This Week's Sponsor:

PowerPhotos

The Ultimate Toolbox for Photos on the Mac

Posts tagged with "iPadOS"

Twitter iPad Apps Upgraded with Multiwindow Support, Keyboard Navigation

Twitterrific (left) and Twitter (right).

Twitterrific (left) and Twitter (right).

This fall has been a significant season for the iPad. While new hardware has been limited to an updated entry-level iPad, the software changes have more than made up for the dearth of hardware updates. September brought iPadOS, the new branch of iOS that packs advancements like multiwindowing, an upgraded Home screen, and more. Mere weeks after iPadOS launched, macOS Catalina enabled a host of iPad apps to be brought to the Mac, which in some cases meant those iPad apps became more Mac-like as a result.

Thanks to these recent software changes, a couple of key Twitter apps for iPad have been updated to offer key new functionality. Twitterrific has become the first Twitter client to add multiwindow support, enabling creating separate windows for different accounts or different views within the same account. The first-party Twitter app, meanwhile, has recently added extensive support for external keyboards, likely as a side benefit of the app making its way to the Mac. In both cases, the Twitter experience on iPad has been meaningfully improved in ways that power users will appreciate.

Read more

More than 200 New Emoji Coming Soon Are Now Available in iOS and iPadOS 13.2 Beta 2→

It’s October, which means Apple’s latest crop of emoji is right around the corner. As usual, Jeremy Burge at Emojipedia has all of the details. As previewed earlier this year, Apple will release its version of Emoji 12.0 from the Unicode Consortium this fall in iOS and iPadOS 13.2 and in a future update of macOS Catalina and watchOS 6 too.

The release of the new emoji is a long process. The first step came in February when the Unicode Consortium announced the details of the emoji that it had approved for 2019. Apple, like other platform vendors, took the specifications from the Unicode Consortium and implemented its interpretation of each emoji, which the company previewed in July.

Today, those emoji, plus a few that weren’t previewed on World Emoji Day in July, have been added to the iOS and iPadOS 13.2 betas. The new emoji should be shipped to the broader public as the official iOS and iPadOS 13.2 release soon. Among the new emoji are people in wheelchairs, skin tone support for people holding hands, a sloth, a waffle, a yawning face, a skunk, garlic, a yo-yo, and a flamingo.

For the first time today, Apple also revealed its emoji for an otter, a pinching hand, a beverage box, and a ringed planet. Also added to iOS and iPadOS 13.2 is a new emoji keyboard interaction for picking the skin tone for emoji that depict multiple people.

Emoji have become a significant driver of OS updates for Apple, and I expect this year will be no different. With the explosion of choices, though, I do wish Apple would implement an emoji search mechanism on iOS and iPadOS and improve the search functionality on the Mac.

Permalink

iOS and iPadOS 13 App Roundup: Multiwindow, Dark Mode, Shortcuts, and More

iOS and iPadOS 13 have been in users’ hands for several weeks now, and with the abundance of new capabilities those releases brought has come a wealth of third-party app updates. System dark mode has been adopted not just by indie developers, but also major social media apps; multiwindow has empowered users to work more flexibly on the iPad; context menus have introduced a new layer of functionality to both iPhone and iPad; and of course, Shortcuts is now simultaneously more powerful and more user friendly in iOS 13, unlocking possibilities that are only beginning to be explored.

We’ve covered a lot of the best app updates for iOS and iPadOS 13 in individual articles and through our Club MacStories newsletter, but today the MacStories team has a roundup to share of several other noteworthy app debuts and updates of late.

Read more

GoodNotes Adds Superior Multiwindowing, Dark Mode, and OCR Scanning

When Apple introduces a fundamental change to how apps interact with iOS (and now iPadOS), it’s always fascinating to see the different ways those changes are adopted by third-party developers. Although Apple sets a baseline for how new frameworks work, it has less control over how they are used, and it’s those implementation details that often have the greatest impact on users.

In the inaugural version of iPadOS, that’s been the case for multiwindowing. Many apps stick to the basic built-in ways to open multiple instances of the same app. However, the real power of multiwindowing is revealed by apps like GoodNotes, which goes the extra mile and provides an experience better than any other multiwindow app I’ve tried.

Dragging a PDF into a new window.Replay

What makes GoodNotes special is not just the sheer number of unique ways to open a second window for the app, though that’s impressive in itself, but the thoughtfulness of its execution. In every corner of the app where you might want to move a folder, document, page, or bit of data into a new window or document, you can. The result is a level of flexibility that even Apple’s own iWork suite doesn’t match, further cementing GoodNotes as my favorite app for taking handwritten notes.

Read more

Things Adds Multiwindow, iOS 13 Dark Mode, Shortcuts, New Share Extension, and Reminders Import

Today as Apple releases iPadOS into the world, Things 3 for both iPad and iPhone has fully updated to add multiwindow functionality on iPad, integration with iOS 13’s system dark mode, shortcuts with parameters, a share extension that introduces key new functionality, and finally a new Reminders Import feature for moving easily all your reminders into Things. There’s a lot to explore, so let’s dive in.

Read more

CARROT Weather Adopts iOS 13 Shortcuts, Dark Mode, Multiwindow, and More

The malevolent weather app CARROT Weather was updated this week to add support for the new capabilities provided by iOS 13 and the forthcoming iPadOS update. This latest version enables more powerful automations in the Shortcuts app, integration with the system dark mode, multiwindow support on iPad, and a fully independent watchOS 6 app. It’s the same CARROT app, but supercharged with all the new possibilities Apple just introduced for its software platforms.

Read more

LookUp 6 Review: The Biggest Update Yet for the Best Dictionary App

The average life cycle of an app typically consists of two phases: the app’s early days often bring a host of significant updates as it strives toward feature maturity; however, once that level of maturity is achieved, the updates become more iterative and unsurprising, largely aimed at keeping pace with new OS technologies. LookUp 6 defies that normal pattern. The sixth major version of the excellent iOS dictionary app weds two important themes: adopting all the relevant functionality enabled by Apple’s latest OS releases, while simultaneously adding substantial features like quizzes, translation, full navigation via keyboard, and more. Despite how modern and feature-rich LookUp already was, version 6 sets the app on even stronger footing at the dawn of Apple’s latest software releases.

Read more