For Your Consideration

Work has been getting crazier in the past week or two. We are now planning on being online for a while, and the curriculum work that has resulted is growing rapidly. There are many courses to rewrite as we experiment, on the fly, to figure out what tools we want to use (or avoid). I’ve been put in charge of these experiments, and it’s a much larger logistical task than I’ve ever had to deal with. It pales in comparison to what others have done, but it’s quite a doozy on my end.

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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.

As we’ve been transitioning our in-person learning centers to be fully online, the question has come up about how to use slides and work with students. While Zoom offers screen-sharing and annotation, the annotation on an actual slide persists on the screen: if you scroll to a new slide, the annotation remains. There’s no way to annotate a document using Zoom. Even worse, the “whiteboard” feature in Zoom, though cool in many ways, really loses out by having no way to paste formatted text, or even images, onto it. That takes away significant functionality.

At our learning centers, we use a Windows-only piece of software called Drawboard. It’s a pretty nice piece of software with nice annotation tools. It could be a bit more fully-featured (making straight lines or shapes is rather difficult/impossible), but our teachers are used to it. However, it’s $12 and we can’t expect teachers to buy it. Furthermore, all of our teachers are working from home, and many will be using Mac (or even Linux, believe it or not!) So, this isn’t an option. Luckily during my time training, I got some recommendations from a few resourceful teachers.

First is Xodo. It’s a browser-based app where you can import and mark up PDF documents. That’s really all there is to say. It has the same features our instructors are familiar with, and works pretty fine. I actually had some trouble getting it to be as responsive, but I haven’t heard that complaint from others, so it might be specific to me.

Another is bitpaper. This one I really like. It has collaboration features (although teachers likely wouldn’t use them), but it’s much sleeker than Xodo in my opinion. It has a more “iPad” feel to it, with the tools in the bottom very similar to those in the Apple Notes app. It has basic straight-line drawing and keyboard shortcuts.

I’m still working on properly vetting these before we can officially recommend as a company, but they all pass the smell test for me. Even if you aren’t a teacher and just want simple PDF tools, I think Xodo is a good place to start for a lot of mark-up, and bitpaper is excellent for easy collaboration.