iPadOS 13.4 was released a couple weeks ago, and with it came full support for cursor devices. You can now connect a mouse or trackpad and have a small circular cursor that acts like a mouse for your iPad. Certainly many people won’t find this useful, but it was really the missing piece that allows my iPad to go from a device mainly useful for handwritten notes and media consumption to a full-fledged computing device. I can fairly comfortably navigate 90% of what I do on a daily basis. While I still prefer my regular computers for podcasting, and also prefer the larger screen real-estate, the iPad now allows me to perform my regular work functions.
In my estimation, there are two things that cursor support brings that completely change the game: hover states, and text selection.
Most of my work is done through browsers. All of the content editing I do is through our browser-based CMS, and a lot of navigation and editing tasks require the ability to hover over something to see more options. This is a well-known paradigm in the computing world: Hover over a menu, see options related to the top-level item, then click on the option you want. This was completely missing from iPadOS; if you used mobile Safari, then the iPad would try to be clever and say one tap gets you to a “hover” state, and another tap lets you select. But this was not universal, and failed in most situations I find myself in at work. However, now the cursor has a complete hover state, making it very usable.
Text selection has been frustrating on all mobile devices for a very long time. You have to try and remember what number of taps you need, where to tap, and what to do after. The OS is guessing at what you want, and while it has improved, it doesn’t always get it correct. While dealing with a whole paragraph, or even a single word, isn’t too bad, editing a few characters here or there is extremely painful. The Apple Pencil has helped with precise selection, but the whole situation has been limited by the text selection paradigm that iOS has chosen. The new cursor support gives a new look to the familiar “pipe/I” selection cursor seen in all text-editing situations on a computer. You can now finally precisely place your cursor where you want it, and select any number of characters without fiddling around.
Overall, this has been an amazing upgrade for my use of the iPad. Definitely check it out.