iPadOS 15 beta preview: Quick notes and tools provide a new experience

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iPadOS 15 arrives at a critical time for the iPad. Since the arrival of the well-designed and very powerful iPad Pro 2018, people have increasingly asked Apple to make its tablet software as flexible and impressive as its hardware. This year’s iPadOS update won’t satisfy those who want the iPad to work like a Mac — it still feels like an iPad, for better or worse.

However, Apple has made a few significant changes and a handful of smaller ones, all adding to an experience that makes the iPad more customizable and flexible than before while retaining (and improving) the basic iPad experience. There are plenty of new features to unpack, and the recently released iPadOS 15 public beta is still a work in progress, but here are some of the most important changes to look forward to when the final software arrives this fall.

Should you install iPadOS 15?

But first, a note about the beta status. Apple’s public beta versions are generally considered reliable, and that’s true here as well. I’ve generally been able to use my 11-inch iPad Pro without any issues, but apps sometimes crash and throw me on the home screen; Interaction with notifications does not always work; There are many other hiccups here and there. (Examples: My cursor doesn’t always go to the search field when called, and sometimes the last few characters of my messages get cut off when using the app in Slide Over.) Nothing breaks deals, but it’s noticeable, especially when I’ve been using my iPad for several hours at a time. Once. Unless you’re super curious, I’ll wait for a few betas to come out before releasing them, unless you can put them on a spare iPad.

With that out of the way, let’s delve into the new features. The most obvious change in iPadOS 15 is the appearance of widgets on the Home screen. As with iOS 14 last year, iPad users can now install the widgets anywhere they want. You can also select the apps you want to display on the home screen and store the rest in the App Library, an automatically organized place to find everything you’ve installed on your iPad. Widgets and the App Library both arrived on the iPhone last year, and surprisingly they haven’t made it to the iPad yet.

My main “Work” screen.

I’m glad Apple did, because it makes the iPad’s home screens more customizable than before, something that’s much needed on a large screen device. It took a bit of work, but now I’ve hidden the apps I don’t use often in the app library and I now have five curated home screens for work, entertainment, games, etc. For example, my work screen only has six app shortcuts (Drive, Docs, Sheet, Trello, Slack, and LastPass), but the set of tools I installed provides quick, easy-to-access information to a lot of tools. I have a widget that shows recent notes in my Work folder, another with reminders (also from my workgroup specifically), an Apple News widget that shows the latest tech news, and widgets for Google Calendar and Gmail. All that, plus the apps in my dock, makes this the best place to go when I need to get things done.

Quick Notes

Another new feature that could fundamentally change the iPad experience is Quick Notes. As Apple’s Craig Federighi said during the WWDC keynote last month, feedback is now a “system-wide” feature. Swiping from the bottom right corner will summon up a new note that floats over any apps you’re using. You can quickly type or type (with the Apple Pencil) whatever comes to mind and then slide the note away when you’re done. Depending on your settings, you can start a new note each time you access Quick Notes, or just keep adding to the same note. Finally, you can scroll between the Quick Notes you started if you want to access a specific document.

At the top of this quick note is a button that appears automatically to allow you to save a link to the page you’re visiting.

The iPad’s Slide Over feature provided almost universal multitasking for this experience, but Quick Notes is much more flexible. For starters, you can move a quick note anywhere on the screen you want, making it look like a real “window” reminiscent of something you’d use on Windows or macOS. If you’ll be entering and exiting the same note frequently, you can dismiss it on the side of the iPad screen where a small arrow appears that you can quickly summon it again.

Apple Quick Note demos have mostly focused on using the Apple Pencil to quickly jot things down, but they also work with the keyboard. When I’m doing my job, it’s always with the Magic Keyboard attached, and the ability to quickly summon a permanent document to take notes, no matter what I was doing, makes the iPad noticeably more versatile. It’s a great tool when doing research, especially since you can add links to web pages in Safari or destinations in Maps with a single click. My only real complaint is that the “swipe in from bottom right” gesture is a bit awkward, especially when using the keyboard-mounted iPad. It’s a lot with the Apple Pencil.

multitasking

Multitasking was a major focus at WWDC as well. While Apple has made some useful changes here, the basic multitasking experience for the iPad remains the same. Apps can take up the entire screen, or share the screen with a second app in Split View. There is also a Slide Over area, which allows you to quickly summon a floating window containing another app. Apple has made major improvements to these features over the years, but they are the same basic multitasking options we’ve had since iOS 9 in 2015.

A small multitasking list can come in handy once you know how to use it.

If you were hoping for a true multitasking experience, this is not the case. But Apple has made it easy to handle the multitasking features it offers. Now, there’s a small three-dot menu at the top of every app you use that lets you move the app between full screen mode, swipe over it and split view. As I compose this sentence, I’m typing in the Notes app in full screen. If I want to take notes in Split View and share the screen with Safari, just click on the multitasking menu and tap on the Split View icon. This gives me a full view of my home screen, which then lets me choose whatever I want to go to along with the notes.

Being able to quickly select from any app on your home screen when setting up a multitasking view is a huge improvement; Before, you primarily had to use search to find the app you wanted, or pull up one of the apps available in your dock. The menu also makes it easy to move apps between Split View, Slide Over, and Full Screen View. Previously, you had to be aware of a variety of gestures, but a few minutes of playing with the multitasking menu makes the behavior quite evident.

Safari

The last major change I’ll be covering at this early stage is Safari. It is one of the most important apps on the iPad, and it has improved a lot in the past few years. But for iPadOS 15, Apple made what I expect will be a polarizing design decision. In an effort to shrink the top menu bar, Apple crammed the URL bar and open tabs in a row. Essentially, the tab and its URL bar are now represented by a single visual cue.

This means that the URL bar site is moving. If you’re looking at the rightmost tab you opened, for example, the URL bar is at the far right. It definitely takes a while to get used to, since most of us are used to it being constantly in the middle of whatever browser we use. This also makes it difficult to see all your tabs; Besides the “active” tab, I can currently see eight more. The rest are hidden to the left and right of my active tab. To see them, you’ll have to swipe in any direction to find what you’re looking for.

Since my active tab is the farthest to the right, the URL bar in my window is also the far right, in this case the active tab is the far left, and so is the URL bar.

Clean up Apple’s menu bar also means it has removed the button that minimizes to show you a preview of every tab you’ve opened. I’ve been using that constantly, so I hate this change. And unlike on a Mac, you can’t customize the Safari menu on the iPad at all. Now, you have to either use the keyboard shortcut or pull up the new sidebar, which contains all the tabs open in the window along with bookmarks, reading list, history, and links shared in messages.

Safari on the iPad actually did a great job of hiding the menu bar as soon as you start scrolling through a site, so this change seems unnecessary to me. I’d be curious to see what kind of feedback Apple gets during the beta, because I bet a lot of other people would prefer the old design.

The new sidebar in Safari contains tab groups in addition to the usual items such as bookmarks and reading list.

There is at least one good thing about the new Safari: tab groups. It’s handled neatly, with a button in the sidebar that lets you open a new “empty” group for you to group or take all your existing tabs and save them as a group. You can switch between groups in the sidebar, and access any groups you’ve created in any open Safari window. Collections will also sync across your other devices, assuming you’ve upgraded to iOS 15 or macOS Monterey. Having different tab groups for different tasks has already proven useful to me, and I’ll probably use it more when I used to integrate it into my workflow.

More is coming

There are a lot of other significant changes to iPadOS 15, things like a new focus system and revamped notifications, improvements to FaceTime and Messages, a new global control system that works between Mac, iPhone, and iPad, and more. (You can read about some of these changes in our previews of iOS 15 and macOS Monterey.) We’ll be doing a proper review of all the new software in final form this fall, but in the meantime I’ll keep looking at future betas to see how iPadOS 15 changes between now and its broader release. .

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