Monday, June 6, 2022

iPadOS 16 Announced

Apple (feature list, MacRumors, Hacker News):

New features in Messages make it easy to start collaborating and manage shared content across Files, Keynote, Numbers, Pages, Notes, Reminders, and Safari, as well as third-party apps.

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Users can now edit or recall recently sent messages, recover recently deleted messages, and mark conversations as unread so they can come back to them later.

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Freeform, a powerful new collaboration app with a flexible canvas, gives users the ability to see, share, and collaborate all in one place without worrying about layouts and page sizes, and with full support for Apple Pencil.

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Users are given a moment to cancel delivery of a [Mail] message before it reaches a recipient’s inbox, schedule emails to be sent at the perfect moment, and move sent emails to the top of their inbox to quickly send a follow-up. Messages can also be resurfaced at any date and time with Remind Later, and users can get notified if they forget to include an important part of the message, like an attachment or recipient.

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Designed to take full advantage of the stunning display, Weather comes to iPad with beautiful animations.

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Powered by the performance of the Apple-designed M1 chip, Display Zoom now allows users to increase the pixel density of the display so they can view more in their apps, which is especially useful when using Split View. With Virtual Memory Swap, iPad storage can be used to expand the available memory for all apps, and delivers up to 16 gigabytes of memory for the most demanding apps, helping to make multitasking absolutely seamless.

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Stage Manager is an entirely new multitasking experience that automatically organizes apps and windows, making it quick and easy to switch between tasks. For the first time on iPad, users can create overlapping windows of different sizes in a single view, drag and drop windows from the side, or open apps from the Dock to create groups of apps for faster, more flexible multitasking.

Previously:

Update (2022-06-08): Steve Troughton-Smith:

So, Stage Manager on iPadOS 16. I’m coalescing my feelings about it, which so far are a net negative for b1, so bear with me.

Jack Wellborn:

Below is a rough collection of thoughts I’ve had on Apple’s new Stage Manager.

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I am happy to see iPadOS get some form of windowing, but I would argue what iPadOS really needs is a holistic paradigm. It’s the first beta and I am sure there will be improvements, but at the moment Stage Manager seems like a concept more than anything else. I don’t see how this concept becomes the paradigm iPadOS needs, let alone coexist with the nearly 40-year-old desktop paradigm found in macOS.

Federico Viticci:

To activate Stage Manager, the iPad’s new multitasking mode, you can use a toggle in Control Center. Once Stage Manager is enabled, the toggle turns blue and you’ll be able to use multiple overlapping windows on your iPad Pro or iPad Air. What you should also know is that there’s a way to customize Stage Manager and the UI elements it displays by default: long-press the toggle in Control Center, and you’ll get a menu that allows you to hide the “stage” (the recent apps on the left) and the dock at the bottom.

If you disable both, you’ll end up with a fascinating UI mode where all you see on your iPad are app windows and the only app launcher is Spotlight.

Update (2022-06-09): Jonathan Deutsch:

If Steve Jobs were alive, Stage Manager would have been one of the thousand “No’s”.

<Scratches head, 22 year old memory surfaces> Oh wait…

When Steve Jobs was alive, Stage Manager was simplified and combined with the Dock.

Chris Hynes (archive):

While Apple was transitioning to Intel in 2006, I worked on a team that was toying with a feature code-named “shrinkydink” (sometimes referred to as “always-on exposé”). It was a radical new way to manage apps and windows and effectively made the existing Exposé irrelevant as well as the Dock as a way of managing running apps and windows.

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At WWDC 2022, I was very excited to see Apple announce a new feature for macOS and iPad called Stage Manager. It’s a radical new way to manage windows and likely makes much of Exposé and the Dock functionality irrelevant. Sound familiar? Well, it turns out it looks familiar too!

Sami Fathi:

The Files app on iPadOS 16 is gaining some much-requested features from iPad users, including easier navigation buttons, easier access to common controls such as duplicate and rename, the ability to change file extensions, and more. The new changes are part of Apple’s efforts to make iPadOS apps more “desktop-class.”

Jason Snell:

The result should be nice improvements in stock Apple apps, including Calendar, Mail, Contacts, Safari, and Files. In particular, I noticed that Apple’s list of “desktop-class” features includes a bunch of printing-related features—unsurprising since printing has always been an afterthought on iOS.

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But the big news here is that Apple is trying to get features out of the “more” button in the corner of the screen and display them front and center as toolbar icons. App developers can place a default set of toolbar icons, but—as has been on the Mac since the early days of OS X—they’re now editable, so users can customize their iPad app toolbars to make them fit the way they work.

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In iPadOS 16, you can use a cursor to select items by dragging around them or by holding down Shift or Command and clicking as you would do on the Mac—all without entering that multiple-selection mode.

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