Introduction

Congratulations! If you’re reading this right now, you’ve survived most of 2020. While this year might seem to be full of absolute disasters, Apple is still shipping new products, and iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 are anything but disastrous.

If you’re anything like me, you carefully arrange your first iPhone Home screen, stash some commonly used, but less-important apps on the second Home screen, and then every page after that is increasingly chaotic. Too many apps, not enough time.

Thanks to the App Library, you can now quickly hide entire pages of apps on your iPhone and clean things up. iOS 14 has also reworked widgets and now lets you embed them on your Home screens.

There many other big changes in iOS 14. The iPad’s Picture in Picture mode is now available on the smaller iPhone screen, letting you watch video while doing other things. There’s a new built-in Translate app that can help you converse in other languages in real time. There are new ways to handle group messages, health-tracking features, privacy functions, and more.

Unfortunately, iPadOS 14 doesn’t get the radical Home screen overhaul or the Translate app, but it does gain a number of new features, especially for the Apple Pencil. Scribble will take you back to the days of the Newton, allowing you to use your Apple Pencil to write in any text field.

Unlike previous incarnations of this book, this title doesn’t go into detail on the basics that you probably already know, though we do touch on them. You’ll learn all about the new stuff: using App Library to clean up your Home screens, playing with Home screen widgets, entering text with Scribble, using new group messaging tools, having conversations using the new Translate app to have conversations in other languages, and more. Let’s go…