Yesterday, Apple released iPadOS 13.4. There are lots of improvements and bug fixes in there, but for an attorney or anyone else using an iPad to get work done, the best new addition is the vastly improved support for a mouse and trackpad. For six months (since the release of iPadOS 13 on September 24, 2019), it has been possible to use a mouse with an iPad, but as I explained in this post, there were lots of limits to what you could do. I still used the feature, but it always seemed like sort of a hack.
With iPad OS 13.4, the iPad now has fantastic mouse and trackpad support. And the timing could not have been better considering that, as a result of COVID-19, so many attorneys are now working out of their offices. When you use an iPad with an external keyboard and a mouse or trackpad, you get a perfect environment for editing documents. When your iPad is propped up on a table, you no longer need to hold up your arm to reach the iPad screen to swipe around when you are viewing documents, emails, webpages, etc.
BYOM, but do more with multi-touch support
You can use just about any mouse with the iPad. If you use a Bluetooth device, then just like any other Bluetooth device, the first time that you use it you need to use the Settings app to pair it. But after that, you can just turn on your device and a few seconds later you will see a cursor on the screen.
If you have a USB mouse (or a wireless mouse that requires a USB dongle) that will also work if you have a way to use USB with your iPad such as HyperDrive's $90 6-in-1 USB-C Hub for iPad Pro (my review), Apple’s $29 Lightning to USB Camera Adapter (for an iPad that uses Lightning) or Apple's $19 USB-C to USB Adapter (for the third-generation iPad Pro).
To get the best experience, you should use a device that supports multi-touch. For about five years, Apple has been selling the $130 Magic Trackpad 2 and the $80 Magic Mouse 2. Those devices support additional gestures, which I'll describe below. Apple's new Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, coming in May, will also support multi-touch, and it will retail for $300 for the 11" iPad Pro and $350 for the 1Pad Pro. Third-parties will also be coming out with trackpads that use multi-touch — some that come with a keyboard, such as the $150 Logitech Combo Touch.
The cursor
When you use a finger on an iPad, there is no need to have a cursor. But with an external pointing device, you need to have one. Apple has done a fantastic job with this new cursor, making it adapt to the task at hand. Normally it is a small translucent circle, about the same size as your fingertip. But as the cursor passes over an object that it can act upon, things change.
Pass the cursor over an app icon on your Home Screen and the app seems to lift up off of the screen a little to let you know that you are about to act upon that app. (Then you can click to open the app.) I like the way that Ryan Christoffel of Macstories describes it: "[W]hen hovering over an app icon on the Home screen, the cursor doesn’t actually sit above the icon, rather it merges with the icon such that the visual circle disappears, and your movement of the cursor is reflected in the icon itself moving around." Pass the cursor over the icons at the top right of the screen (where the battery icon is located) and the cursor changes to highlight all of those icons, an indication that you can click to launch the Control Center.
When you are using an app, you'll see the cursor change to all sorts of different shapes to indicate that you can click on an item. For example, with the cursor right next to the Bookmarks icon, you see a normal cursor:
But once I pass the cursor on top of the Bookmarks icon, it changes to a rectangle, indicating that I can click on the Bookmarks icon:
When you have multiple tabs open in Safari, hover over the close icon for a tab and the close icon gets larger to indicate that you can click to close the tab. Hover over the action icon to see a rectangle above that icon. Hover over the address bar and the entire bar darkens to indicate that can click to enter a new URL. And if you are viewing a website that has drop-down menus, you can hover over the menu title to see the menu open up, the same way that it works on a computer.
Using a mouse or trackpad with an iPad is especially useful when an iPad is propped upon a desk. It is also a perfect companion to using an external keyboard. Many apps work just fine with a mouse/trackpad today, but apps can work better when they are updated to work with the cursor.
For example, in Apple's Notes app, if the cursor is not above text, you see the normal round cursor. But if the cursor is above text, it changes to an I-beam. This makes it incredibly easy to use an external mouse or trackpad to select text, just like you would do on a computer.
On the other hand, the current version of Microsoft Word for iPad (2.35) doesn't yet support the new cursor, so the cursor remains a circle even over text. You can still double-tap on a word and then drag the selection tool to expand to more letters, the same way that you would if just using your finger, but Microsoft Word will be so much better when cursor support is added. Microsoft typically does a good job of updating its apps to take advantage of Apple updates, so I expect that this is coming soon.
There are many ways that you can adjust the settings of this new cursor, such as the size color, transparency, and speed when swiping. Go the Settings app and tap on Accessibility -> Pointer Control to access these settings. ("Pointer Control" will only appear when you have attached a mouse/trackpad to your iPad.)
The new cursor support is fantastic. Craig Mod of Wired wrote an entire article to gush about it. Jason Snell of Six Colors raves about the animations associated with the cursor. Once you try it yourself, you'll see what all of the fuss is about.
Multi-touch
Cursor support is great, but as noted above, a device works better if it supports multi-touch. If you purchased an Apple desktop computer in the last five years, such as an iMac, you probably already have a Magic Trackpad 2 or Magic Mouse 2. I found a Magic Mouse 2 in one of my desk drawers and it works really well with iPadOS 13.4.
First, if you move your finger up and down the surface of the Magic Mouse 2 (without clicking), you can scroll up and down. Second, if you swipe your finger to the left of to the right, you can swipe between pages. In Safari, this works as page back / page forward. In PDF Expert, when you are viewing a document you can swipe up/down to scroll between pages in Vertical Scroll mode and left/right when using Horizontal Scroll Mode. Also in PDF Expert, when you are looking at a list of files in a folder, you can swipe from left to right on the surface of the mouse to go back to the parent folder (the same gesture that you can do by swiping from left to right with your finger on the screen).
In Mail, when your cursor is over one of the emails in your list of emails, you can swipe to the left or right to bring up the same controls that you see when your finger is on the screen and you swipe across the email such as mark read/unread, flag, delete, etc.
Although the Magic Mouse 2 works well, I understand that the Magic Trackpad 2 give you even more gestures. For example, you can swipe between app spaces, go Home, access the App Switcher and zoom in and out — the same gestures that you can do by using more than one finger on the screen.
Although you don't need to use a device with multi-touch, in my tests so far, you miss a lot without multi-touch. This is especially true for scrolling up and down. I have a first-generation Magic Trackpad, and I tried using it with my iPad last night. It worked great for controlling the cursor and clicking, but I found it frustrating that I couldn't scroll up-and-down a webpage, a list of emails, the pages of a document, etc. Note however that if your mouse has a scroll wheel, that will also give you up-and-down scrolling, although not left-and-right scrolling.
Other buttons
Almost every input device has a right-button function. (If not, you can always hold down the Control key on an external keyboard as you do a left-click to simulate a right-click.) The default on an iPad is for a right-click to trigger a Secondary Click, which is treated the same as a long tap — holding down your finger for a second or two. You can modify this in the Settings app by going to General -> Trackpad & Mouse -> Secondary Click. Your options are to have the right-click be the Secondary Click, the left-click be the Secondary Click, or to turn off Secondary Click completely.
If you want to be more fancy, you can take advantage of your right-click button, or any other button on your device, by assigning special functions. This isn't something new in iPadOS 13.4; this support also existed in iPadOS 13, and I discussed it six months ago in my earlier post on using a mouse with an iPad. But to use this function, you need to take advantage of the AssitiveTouch functionality, which is still a little clunky. I hope that in the future, Apple improves support for additional buttons.
Nevertheless, it works if you don't mind jumping through some hoops. For example, if you have a Magic Mouse 2, here is how to tell the iPad what to do when you right-click. First, go to General -> Trackpad & Mouse -> Secondary Click -> and then enable Right click. Second, go to Accessibility -> Touch -> AssistiveTouch and turn on AssistiveTouch. Third, go to Accessibility -> Touch -> AssistiveTouch -> Devices (listed under Pointer Devices) -> [tap the name of your Magic Mouse 2] -> Customize Additional Buttons. Your iPad will ask you to click the button you want to customize. Respond by right-clicking, and then select what shortcut you want to assign to the right click. For now, I have mine assigned to Home, but there are dozens of choices — including, if you want to get really sophisticated, Shortcuts.
Conclusion
With an external keyboard and the improved mouse and trackpad support, the iPad is now an even better substitute for a laptop or desktop computer, especially when you are getting work done such as editing a document. But unlike a computer, you retain all of the advantages of the iPad such as extreme portability, the great touchscreen interface, the beautiful display, the amazing selection of apps, etc.
I'm not sure that it will be worth it for me to spend $350 on Apple's upcoming Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro when it comes out in a few months. I use an external keyboard a lot, but not every day and sometimes not even every week. But if you do like using a keyboard, having a high-quality keyboard with a built-in trackpad is going to be very nice. Clearly, Apple had that product in mind when it added all of these improvements to iPadOS 13.4. It is wonderful that even those of us not using that new device can still take advantage of the new cursor. An iPad with an external keyboard and an external mouse or trackpad is a fantastic combination for being productive.
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This article won the BlawgWorld Pick of the Week award on April 1, 2020. The editors of BlawgWorld, a free weekly email newsletter for lawyers and law firm administrators, give this award to one article every week that they feel is a must-read for this audience.
