iPadOS & 3-finger gestures

Just saw this neat beginner-friendly video from The Washington Post about cut/copy/paste and other 3-finger iPadOS gestures, as well as a discussion about split view and slide-over apps. I think that the iPad is finally getting to be as powerful and sophisticated as it needs to be, but I really worry that the new gestures - both remembering them but properly implementing them - are going to be beyond the functional abilities of a lot of casual users, not to mention people with limited dexterity.

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Good tip. I’ve had my 2018 iPad for about 9 months now and I still find split view and slideover confusing. And I don’t even think to use multifinger gestures. I’ll check out that video.

And the guy starts with ”just make sure you have the right software, most of this only works on iPad OS 13.”

Anyone else who thinks pushing OS-level beta versions in (what looks to me) a non-tech contex is ill adviced?

Then he goes on to say that “it’s available as beta software right now and widely available in the Fall of 2019” (I hope I got that quote correct). That seems to be a sufficient caveat, although they might have put a warning in the text to the right of the video.

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Since I’m currently iPadless I’m watching these videos with great interest. But I can’t help but worry that my older relatives will be utterly lost, either unable to precisely execute the new gestures, or, perhaps more commonly, as casual users they won’t remember what the gestures are or that there are gestures to perform these actions.

I’m thinking. There is no need for them to learn the new gestures. I look at them as icing on the cake (at least currently). I’m eager for non-beta iOS then I’ll mess with the newnew ideas.

Even on my 10.5 I use both split screen and slide over daily. Ulysses paired with Safari, Terminology, Kindle, Spark … not saying you should but it is one of the reasons I do most of my text writing on my iPad.

I have read others bemoaning that the 10.5 is not big enough to do justice to split-screen (true sorta). But I usually set one app bigger than the other It works for me. Even the small slideover screens have many uses.

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I’m a luddite. Still prefer the Mac for heavy lifting, even though heavy lifting for me consists just of writing and editing.

I primarily use the iPad for reading and social media. Love the iPad but it’s not my main work machine.

I don’t use split screen and slideover much, which makes them unnatural for me, which makes me use them less. An opposite-of-virtuous cycle.

The situation has been exacerbated for me over the last few weeks, because I’m running the iPadOS beta. On the iPad and iPhone, I rely extensively on Copied, a wonderful app last updated a year ago. Recently, I spent about a half hour or an hour struggling to get Copied working in split screen until I finally concluded the problem was probably not that I was doing it wrong, the problem was probably in Copied compatibility with the OS.

(I’m hoping Copied is not abandonware, that the developer might decide to give it a tune-up for the latest iOS/iPad OS, even if he does not add new features.)

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Gladys and Yoink are so good I stopped using Copied long ago.

Great little video as I cannot remember the different gestures for the life of me!

I like the text transformations in Copied.