a lot of “Reminders switchers” in our community this year.

Reminders is getting another substantial update in iOS 16 with features such as templates and new filters for smart lists.

I’m equally glad I switched back to Apple’s Mail app a few months back. Much to my surprise, Apple finally found the time to work on the Mail app this year, and they’ve modernized it with features such as reminders (essentially, snoozing for messages), send later, undo send, and – this one deserves a big Finally – completely revamped search that is faster and more reliable than before. Mail’s lackluster search was the single reason why I couldn’t continue using the app in previous years, and I’m happy to say Apple delivered here: the correct results come up immediately as you search now, keywords are highlighted in yellow in matching messages, and the system even accounts for typos in your search queries and offers helpful suggestions to find what you may be looking for. I almost can’t believe I’m typing this, but Mail is…good now? Smart mailboxes are the only missing feature for me at this point, but given Apple’s newfound love for these options in Reminders and Notes, I have to believe they’ll be coming to Mail eventually as well.

Is this real life? Or is this just fantasy?

As you can imagine, there are literally hundreds of other new features in iOS 16 I can’t possibly cover today. Medication reminders in Health are great, and they’ve helped me get rid of Due, which I was mostly using to remember to take my vitamins in the morning. Safari tab groups have been improved with the ability to tie a tab group to a Focus mode, a Shortcuts action to open a specific group, and the ability to have tab group-specific favorites (I like this a lot). Shortcuts run much faster than before and its modal alerts and lists no longer block interactions with the rest of the system’s UI. There is support for turning on keyboard haptics in Accessibility, which makes typing feel a lot more fun and Android-like (I enabled this right away and can’t imagine ever disabling it). The Home app has a design that makes sense now, and there’s a proper grid view for your HomeKit cameras.

Medication reminders, powered by the Health app, have replaced Due on my iPhone for these kinds of alerts.

The list of these updated features and quality-of-life improvements goes on and on. But like I said, we’re going to have to wait for the fall for a proper review.

What I’d Like to See Improved in iOS 16

• Offer a Shortcuts actions to retrieve the list of tabs from a tab group. iOS 16 adds a new ‘Open Tab Group’ action in Shortcuts, but I’d like to see one to get the URLs of tabs in a group, too.
• Support excluding multiple lists as a filter for smart lists in Reminders. In the updated Reminders app, you can now create a smart list that collects tasks from all lists except one. This is great, but I’d like to exclude multiple lists, not just one. What’s odd is that although you can already exclude multiple tags, you can only pick one list to exclude.
• Bring more fonts to the Lock Screen. Because why not? Give us some weird fonts to make our Lock Screens look extra different.
• Let me use another row of widgets underneath the clock. Apple probably isn’t going to do this in iOS 16, but I’d still love to have a secondary row of widgets to have even more information on the Lock Screen.

It’s Public Beta Time

There’s a lot I haven’t covered today in both iPadOS and iOS 16. And as you can imagine, I still have questions that haven’t been answered today. Will Apple listen to users’ feedback and bring a limited version of Stage Manager to older iPads as well? (I covered this topic here.) What will developer adoption of Lock Screen widgets be like, and how limited will the WidgetKit framework turn out to be for apps that want to push real-time information to the Lock Screen? With Stage Manager now a reality on iPad, will more developers be convinced to modernize their iPad apps with features such as multi-column layouts, multi-window, and keyboard shortcuts? Are we done seeing improvements to Stage Manager or customization options on the Lock Screen? I can’t answer these questions today, but you can rest assured I’ll be keeping an eye on these themes over the next couple of months.

What I do know today is this: on iOS 16, Apple is now telling a much more consistent, cohesive story with the Lock Screen, Home Screen, and Focus, and this is just the beginning before the arrival of third-party Lock Screen widgets and the always-on Lock Screen on future iPhones. As for iPadOS 16: Stage Manager and desktop-class features are exactly what I hoped the powerful M1 foundation of the iPad Pro family would allow Apple to build. And if Apple doesn’t make an even bigger iPad in the future, I’d be shocked. If there ever was an argument in favor of a large ‘iPad Studio’ device, Stage Manager would be it.

The public betas of iOS and iPadOS 16 are available now. Go download them if you’re feeling curious and want to experience the future of the iPad two months in advance. I’ll see you this fall, ready, as always, with my annual review of iOS and iPadOS.

You can also follow our 2022 Summer OS Preview Series through our dedicated hub, or subscribe to its RSS feed.

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Thursday is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. To mark the occasion, Apple has announced a long list of accessibility features coming to its products later this year and shared other ways it is celebrating the day through its apps and services.

Apple’s press release sums up the features coming to the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch as follows:

Using advancements across hardware, software, and machine learning, people who are blind or low vision can use their iPhone and iPad to navigate the last few feet to their destination with Door Detection; users with physical and motor disabilities who may rely on assistive features like Voice Control and Switch Control can fully control Apple Watch from their iPhone with Apple Watch Mirroring; and the Deaf and hard of hearing community can follow Live Captions on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Apple is also expanding support for its industry-leading screen reader VoiceOver with over 20 new languages and locales. These features will be available later this year with software updates across Apple platforms.

Door Detection will be part of the Magnifier app later this year. The feature helps blind and low vision users find and navigate doors when they arrive somewhere. The feature will judge the distance to the door using LiDAR, describe the door’s attributes, like whether it opens by pushing or using a doorknob, and read signs and symbols next to doors.

Apple Watch Mirroring.

The Apple Watch will add several Physical and Motor accessibility features too. Apple Watch Mirroring, which is built on AirPlay in part, will allow users with physical and motor disabilities to control their Watches from an iPhone using Voice Control, Switch Control, voice commands, sound actions, head tracking, and Made for iPhone switches. The Apple Watch will also add a new double pinch gesture for controlling, like answering and ending phone calls and taking photos.

Apple Watch will add a new double pinch gesture.

For Deaf and hard of hearing users, Apple will add Live Captions on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Apple says captioning will work with video calling apps like FaceTime, streaming video services, video conferencing apps, and in-person conversations. Live Captions occur on-device to preserve privacy, and on the Mac, users will be able to type a response that will be spoken aloud.

VoiceOver will get an update, too, adding the following languages:

• Arabic (World)
• Basque
• Bengali (India)
• Bhojpuri (India)
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Croatian
• Farsi
• French (Belgium)
• Galician
• Kannada
• Malay
• Mandarin (Liaoning, Shaanxi, Sichuan)
• Marathi
• Shanghainese (China)
• Spanish (Chile)
• Slovenian
• Tamil
• Telugu
• Ukrainian
• Valencian
• Vietnamese

VoiceOver on the Mac will also gain Text Checker that will discover formatting issues.

Additional upcoming accessibility features.

Apple previewed several other upcoming accessibility features across its products, including:

• Buddy Controller, the ability for someone to use a second game controller to assist with playing a game as though the two controllers were one
• Siri Pause Time, which will allow users to customize the period Siri waits before responding to a user
• Voice Control Spelling Mode, for dictating words letter-by-letter
• Customizable sound recognition of the sounds in your environment
• New themes and text adjustments in the Books app for a more accessible reading experience

Apple apps and services are celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day, too.

Also, Apple has announced that Global Accessibility Awareness Day is being celebrated with Apple Store sessions, an Accessibility Assistant shortcut in the Shortcuts app, special Fitness+ sessions and Time to Walk or Push episodes, an accessibility-oriented Maps guide, and highlighted content on the App Store and in Apple Books Apple Podcasts, Apple Music and Apple TV.

We’ve seen Apple announce accessibility features coming to future versions of its OSes before, but today’s announcement is unique given the number of features revealed. I’m eager to try these features out. Based on what Apple has said, there seems to be a lot here that will make meaningful impacts on a lot of users’ everyday lives.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

Source: Adobe.

Today, Adobe announced substantial updates to Fresco, its drawing and painting app for the iPhone and iPad, and its image editor, Photoshop for iPad. I haven’t had a chance to spend much time with these updates yet, but based on Adobe’s announcement, the changes promise to be among the most significant releases yet.

Source: Adobe.

Fresco is adding a magic wand selection tool that allows selections to be made based on color. A slider adjusts the color that defines the selection, which gives artists fine-grained control over what is selected. As with magic wand tools in other Adobe products, the purpose of the new tool is to eliminate tedious manual selection methods where possible.

Source: Adobe.

The app has also added a liquify tool that blends colors on Fresco’s canvas as though they were paint. Liquify, which is part of the Transform set of tools, allows users to push, pull, and mix adjacent colors in a way that looks quite natural in Adobe’s demonstrations.

Fresco first added tools that brought compositions to life with motion last year. Today’s update adds the ability to adjust the opacity of motion frames from the Frames action menu and move, resize, and rotate motion paths. Fresco’s update includes several other new features, including a recent brushes list, new vector manga brushes, and the ability to define reference layers, a handy way to separate line work from color fill work, and capture a perspective grid from an imported image.

Source: Adobe.

The Photoshop update has added a new AI-based Content-Aware Fill tool that can use surrounding parts of an image to remove and fill unwanted sections of an image with a single tap. Content-Aware Fill is one of the marquee Photoshop features on the Mac, so it’s nice to see it added to the iPad now too. The app has also added a single-tap background removal and replacement tool, which relies on Adobe’s Select Subject technology.

Source: Adobe.

To make quick adjustments to an image, Adobe has introduced auto-tone, color, and contrast tools to Photoshop too. Adobe says these are three of the most frequent actions taken by users on the desktop, so bringing them to the iPad should make it a much more attractive platform for editing images. Adobe’s font browser with over 20,000 fonts is available on Photoshop for iPad too.

I continue to be impressed with the pace at which Adobe apps, but especially Fresco and Photoshop, are advancing on the iPad. Both have grown into some of the most sophisticated iPad apps available and feel natural and native to the platform in the way they implement the equivalent of desktop features on the iPad.

Fresco and Photoshop are available as free downloads on the App Store and offer In-App Purchases to unlock certain features.

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Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

According to Allen, Paper was born from the ashes of Microsoft’s prototype device called the Courier, which was never released:

While Paper was born in 2012, its roots go back a few years prior when we co-founders first met at Microsoft working on the idea for a new device called Courier. Before the iPad, this was a two-screen digital journal + pen with an entirely new OS and apps designed for a very un-Microsoft customer—creative types. Despite internal excitement for the product, Ballmer shut down Courier in 2010, and if it wasn’t for a leaked prototype video that caused a stir online, things might’ve ended there.

Allen’s post also describes the unconventional design decisions that drove Paper’s unique look and interaction model, which anyone interested in the history and process of app design will love. What really struck me, though, was Allen’s observations about the Paper’s resilience, which is more an exception than a rule:

Most apps from the early App Store-era that were hailed for their design are no longer with us (Path). Yet Paper is still here. And in much the same form as when it was first released having weathered the many tides of changing UI trends (flat design) and iOS updates. The same principles continued guiding it through new features, experiments, and even full rewrites. Every part replaced, yet its soul intact.

Yet, despite Paper’s longevity, even it isn’t immune from the impermanence of modern apps:

In writing this article, I wanted to get the original version of Paper 1.0 running on an old iPad. I tried for a full day but failed. A reminder that our work is transient—here for its moment and then gone.

I’m glad Allen shared these stories about Paper. Too many of the tales of the early App Store have already been lost, and Paper is an important milestone in that history that illustrates the kind of creativity and innovation that the iPad made possible.

→ Source: andy.works

ComicTrack is a new app from Joe Kimberlin for tracking and organizing the comic books you’ve read, are currently reading, and want to read. The idea is similar to his excellent videogame tracking app, GameTrack, but applied to comics. I’ve been using ComicTrack for a couple of weeks now, and it’s excellent. Of course, you’ll also need a separate app to read your comics, but having a dedicated app to organize what I’m reading and plan to read has single-handedly gotten me back into reading comics more regularly.

ComicTrack on the iPhone.

For context, I’ve always been a very casual comic book fan. I have Comixology and Shonen Jump installed on my iPad mini, but I often go weeks or months without touching either. It’s not a lack of interest, so much as a combination of not knowing where to start and having limited free time. ComicTrack hasn’t magically granted me more free time, but it has made getting started much easier by reducing the friction of picking something to read.

ComicTrack on the 12.9” iPad Pro in dark mode

I’m going to focus on the iPad version of ComicTrack because that’s where I read most of my comics, but the app also works and looks great on the iPhone and Mac, as you’ll see in the screenshots below. Everything syncs over iCloud too. Also, although I spend most of my time using the iPad version of ComicTrack, I find the iPhone and Mac apps indispensable for collecting new ideas of things to read. I run across comic books all the time via RSS, Twitter, podcasts, and friends’ recommendations. That doesn’t just happen when I’m using my iPad, but with ComicTrack on all the platforms I use, it’s easy to add something that catches my eye.

ComicTrack on the Mac.

On the iPad and Mac, ComicTrack uses a two-column layout with a sidebar on the left and content on the right. The sidebar can also be hidden to maximize the space available for your comic book collection. The iPhone uses a tab bar for moving between the app’s sections.

ComicTrack’s sidebar can be hidden.

The tinting used for most of the app’s text and buttons can be adjusted in Settings allowing you to pick between 11 different colors. There are also 18 icon choices available and light and dark themes, letting you pick from a wide variety of great looks.

Regular and Compact layouts on the iPad mini.

The content pane of ComicTrack displays a grid of cover art for each title by default that can be set to ‘Regular’ or ‘Compact.’ I prefer Regular sized art, but Compact is a nice option if you track a lot of comics. There’s also a list view option in the app’s settings that on an iPhone or compact iPad size class arranges items in horizontal lists instead of a grid of four items per category.

The Issues section.

The Series section.

The sidebar is where you organize your library. It’s divided into collapsable sections called Issues, Series, Lists, and Discover. Issues has four subcategories for comic books you’re currently reading, novels, recently added content, and an Up Next list that collects the next unread issues you’ve added to the app. As you can probably guess, the Series section collects multi-issue series of comic books.

The user-defined Lists section.

The Discovery section.

The Lists section is for user-defined lists. I haven’t used this section much yet, but I’ve created a Faves list for series that I’d recommend to others. Finally, the Discover section is broken down into four ways to explore new material: Featured, Popular, This Week, Last Week, and Publishers. ComicTrack uses ComicVine for its search engine, so I assume that’s where this content is pulled from too. If you’re at a loss of what to try next, Discover is a nice way to browse what’s new and popular.

ComicTrack search results.

Adding an issue or series.

Adding comic books to ComicTrack is simple. There’s a search button at the top of the screen that searches ComicVine’s extensive database. In my experience, the results are quite good, although sometimes the existence of multiple versions of a comic book can make picking the one you want a little difficult. If you tap on a series from the app’s search results, you can add the entire series or pick individual issues, which you’ll find at the bottom of the screen beneath the series description. I’ve generally found myself adding series to ComicTrack, but I’m glad the flexibility is available to pick and choose individual issues.

A series will show all issues unless filtered out, but Up Next shows the latest unread issue.

When you add a new issue or series, you’ll see a new entry in the series section of the app that has either the individual issues you’ve added or every issue in a series if you added the entire series. The first issue in each series will also show up in the Up Next list under Issues. Then as you work your way through issues chronologically, marking them as read will update your Up Next list with whichever issue in the series is next in line. New issues added to a series will appear automatically in ComicTrack as they’re published too.

The detail screen for an individual issue added to ComicTrack.

With a collection of series and issues saved in ComicTrack, it’s time to pick something and start reading. Tapping any issue pulls up a summary and related metadata like the release date, plus buttons to mark an issue as unread, read, or reading, a five-star rating system, and options to add the issue to a list you’ve created or delete it from the app. The same options are available by long-pressing on an issue’s cover art, which is how I usually manage issues. Long-pressing on an issue in a series has the added advantage of letting you mark all earlier issues as read at one time, which is handy if you’re adding a series of which you’ve already read several issues.

ComicTrack makes good use of context menus.

There are a few additional options that are unique to series too. If you select a series, More and Filter buttons appear in the toolbar. Tapping More allows you to add the series to one of your lists, rate the series as a whole, mark all of its issues as read, or delete it. The Filter button lets you filter a series by reading status, sort by name, issue number, or rating, and list issues in ascending or descending order.

ComicTrack makes picking up where you left off with your favorite comics simple.

I love ComicTrack for many of the same reasons I’m a fan of GameTrack. There are more comic books that I’d like to read than I’ll get to, which is the same problem I have with videogames. That problem isn’t going to be eliminated by either app, but both help with picking what to read or play next. Because I don’t follow comics closely, having a place to store what looks like something I’d like to read later has been fantastic. I immediately tossed some series I’ve partially read, old favorites I want to revisit, and a few new series into ComicTrack. Over the past couple of weeks, the app has made it much easier to sit down and pick up where I left off in a series or try something new. That should also make it easier to get back into a series when I inevitably get busy and take a month off from reading comics.

I’m also glad this is a separate comic book-focused app. Some types of media fit neatly into a generalized structure allowing media like movies, books, and music to be combined into one tracking app. Because comic books are serialized, though, the extra layer of organization between series and issues makes having a dedicated app a better solution. If you read comic books occasionally like I do or a lot, I highly recommend trying ComicTrack. The design, flexibility, and multi-platform features of ComicTrack, make it the best way I’ve found to organize your comic book reading.

ComicTrack is available on the App Store. The app is free to download and try, but unlimited series, reading lists, tint color options, additional icons, and multiple layouts require a subscription for $1.49/month or $9.99/year or as a one-time payment of $34.99.

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Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.