Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The best demo at WWDC 2021”.
Okay, apple’s wwdc 2021 keynote is wrapped now this keynote happened in the midst of a huge focus on apple’s, app store policies and there’s been a lot of developer. Unrest and apple. Didn’T really talk about any of that and that’s to be expected and, besides apple had too much other stuff to actually get through mac. Os monterey ipad, os 15 ios, 15 watch, os health, stuff privacy, stuff home kit, stuff stuff, a lot of stuff, but some of it is really good stuff.
But there was this one particular demo. That was definitely the highlight of the whole keynote. It’S called universal control and what it lets you do is use one max keyboard to control an ipad or a second mac.
It’S actually easier to watch it than to have me explain it so here just watch it without any other setup, i’m going to simply move my mac cursor towards my ipad and the ipad automatically recognizes it, and if i move a bit further boom, my cursor is Now, on the ipad, how cool is that i can even drag and drop files between my devices, i’m just gon na take this drawing. I finished on my ipad and drop it on the keynote on my mac awesome. So that’s pretty cool right now. I know that a lot of the stuff in ios 15 might be more important than this demo.
So i have a lot of things to say about these new focus mode profile things and even more to say about the new multitasking model on the ipad, because i think apple may have just kind of given up on it a little bit. But right now i want to talk about this universal control demo because it’s very cool – and i think it’s cool for a particular reason. So here’s a question: how on earth does this thing even work now? What i want to do here is go through this demo. Video step by step and analyze what’s happening here now, you should know before we get started that all of these computers have to be on the same icloud account because you know apple ecosystem. Here we go so first, you set an ipad next to a mac, and the two computers know that they’re close to each other because they both have bluetooth on the same icloud account it’s the same thing that enables handoff.
Then you take your mouse on the mac and drag it over to the left or right edge of the screen and then it seems to know the ipad’s position. Somehow, maybe that’s what i thought, but actually no apple tells me that the mac just assumes that there’s an ipad over on the left or the right of the mac screen. When you drag your mouse over to the left or the right edge of your mac screen and actually just a little bit beyond it, and then this really clever thing happens, this bar appears on the ipad and if you look closely you’ll see there’s some little arrows On the bar and what those arrows do is they align your two displays, so you can drag it up and down and make sure that when you drag your mouse over it’s in a natural spot and then bam, you’ve basically got a kvm switch. Your track pad and keyboard work with the ipad, but that’s not really the magical part. The magical part is drag and drop works from ipad os to the mac and vice versa.
It’S kind of just like airdrop, but it’s better, because you’re literally dragging and dropping over the air uses wi-fi direct or if you have a usb connection, it can do it over usb to be just a little bit faster and then, after that, they just added another Mac to the mix, because why not you can have up to three devices using this universal control system, so this is all great, but if you can connect up to three devices, how does the mac know which one to connect to the first time you drag your Mouse over to the edge of the screen: well it just guesses it figures: you want to use the last device that you interacted with. So if the last thing you touched was the ipad it’ll be the ipad. If the last thing you touch with the other mac, it’ll be the other mac, but you can set up a permanent universal control buddy if you want in the system preferences, so it always goes to that one. So, on the one hand, this honestly does seem like a pretty simple feature for apple.
To make i mean, apple devices have communicated through continuity forever, and this is just handing off a different piece of information, mouse position and keyboard and stuff. But this demo it’s so seamless and easy that that’s the magical part and i could be wrong. But i think that this feature could not have happened if apple hadn’t been laying the groundwork for years on both the mac and the ipad. So let’s start with the ipad, so the first set of features to talk about are airdrop continuity and handoff.
These are the core ways that the ipad can communicate. Wirelessly to a mac, then there’s multitasking on the ipad, and that seems like a weird thing to include because split screen whatever. But the important part here is drag and drop was part of multi-window on the ipad, and so that works across multiple apps on the ipad and it also works here. Then, of course, there is keyboard and mouse support on the ipad.
It started as an accessibility feature, but then apple made it a core top-level feature for everybody, with the magic keyboard. Finally, there’s sidecar: this is the feature: let’s use your ipad as a second monitor for your mac wirelessly, so you’ve been able to throw your mouse from a mac to an ipad for a while now, but you know this is different because in this new feature, the Ipad is running ipad os, but i don’t know i kind of feel, like maybe apple learned, some things about how to do low, latency keyboard and mouse stuff from the mac to the ipad over sidecar. Without any of these features on the ipad, this demo doesn’t happen. So that’s one branch that is the ipad.
Now, let’s talk about the other branch, the mac. My hunch is that some of this magic was based on all the ipad type things that have been happening on the mac over the past few years. There were catalyst apps. They came first they’re sort of like half ipad, apps and they’re bad.
Then there are native ipad apps on the m1 mac, which i thought could be another building block. But now i asked apple and apple, told me that this is pretty much a straight line from continuity and handoff and there’s no extra magic from all those ipad guts that are increasingly part of the mac which, by the way, shortcuts in the new focus modes, are Also coming to the max, so it’s not that bad of a hunch to think that there’s more ipad stuff going on on the mac – and that was part of the story. Huh yeah look. Sometimes your hypothesis. It is exactly right science, and so i think that this was the best demo coming out of wwdc and also, i think we can learn some things from it. First, i really do think that the mac and the ipad really are coming closer and closer and closer and closer to each other. No, you can’t run mac apps on an ipad pro with the m1 chip, but you can drag a file from the mac to the ipad and, like i said, i think the mac is getting more and more ipad features like focus mode and shortcuts and control panel And so on, and so on. Does that mean that i think these two platforms are going to merge nah, i think apple fundamentally, doesn’t want to do that just like it fundamentally refuses to offer multi-user on the ipad or put a touch screen on the mac. Look sometimes when i’m using an ipad, i get annoyed by some limitation in the os and then i set it down, and then i redo the entire setup on my mac to get started again, but now well, there’s just more opportunities to use an ipad and a Mac together, so if i’m doing something on an ipad and i’m annoyed by it, i just drag it over the mac and keep going because switching between them has just gotten a lot easier. But to me the most important part of this demo is that it is possible to make really great features just by thinking creatively about how to use the tools and features that you have already built. Technically speaking, apple didn’t really invent anything radically, hard or even especially new, with universal control.
It just made very clever use of the technologies that it had already invented before and that’s cool. So here’s a thought that i’m going to leave you with look at all of the things that you’ve learned in your life and take a step back from them and think about how you could use those skills in new or clever ways. You might surprise yourself, hey everybody thanks so much for watching. If you missed the keynote, we have a supercut. That’S got all of apple’s announcements in a compact, 20-something minutes, and let me know down in the comments. Was this your favorite feature? Did you like something else? Maybe you did .