“Some features on the iPad are straight forward – a touch screen is, after all, designed to be easy to use,” Richard Gray reports for The Telegraph. “More adventurous users have, however, discovered some hidden features that are perhaps not so obvious and have shared them.”
“Buried under general settings is an innocuous little switch that turns on multitasking gestures. This allows you to use several fingers at once to control the iPad,” Gray reports. “Pinching four or five fingers across the screen will return you to the Home Screen of the iPad from any App. Swiping four or five figures upwards will reveal the multitasking bar, showing which Apps are currently running. Swiping down again will hide it. Swipe those digits to the left or right will allow you to change Apps at flicking speed.”
Gray reports, “Made a mistake when typing and wish there was a handy undo button just like on your desktop word processor. Actually there is, but you have to get physical. Simply pick up your iPad, hold it tightly and give it a rigorous shake. A box will flash up on the screen asking if you would like to undo the typing you have just inputted.”
MacDailyNews Note: If you’d rather not get all etch-a-sketchy, there’s also “undo” on your keyboard, just tap the “.?123” key to reveal it.
More helpful tips in the full article here.
?123 is even more keystrokes than Microsoft’s famously embarrassing ctrl-alt-del. No wonder nobody knows about these hidden features.
Apple would be wise NOT to bury features and settings. One cannot call an OS easy-to-use when essential operations require weeks of random exploration or hours of geek blog research.
Stupid!
for goodness’ sake, do i have to write “this is satire” /s ?
who new that Apple fans were so tightly strung?
1) It’s a key, Mike, not a series of keystrokes. MDN even put it in quotes for you and used a singular article “the” and a singular form of “key” rather than “keys” — “tap the key”
2) This topic is fully covered in the iPad users guide. You only need to spend weeks of random exploration hours of geek blog research if you don’t a) notice things like the keyboard changing when you tap one of the modifier keys, or b) read the manual to see what all else you might be missing.
Doesn’t work on iPhone as far as I can tell. I really dislike having to shakeup device vigorously to fix a mistake. It’s not clever, it’s stupid.
beyond the UNDO,
one can ‘press and wait’ on your text input, for the magnify glass to come up, then make corrections.
Correct. It’s not mentioned in the iPhone user guide either. I don’t think the screen is big enough (yet?!) for four- or five-finger gestures.
Mike’s a troll. Do not respond to it.
silverhawk1, no one needs you to point out or to label others
Mike made a comment, he was incorrect, he is human not a troll. The simple act of your posted was to provoke an emotional response or to cause trouble; by which, classifies you with that title, you mentioned.
Derp, actually Mike is actually a Troll. He is an alien troll sent here to earth to Piss off Supernan. Sadly the Trolls sid not realize that superman was a comic book creation and not real ( unlike Batman who is real, just retired).
Just saying.
Superman might be a comic book creation, but Supernan is real … And she is pissed off! Like you said.
It’s actually a single key. Maybe get your hands on an iPad and see for yourself.
Village …
Isn’t the past tense of “input”…..input? Is “inputted” actually a word?
The multitasking bar does not “show which apps are currently running.”
It is a list of recent apps, some of which may or may not be doing anything in the background as determined by the app’s requests to iOS.
It’s called the multitasking bar because when you swipe to the right (revealing controls that were off-screen to the left) you can adjust your music which is playing in the background, i.e. multitasking.
Sadly, this confusion leads to urban legends that battery life is improved by deleting all recent apps from the multitasking bar. That’s almost never the case, given how aggressively iOS manages what apps can do in the background (to be exact, unless the app carefully requests express timings to do small tasks, iOS ignores the request or kills the app… within seconds of going into the background). Deleting a GPS tracking app from the multitasking bar can make sense if you no longer need it tracking you; same, too, for a navigation app that is designed to be running all the time. But all those other casual apps we all run from time to time — they are not doing anything for you — or to your battery — once you move to another app.
iOS isn’t perfect..those apps in the task bar are assigned memory..as are tabs in safari. They shouldn’t be doing anything in the background, and iOS is supposed to assign memory where/when needed, but its not 100% efficient. Closing those apps can indeed free memory..especially when you consider not all apps are created alike. Facebook, for example, will hold onto memory when it’s not supposed to.
I think I’ll respectfully challenge your comment. My knowledge comes from both Apple’s documentation on app states and on personal experience developing apps for iOS.
In the case of an app that is not registered for background tasks, iOS keeps the app for 5 seconds (in case the user pressed the Home button when they meant to navigate backwards within the app). During those five seconds you, the developer, can still do things to it with Instruments. After those five seconds it is gone.
For you to speak about Facebook suggests you are either on the Facebook development team — in which case you’d know about any registrations for background tasks already, or you are examining memory of a jail broken device, for which my comments — and Apple’s iOS behaviors no longer apply.
A good alternative to weeks of random exploration or hours of geek blog research would be to simply touch the single key that is labeled “?123” and behold the “undo” key that appears. Magical.
(The post above was in response to Mike’s post at the top.)
(You type faster than me! :))
Maybe, yet honestly, I use Siri dictation.
the shake-to-undo is soooo stupid!!!! Apple should replace with finger gesture
We should give Apple a finger gesture for thinking we would actually shake to undo…
If you don’t like it, then don’t use it. No big deal.
Shake to undo, also works on the iPhone, tested. And I would also suspect the iPod Touch.
Here’s a huge feature rarely discussed
Triple click for turning OFF the home button as well as the touch screen. (Turn this feature on in accessibility)
You can even highlight areas of the touch screen you want to function by circling them.
Great for handing a kid your phone and letting them watch a show on Hulu, etc, play a game…it’s great and a large majority of parents have NO IDEA they can do this and save themselves frustration!!
Thanks for the tip of the “Undo” key on the iPad. I’ve been shaking it…and hating doing so. Just wish the iPhone had an undo key.
yes but where’s the goddamn Forward Delete key already ?!?! I’m freakin frustrated still after 3 years+ of ipad usage. Would it be so hard to make some kind of combo (shift+Del etc) to support this?
Nice, thank you.