Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Expanded Mouse Cursor Support Coming to iPadOS 14 Alongside New Smart Keyboards With Trackpads
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Yeah but iPadOS already has all of those things...
I don't think I would want a pad below the keys. Most will have one hand on the screen or with a stylus and then the other hand can be to the right or left of the keypad on the track pad. That might be ergonomically a better fit. In fact, I would prefer if the new updates would allow for the magic track pad and then get rid of the ugly cursor and put something smaller and more useful as well as making it full feature in some instances. I know when years ago working on a Wacom C, stylus in one hand and on the side were short cuts for the other hand or add a pad if desired with function keys.
These are great news!!!
Personally for work I need a performant workstation. The only option for mobility its today a laptop, but performance was always contrived compared to a desktop. More so in hybrids like the Surface ....
With this. There is the potential to get rid of my laptop, return to the desktop with uncontrived performance and use an iPad Pro for those moments I'm out and about, eventually remoting back to the iMac if needed, say for more complex software development tasks.
Yes, some people might think, why not get a laptop and a desktop? Well, for one the work required to maintain and configure two PC/Macs for full production is considerable. The nature of iOS requires no maintenance, just install the app and start doing. That is what I want when away from the desk.
Equivalent support for mouse and keyboard is what I require for iPad Pro to be the perfect mobile companion to a desktop workstation.
If a laptop is a sedan and a desktop its the the truck, the iPad Pro should be the fast motorbike to get around the urban traffic. ... and when I retire, all I need is the motorbike
Personally for work I need a performant workstation. The only option for mobility its today a laptop, but performance was always contrived compared to a desktop. More so in hybrids like the Surface ....
With this. There is the potential to get rid of my laptop, return to the desktop with uncontrived performance and use an iPad Pro for those moments I'm out and about, eventually remoting back to the iMac if needed, say for more complex software development tasks.
Yes, some people might think, why not get a laptop and a desktop? Well, for one the work required to maintain and configure two PC/Macs for full production is considerable. The nature of iOS requires no maintenance, just install the app and start doing. That is what I want when away from the desk.
Equivalent support for mouse and keyboard is what I require for iPad Pro to be the perfect mobile companion to a desktop workstation.
If a laptop is a sedan and a desktop its the the truck, the iPad Pro should be the fast motorbike to get around the urban traffic. ... and when I retire, all I need is the motorbike
As I've said before, they're going to make an ipadOS based computer to replace the low end macbook. They will build the keyboard into it and move the battery to keyboard and improve battery life further. They will forget "gorrila arm" because in reality, they've forgotten it already as they keep promoting the ipad pro with keyboard.
If they released a version of final cut pro (if you look at Lumafusion you know its quite possible) and maybe even Logic then the whole world will change over night in terms of apple computing. There wont be an arm based computer that can touch it for the price and what it can actually do. And it will have all the top apps and those apps will be pretty cheap.
If they dont go this way they are mad. There is no future in expensive intel computers in terms of volume sales.
If they released a version of final cut pro (if you look at Lumafusion you know its quite possible) and maybe even Logic then the whole world will change over night in terms of apple computing. There wont be an arm based computer that can touch it for the price and what it can actually do. And it will have all the top apps and those apps will be pretty cheap.
If they dont go this way they are mad. There is no future in expensive intel computers in terms of volume sales.
There will surely be portable trackpads smaller than the magic trackpad for this. Brydge is already working on one (who knows if they will have to modify it to support ios14, I hope it has upgradable firmware!
Id actually like to see a keyboard case, dock (like the Brydge design) with a built in usb-c hub, though that might be awkward unless Apple starts adding another port to the long side of the iPad... Even if a short 90 degree cable came out of the side, that would still be neater than most of the current solutions with a hub hanging off in mid-air.
They are growing to be close to a $2 Billion dollar revenue. It's true that they are not near the iPad, but that doesn't mean they are not any good. The Surface Pro for example is a great bit of hardware I had a Pro 6 and later sold it (I now regret selling it). Windows isn't as bad as it use to be, but it does need to improve some more. But the same can be said for IOS and it's buggy release of IOS 13.
Me personally i'm in the Apple ecosystem, in a pretty big way:
iPhone 11 Pro Max
iPad Pro (2nd Gen)
Apple Watch 4
Home Pod
AirPods Pro
Apple TV
iMac 2012
MacBook Pro 13" 2019
It's ridiculous the amount of Apple products that i have brought over the years, BUT that doesn't mean i can't appreciate what another company is doing. I think Microsoft has some great hardware with the Surface range. I'm VERY interested in the upcoming Surface Neo and Duo.
My point about the the iPad Pro, it's a great tablet, easily the best tablet on the market. BUT turning it into a laptop with a mouse and cursor is something that seems to be copying the Surface Pro.
Microsoft Surface FY20 Q2 nears $2 billion in revenue boosted by holiday sales
Microsoft's second-quarter financial results for More Personal Computing and Surface nears $2 billion
www.windowscentral.com
I’m not talking about iOS 13 mouse. iOS 13 mouse simulates the touch by making the cursor big and round.
Double clicking was an example. Apple literally states in the App Store guidelines that double clicking with a Pencil should not modify the state. Apple lists out guidelines for what happens when you double tap the pencil. Again, you haven’t read the App Store Guidelines. If Apple made a mouse a first class feature, guaranteed there will be guidelines on how a mouse should behave.
If you two finger tap near a uicontrol it assume you mean the closest control. If you select text first and two finger tap near it, it includes the selected text as, effectively, a possible tap target.
[automerge]1583845645[/automerge]
They are growing to be close to a $2 Billion dollar revenue. It's true that they are not near the iPad, but that doesn't mean they are not any good. The Surface Pro for example is a great bit of hardware I had a Pro 6 and later sold it (I now regret selling it). Windows isn't as bad as it use to be, but it does need to improve some more. But the same can be said for IOS and it's buggy release of IOS 13.
Me personally i'm in the Apple ecosystem, in a pretty big way:
iPhone 11 Pro Max
iPad Pro (2nd Gen)
Apple Watch 4
Home Pod
AirPods Pro
Apple TV
iMac 2012
MacBook Pro 13" 2019
It's ridiculous the amount of Apple products that i have brought over the years, BUT that doesn't mean i can't appreciate what another company is doing. I think Microsoft has some great hardware with the Surface range. I'm VERY interested in the upcoming Surface Neo and Duo.
My point about the the iPad Pro, it's a great tablet, easily the best tablet on the market. BUT turning it into a laptop with a mouse and cursor is something that seems to be copying the Surface Pro.
Microsoft Surface FY20 Q2 nears $2 billion in revenue boosted by holiday sales
Microsoft's second-quarter financial results for More Personal Computing and Surface nears $2 billion
you can’t tell me “Microsoft was right” or “Microsoft won” and then make the above excuses for surface’s paltry sales. The market disagrees with Microsoft’s approach and Apple actually won.
You’re holding on to something that was said several years ago, before the wearable and services margins were triple that of the Mac. Apple wouldn’t even miss the Mac if it went away, I don’t want that to happen but I think it will eventually.
I never actually said that Microsoft won, i don't look at it like that, it's such a childish way of looking at things. It's not about who won, it's about the product and what they offer. There is a $2 Billion dollar market for the Surface, which is still growing. Apple may have the bigger market share and they may take a lot more money, that doesn't mean they were "right" or "wrong"
The iPad is a tablet, it is a great tablet. The Mac is a computer, in recent years it has had issues (keyboards on the MacBooks come to mind). The two are separate devices. The Surface range is in a different ball game.
I don't look at it as who "won" or who is "right" i look and think about what's right for me.
Since I do a good fraction of initial UI testing on the iOS Simulator (it’s usually much quicker than device downloading), I already have to make my apps pointer friendly.
Apple in iPadOS 13 introduced support for external mice as an Accessibility feature, and in iPadOS 14, Apple is set to expand cursor support to make using a mouse or a trackpad on iPadOS similar to using a mouse or trackpad on the Mac.
A mockup of a Smart Keyboard with Trackpad
Apple is rumored to be working on a Smart Keyboard for the iPad Pro that includes a trackpad that will work with the new cursor capabilities, and code found in leaked iOS 14 snippets shared by 9to5Mac provides details on some of the functionality we can expect.
Code in iOS 14 allegedly contains references to two new Smart Keyboard model identifiers, which suggests that the Smart Keyboard with Trackpad will be available for multiple iPad models. That could perhaps mean the 11 and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models.
- No Persistent Cursor - When using a trackpad or mouse with an iOS device, the cursor will disappear after a few seconds of not being used, unlike on a Mac where the cursor is always visible. It will reappear after the trackpad or mouse is activated again.
- Multiple Pointers - As on the Mac, you'll see multiple pointers depending on what you're doing. A standard arrow pointer will be visible most of the time, but it will switch to a hand when overing over links.
- Right-Click - Gestures will be supported, such as a tap with two fingers to right click.
- Tap to Click - Tap to Click, a feature present on the Mac's trackpad, will also be available on the iPad Pro Smart Keyboard trackpad.
While there's no detail on the physical shape of the accessories, the functionality suggests the upcoming Smart Keyboards will feature a standard laptop-like design that includes a keyboard above the trackpad.
Article Link: Expanded Mouse Cursor Support Coming to iPadOS 14 Alongside New Smart Keyboards With Trackpads
Some may say "about f*ing time"... I say, "too little, too late". There was NO excuse for not having this from the beginning. It's not like Apple didn't know how to implement a MOUSE on a computer, which is what Apple has been claiming the iPad is, since at LEAST the annoying "What's a computer?" ad.
Apple has been making mice and putting them on computers since like, 1984. NOW they just realized that people MAYBE would like to be able to use them with their little tablets?
This is like that time Microsoft FINALLY figured out how to let you change screen resolutions without having to REBOOT your computer, and acted like everyone should get down and kiss their feet. Like when the US Postal Service figured out how to apply a pressure-sensitive adhesive to the back of POSTAGE STAMPS so you didn't have to LICK them, and also, likewise, acted like everyone should get down and likewise kiss their FEET.
Thanks to all the Apple iMalfeasance with batteries and yanking headphone jacks out to try to force everyone to buy throw-away, built-to-fail headphones you'll need to buy over and over and over again padding Apple's investors' and executives' bottom lines at your sole expense, and all the other various forms of abuse they have subjected users to, I don't think it's going to make a difference that they're adding a capability they should have built into the things A DECADE AGO.
Hey... Apple... how about making the batteries in your throw-away technology user-replaceable? That'd be a START... and putting REAL mouse support is nice, don't get me wrong, onto the iPad... but why not also put it on the iPhone... since they're using the SAME OPERATING SYSTEM! (Apple, please stop pretending they're different operating systems. That's an artificial distinction. Both the iPhone and iPad are on essentially the same hardware, and there's no excuse for this operating system splitting nonsense, please STOP IT.)
Oh, by the way... there's a rumor going around that they may release an ARM-processor based Mac. For those of you who don't know this, iOS is ALSO built on UNIX underneath all the pretty-pretty. The codebase is further away because of the differences between how the Mac is built and how the iDevice is built, but with them apparently getting ready to make Macs based on ARM architecture, the last excuse for not integrating the operating systems into "iMacOS" seems to be going away.
I sure hope this doesn't portend a day when Apple cripples the Mac and turns it into just a big, stupid iOS device. That would suck but I can see them doing that.
On the plus side, hardly a day goes by without an announcement that Intel-based processors, (and also AMD ones) suffer from unpatchable, unfixable flaws that make computers built on them unsafe to use in a world where there are hackers unless you keep it physically AND electrically isolated, which would make most of them useless for most purposes to which most people PUT their devices nowadays, so maybe an ARM-based Mac might not be such a bad thing. Of course, there are probably security flaws that affect them TOO, but the last big one of those announced, as I recollect, affecting the processor used in Raspberry Pi's, but NOT the Pi itself, because the Pi didn't USE that functionality of the chip, so... there's that. Just saying.
Or... Apple pretends they're leaks, and they come from Apple itself. It's referred to as "sending up a balloon". Apple "leaks" something and then sees how people react to it.
If reaction is positive, the leak is subsequently confirmed when they go ahead and do whatever it was that was "leaked" as a rumor. If the response is negative, or if public conversation reveals a problem that would cost them more money than they'd make, they go, "oh, that was all just a rumor," and disavow it like the Secretary would disavow a caught or killed IMF agent.
This post will self-destruct in five seconds.
I was one of these people. But once I saw how nice it was to use a mouse on an iPad, I started hoping they would continue to improve it. Even with that said, it was hard to predict Apple would change their stance - they are quite stubbourn about certain things, and at the time, it really did seem like they wanted to keep iPad different from Macs in many ways. Mouse support did come as a bit of a surprise - but now I want even more, and these rumors seem like good decisions.
Apple in iPadOS 13 introduced support for external mice as an Accessibility feature, and in iPadOS 14, Apple is set to expand cursor support to make using a mouse or a trackpad on iPadOS similar to using a mouse or trackpad on the Mac.
A mockup of a Smart Keyboard with Trackpad
Apple is rumored to be working on a Smart Keyboard for the iPad Pro that includes a trackpad that will work with the new cursor capabilities, and code found in leaked iOS 14 snippets shared by 9to5Mac provides details on some of the functionality we can expect.
Code in iOS 14 allegedly contains references to two new Smart Keyboard model identifiers, which suggests that the Smart Keyboard with Trackpad will be available for multiple iPad models. That could perhaps mean the 11 and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models.
- No Persistent Cursor - When using a trackpad or mouse with an iOS device, the cursor will disappear after a few seconds of not being used, unlike on a Mac where the cursor is always visible. It will reappear after the trackpad or mouse is activated again.
- Multiple Pointers - As on the Mac, you'll see multiple pointers depending on what you're doing. A standard arrow pointer will be visible most of the time, but it will switch to a hand when overing over links.
- Right-Click - Gestures will be supported, such as a tap with two fingers to right click.
- Tap to Click - Tap to Click, a feature present on the Mac's trackpad, will also be available on the iPad Pro Smart Keyboard trackpad.
While there's no detail on the physical shape of the accessories, the functionality suggests the upcoming Smart Keyboards will feature a standard laptop-like design that includes a keyboard above the trackpad.
Article Link: Expanded Mouse Cursor Support Coming to iPadOS 14 Alongside New Smart Keyboards With Trackpads
P.S... I like the image they used with this on the iPad's screen. I'm thinking... it's a crow getting its brains blown out in a puddle of pinkish vomit in some Iowa cornfield. It's that, right? I guessed what it was, yes?
It is really pointless to create a smart keyboard that isn't better than the MacBook.
The Smart Keyboard folio has been better than the MacBook keyboard for the last several years, up until the 16” MBP which finally doesn’t suck.
My point about the the iPad Pro, it's a great tablet, easily the best tablet on the market. BUT turning it into a laptop with a mouse and cursor is something that seems to be copying the Surface Pro.
Microsoft Surface FY20 Q2 nears $2 billion in revenue boosted by holiday sales
Microsoft's second-quarter financial results for More Personal Computing and Surface nears $2 billion
Interestingly, the Surface Pro X isn't good at all - an ARM tablet with basically none of the advantages of ARM (compared to an iPad Pro), nor can it run the "desktop" PC apps well (laggy in emulation) or at all (64 bit apps).
The Surface Pro intel models are good, but mostly as laptops with some tablet abilities. I think it's just fine for the iPad to cover things from the other direction - a great tablet with some "laptop abilities". It's inevitable they'll meet in the middle to some degree.
yea I did see a couple of articles about that. I think it will be a matter of time before the Pro X is up to the level of the Intel chips.
I’m not saying that Surface is king or anything like that, I use Apple products a lot but I also appreciate the Surface devices. Especially after owning and using the Pro 6, I wish I had kept it instead of selling.
I just think Apple should keep the iPad as a tablet, that’s what it’s great at being.
Good to see proper mouse support as well as trackpads, not at the price Brydge are asking for it tho, I wonder how much will Apple products cost.
Typing from my 10.5 Pro on K380 with X4000b mouse, loving it, after setting up mouse buttons and scroll wheel to do what I want them to. Full native mouse features will be great!
Typing from my 10.5 Pro on K380 with X4000b mouse, loving it, after setting up mouse buttons and scroll wheel to do what I want them to. Full native mouse features will be great!
It's not hard to see them introducing this at a price point above the current folio keyboard
Some people have expressed concern that Apple is trying to turn the iPad into a Macbook replacement. Could there be another option?
Since there is now noise about an ARM based Mac (with MacOS) - could the iPad become powerful enough to run iPadOS in tablet mode but then run MacOS when connected to Mouse/Keyboard/Monitor?
best of both worlds on one piece of hardware?
Since there is now noise about an ARM based Mac (with MacOS) - could the iPad become powerful enough to run iPadOS in tablet mode but then run MacOS when connected to Mouse/Keyboard/Monitor?
best of both worlds on one piece of hardware?