iPad Multitasking Explained: Stage Manager Guide!

the iPad multitasking system has gone through a ton of changes since its introduction in iOS 9. the latest version is called stage manager and it brings window Wing to the iPad this video is sponsored by sanebox unlike previous multitasking systems on the iPad stage manager doesn't replace what came before it in fact it's just a mode you enable but it's a mode I toggled on and it's not something I toggle off now it's the default way my iPad does multitasking you can enable stage manager through control center if you don't see the stage manager trigger you can add it in settings control center once enabled apps will now be in a window mode to move a window around grab the top bar with your finger you can then move an app window around to the position you want if you're using a trackpad or Mouse just click and hold the top bar and drag the window around to resize the window with your finger grab the corner with the corner symbol and drag to resize app windows can go from full screen to small iPhone versions of their apps the app has to be designed to be resized to these different positions though this could mean not all of your apps are able to be resized if you're using a trackpad or Mouse you get a bit more flexibility you can resize the window from any side the left or right side will adjust the width the top and bottom will adjust the height you can grab any corner of the app and resize it in any direction one of the great benefits of using stage manager is iPhone apps run on the iPad properly this means no more compatibility mode for these apps you can move these when Windows to where you want and even make them slightly bigger this works great with apps like Instagram threads Apple's classical music app and more though I would still highly encourage developers to adopt appropriate size classes for their apps so users can resize them to the size that they want you can add multiple apps to your current stage while working in stage manager you do this by dragging and dropping your apps into the current stage this can be done from the dock Spotlight app library or even the recent strip that is on the side we'll talk about that more in just a bit at the top you'll notice there's a three dot menu this is the multitasking menu button in here you'll find controls that include making an app full screen you can also do this by hitting Globe F if you have a keyboard attached there's also an option in here for minimizing a window this doesn't quit the app this just moves it out of your current stage you can also do this by hitting command M on a keyboard there there's also a close option and this will kill the current window of that app you can also do this by hitting command W on a keyboard but the main option in here is to add another window to your current stage this will shift all of your current windows out of the way and bring up your recent apps here you can select one and we'll add it to your current stage the keyboard shortcut for this is Globe control up Arrow when you have multiple apps in the same stage there's a handy keyboard shortcut for cycling through them you can use Globe back quote this will cycle through all of the apps that are just in your current stage you will not leave the stage that you are in command tab though will still cycle through all of your recent apps despite what stage they're in in stage manager you can add up to four Windows to your current stage and I do mean windows and not apps if you have a stage with four apps and say one of those is made if you open the compose window in mail this will kick the fourth used app out of that stage and replace it with that compose window when you send that message from that compose window the app that was kicked out will not come back this is the thing I currently dislike the most about stage manager this four window limit is completely artificial and has no reason to be there though you can only have four apps in a given stage you can have an unlimited amount of stages and you can switch between these stages at will when using stage manager it's best to enable the more space feature go into settings display and brightness display zoom and enable more space this will run your iPad's display at a higher resolution giving you more space to place windows and spread things out when setting up my stages I like to organize my apps by task so I have a writing stage that will have obsidian and notes in it I have an admin stage with reminders calendars and mail a photo editing stage with Lightroom Photoshop and files a reading stage with reader in any box a messaging stage for Ivory Discord and threads and so on these help me group my apps into focuses so I can just tackle the task at hand this is where I see something like stage manager being hugely beneficial over something like traditional desktops where you have all of your windows in one spot especially as somebody with ADHD it's really easy for me to get off task so having just specific stages for specific tasks really helps me keep my focus in iPad OS 17 stage manager is getting some much needed updates that I'm very excited about before this I really wasn't a huge fan of stage manager I used it sometimes because it gave me the ability to have more than two apps open at a time but I was never really happy with it because of the performance and some issues I was having with it part of the iPad OS 17 upgrades is the way Windows interact and behave in the past if you were to put a window on top of another one it would take the background window and just shift it to the other side does whatever you would do you could not stack a window on top of another one this made it very difficult to get Windows and apps into the position that I wanted them to be in now in iPad OS 17 you can stack a window on top of each other and the background app will only shift slightly this is so that when you're in tablet mode or you don't have a keyboard attached you can get to that background app by just tapping or clicking on it also in iPad OS 17 windows can be placed almost anywhere before there was a very heavy grid system and apps would just snap to specific really specific places now apps only snap to positions if you bring them close to like an edge or a side or the corner or the center of the iPad's display and it's fairly gentle other than that you can place apps wherever you want them to be unlike an iPad OS 16 you could now make a grid of four apps in a stage this is extremely handy for referencing and making notes about stuff resizing of apps is also a lot more fluid in iPad OS 17. now apps can be reshaped into more sizes and it looks and feels a bit closer to something you would expect to see on the Mac App size classes are still a part of this though so it's not 100 free flowing sizes but it's a lot better but my favorite feature that was added in iPad OS 17 is when you want to add an app to your current stage you can shift click on that icon and it will add it this means you don't have to drag and drop anything you can just quickly add apps to your current stage this really speeds up building stages you you can do this from the doc app Library recent strip or my favorite spotlight I do wish there was a setting though that allowed you to do the reverse of this so when you opened an app it would always add it to the current stage and when you shift clicked on it it would add it to a new stage to me that would be a bit more useful but I see why they want this route in tablet mode you can grab an app by the top bar and then tap another app or stage and that app will then be added to that stage this helps with building stages when you don't have a keyboard attached this video is sponsored by sanebox sanebox sits in between your email server and your inbox as mail comes in it gets filtered into specific folders that you can set up I use folders for messages that aren't important newsletters and receipts I get a ton of random email I don't want so I set up sanebox so that it only allows people that I talk to to be added to my inbox everything else gets filtered into other messages this way if it's in my inbox I know it's probably really important one of my favorite features of sanebox is sane black hole I can drag any email to this folder if that sender ever sends me another email again it will automatically be marked as read and added here I won't ever have to deal with it again I don't have to mess around with filtering rules and it happens automatically in the background I get emails from a lot of con artists and newsletters I didn't sign up for and this is a great way to manage those same Box's new feature deepclean helps you keep the size of your email archive down most of us have a fixed amount of space when it comes to email storage and if we go over that limit we'll either have to pay for more space or we'll stop receiving new messages deep clean goes in and scans your archive showing you a list of your largest messages and senders you can then delete all of those you wish with the push of a button this really helped me cut down on the amount of email I have archived and I also noticed that searching my email is a lot faster now same box is one of my favorite Services out there I've been using it for years way before they ever sponsored me I will put a link in the description below to where you can go check it out if you use the link in the description below you can get a 25 credit when signing up for sanebox my thanks to sanebox for sponsoring this video you can have multiple windows of the same app if you wish the easiest way to do this is just drag and drop the app icon in the stage that you already have a window for that open in you can then minimize it into its own stage if you want but if you drag the app into a stage where the app isn't present it will bring back a previously used window of that app to the stage instead of creating a new window the other way is to long press on the icon and select show all windows this will display all the stages with a window from that app you can drag and drop them into a stage or select one and jump into that thankfully there is a keyboard shortcut to get to this view Globe down arrow will jump right into this in here you can also create a new window by hitting the plus button I really like the fact that the iPad has multi-window support but in stage manager it is very cumbersome to create new windows and to jump between them I've made mention of the recent strip already this is where the last four stages you have used live this allows you to quickly jump between those stages or add apps from those stages to your current stage it's a really nice feature if you organize your stages by tasks personally I find having the recent strip always visible to be a bit busy if you go into Control Center and long press on the stage manager button you can toggle hiding the recent strip and the dock you can also do this by going into settings and multitasking don't worry if you choose to hide one or both of these you can swipe in from their respective edges to show them for just a bit you can also push the cursor into their side if you're using a mouse or a trackpad my Third Way of setting up stage manager is turning off the recent strip but always leaving the dock visible personally I find the dock a lot more useful for jumping between stages because you can have more apps down there but I do use the recent Strip by revealing it temporarily jumping to a stage or grabbing an app and then hiding it speed ing of jumping between stages you can swipe along the bottom edge of your iPad to jump between the recent stages you can also three finger swipe to the left and right on a trackpad to jump between stages as well in both cases swiping to the right will go to the previous stages while swiping to the left will then go back stage manager and multitasking have a handful of shortcuts that are really useful in iPad OS I already mentioned a few but if you'd like to see a full list of them you can do this by holding down the globe key on your keyboard if you're using a keyboard that doesn't have a globe key you can go into settings keyboard Hardware keyboard and modifier Keys here you can change what your modifier keys do I personally set caps lock to be a globe key when need be unfortunately though there is a really annoying bug where this resets every so often other than the keyboard shortcuts that I already mentioned there are a couple of Handy ones that I really like Globe up Arrow will bring up your recent app picker and Globe right and left Arrow will cycle through your previous stages just like swiping along the bottom another part of stage manager is external monitor support on the iPad the iPad can work with any external monitor it doesn't have to be an apple branded one when connecting an iPad to an external monitor you need to make sure you have a keyboard and mouse paired this can be a wireless one or something like the magic keyboard if you don't have a keyboard and mouse paired the iPad will just mirror to the display once connected you can use your iPad and external monitor together each display can have up to four Windows on it this means you could have up to eight windows open at a time it's really nice when working on big projects to be able to set my iPad up at an external display in iPad OS 17 the ability to drag and drop apps from the display was improved before you had to use the multitasking menu or a keyboard shortcut iPad OS 17 also does a much better job at remembering your window position and window size when returning to an external monitor there are some features that stage managers still needs to be truly fully functional the first I already mentioned lose the four window limit per stage the Mac has stage manager and doesn't have this window limit there's really no reason the I put should as well I believe it was put there because Apple didn't want stages to get too messy on an iPad because the iPad's display is obviously a lot smaller than something like the studio display but work in life they aren't Instagram photos things need to be able to get messy the second thing I would like to see is more keyboard shortcut support shortcuts to move apps to other stages also a shortcut to position windows at specific sizes and spots so for example what I do a lot is I take a window and make it 50 of the screen and another window and make it fifty percent of the screen move one to the left and move one to the right the ability to do like Globe shift left arrow and Globe shift right arrow to like take a window and shift it to the left and shift it to the right would be be hugely helpful this one is for chance Miller of nine to five Mac this was his idea the ability to pen specific apps to a stage when switching stages so say I had Ivory open pen Ivory so that way when I'm switching stages Ivory always stays in the stage the keyboard bar at the bottom needs to go away it is so bad it covers up UI in so many apps and yes I know you can move it I I've talked about how you can move it in the past but I shouldn't have to the bar is useless everything that that keyboard bar does there are keyboard shortcuts for or buttons on the keyboard to do that with there's literally zero reason for it to exist it just gets in the way on the external monitor Supply it's support for authentication other than face ID add support for notification and control center on the external display along with widgets support the ability to set wallpapers independently from the iPad because right now we get this zoomed in image and it just doesn't look good at all and then finally once you get all of that stuff boom clamshell mode and then lastly for stuff I would like to see come to Stage manager is better shortcut support right now the only stage manager support we have in shortcuts is the ability to turn stage manager on and off what I would love to see is the ability to put stages together using shortcuts so like I kind of mentioned you know let me run a shortcut that puts obsidian and notes together or Ivory threads and Discord together and just build out those stages automatically stage manager is currently supported on iPad Pro's 2018 and newer and the M1 iPad Air and newer I'm hoping to see stage manager come to the base iPad at some point in the future but unfortunately it's not currently there now external monitor support is only on the iPads that have the M series chip stage manager had a really Rocky first year but with the changes it's getting an iPad OS 17 I am very happy use using it between this and Final Cut coming to the iPad again I'm happy to say the iPad is my main computer again my thanks to the same box for sponsoring this video if you like the video hit the Thumbs Up Button subscribe if you haven't already thank you all so much for watching and have a great day

Channel: Christopher Lawley

Views: 160,906

Keywords: Apple, iPad, iPad Pro, iPad Pro 12.9, iPhone, iPad Productivity, Getting things done on iPad, Working off iPad, iPadOS, iOS, App, iPadOS 16, iPadOS 17, New Features, Guide, Multitasking, Windowing, Multi App, multiapp, Stage Manager, iPad Multitasking, iPad Workflow, iPad Multi App, Using Multiple Apps, iPadOS Guide, How iPadOS Works, Using iPadOS, iPad as laptop replacement, How to Use Stage Manager, iPad Air, External Monitor, iPad External Monitor, Monitor Support

Id: oth722tzWXw

Length: 18min 19sec (1099 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 26 2023