When Apple announcedUniversal Controlas a feature of macOS Monterey and iPadOS 15 , I was n’t certain what to think . It seemed like a feature nobody had asked for , but one that Apple had realize might actually be incredibly useful . I was certainly impressed by its technical dream . But would it be something that I would ever use Clarence Shepard Day Jr. to day ? I was skeptical .
It ’s been about eight calendar month since Universal Control get in – remember , it was herald in June 2021 but conceptualize for nine month before being release in March of this year – and I ’m at long last quick to consider in on Universal Control .
It ’s majuscule . It is one of my favourite operating - system feature additions in recent memory . And most surprising of all , I ’m using it in way I had never , ever anticipated . Here ’s why I ’m thankful that Universal Control exists .
Sidecar lets you use an iPad as a Mac display, but Universal Control lets you do more.
The iPad desk combo
I ’ve never been a multiple - monitor person , but this summertime , I started inviting my iPad onto my desk . It started when I was seek to watch some resilient telecasting – jazz me , probably a NASA TV space thing or a baseball biz – and writhe with using Picture - in - Picture on my Mac . It prevent covering share of my apps , and once in a while I ’d forget it was being play in Safari and end the tab . And I make : Why not just put my iPad on my desk and have the video performing on there ?
Apple
Once I had post it there , it just took one overly enthusiastic trackpad movement , and my pointer had broken through the side of my Mac showing and appear over on my iPad . The iPad was so rarely on my desk that I had n’t even considered that I could use Universal Control , but here it was . And it meant I did n’t need to pick my hand up from my keyboard tray to get the apps on the iPad .
Sidecar lets you use an iPad as a Mac display, but Universal Control lets you do more.
Now I substantiate that for a few years , macOS has had Sidecar , a characteristic that lets you turn your iPad into a 2d show for your Mac . But Universal Control is , at least for how I work , so much better . Most of the economic consumption I have for the iPad involve apps that run natively on the iPad . Why turn on Sidecar and drag a Safari window over onto the screen when I can just use Universal Control to bestow up Safari and chaffer that webpage right on my iPad ?
Very rapidly , I realized I could place my calendar , Twitter , Slack , or Discord over on that iPad and expend it as an auxiliary show – and it was useful because the iPad still behaved like it did when I was using it on its own . It did n’t feel weird or unreal the means using Sidecar did .
Unexpected delight
Universal Control is an impressive circle of technology . It ’s sharing a keyboard and trackpad across multiple devices , yes , but it ’s also divvy up clipboard and even drag - and - drop across devices . Behind the scenes , Apple is taking advantage of all the continuity features it ’s added to its operating systems over the year – AirDrop and Shared Clipboard foreman among them . And , of grade , this feature article would never make for if Apple had n’t sum up cursor musical accompaniment in former 2020 .
But knowing all of that did n’t prepare me for the second of unexpected delight that I see recently . For the last few month , I ’ve been updating my bookabout Apple ’s Photos app , which requires me to incessantly compare Photos on the Mac to Photos on iOS and iPadOS . The intact process of equate the two unlike versions of Photos has been made easier by the fact that , essentially , I ’m usingtwocomputers on my desk – one a Mac , one an iPad , both driven by my same keyboard and trackpad .
Then came the magical moment . I film a screenshot on the iPad , and the floating screenshot rectangle appear on the iPad covert . you’re able to exploit this floating rectangle to straight off reach the screenshot editor in chief , allowing you to make changes , erase it , save it , or copy it to the clipboard . Or you could swipe the float rectangle away , and the image will just be save to your Photo library .
Drag and drop from an iPad to Mac? Yup.
I had a idea . Could I ? Had Apple thought of this , too ? I needed that image on my Mac , so I could process it and insert it into the book . Well , there was no damage in try . I moved my finger’s breadth across my trackpad , the pointer popped over to the iPad , and I clicked and dragged that float rectangle back to my Mac and dropped it on the desktop .
And reader , itjust worked . Exactly as I had intuit it would .
Drag and drop from an iPad to Mac ? Yup .
Willis Lai / IDG
Macs can be friends
This summer , I also needed to get up to velocity with macOS Ventura while not breaking all of my software that want macOS Monterey . It ’s been an issue for me for ten since I started reviewing macOS twenty years ago .
This summertime , I just plopped a MacBook Air on my desk next to my Studio Display and let Universal Control bridge over the crack . Universal Control made it feel much more like I was using a single computer running two different operating systems . Not having to lift my men and type awkwardly on the MacBook Air when I want to use it seemed like a little thing , but it ended up making a Brobdingnagian departure in my workflow .
A surprising use of Universal Control
at long last , this workweek I uncovered a surprising use of Universal Control that I had never forestall . I was plain to a friend of mine about how I was struggling to decent screen external display support on the current iPadOS genus Beta because it was such a hurting to come away my showing , keyboard , and trackpad from my Mac and reattach them to my iPad . ( I wanted to keep my same desk form but switch it so that my iPad Pro was driving the display instead of my Mac Studio . )
My Quaker suggested that perhaps I could give Universal Control a try . After all , was n’t the Mac Studio still running ? Why disconnect the keyboard and trackpad at all ?
So I unplug the cable running from my Mac Studio to my Studio Display and rather stop up in the iPad Pro . So far , so adept . Then I put my hand on my trackpad – still attach to my Mac – and conceive of moving the pointer across to the far correct bound of the Mac screen and down it into the iPad .
Sure enough , it worked . And for the next few hours , I used my iPad with an international show – all driven by a keyboard and trackpad still attached to a Mac , connected via Universal Control .
I have no idea if Apple ever mean its feature to be used in this path , but I ’ve beget to give it to Universal Control . It does the occupation , and the more I apply it , the more it fit with how I ’m shape . These days I keep an iPad next to my desk , and while it ’s not on all the time , I ’m using it far more than I expect – all thanks to Universal Control .
