Notes, Quick Notes, and Multitasking

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WITH iPADOS 15, Apple has paid a lot of attention to productivity. In particular, it’s beefed up the Notes app to make it easier to record, find, and share things, and there’s a new feature called Quick Note that enables you to add a note from anywhere without having to leave the app you’re in.

The main Notes app’s biggest change is in its use of tags. Now you can tag a note by typing the hash (#) symbol before it and Notes will automatically add that tag to the sidebar, underneath the Folders list — so if you tag phone–related things #iPhone, you can tap on that tag to see all those posts. The search works with multiple tags, so you can drill down very precisely.

Notes makes it easy to share your jottings with other people and to see what they’ve done in them, and you can use the “@” symbol to tag other users. If you have an Apple Pencil, swiping it from the bottom right of the screen brings up Quick Note for instant note–taking; if you don’t have a Pencil, you can add Quick Note to your Control Center in Settings > Control Centre.

The other big change here is how your iPad handles multitasking. It was a little bit fiddly before, but it’s much more obvious and straightforward now. Each app that’s capable of working in Split View or Slide

Over mode has a little icon at the top of the screen that contains three dots; tap the dots and you’ll see three different icons. The first is for full–screen mode, which is the default; the second is for Split View, which splits the screen evenly between apps; and the third is Slide Over, which “hides” the current app at the side of the screen so you can slide it in when you need it and slide it back when you don’t. The Shortcuts app has also been updated so you can create shortcuts opening two apps in Split View.

We like the new Centered Window option too. The best example of this is if you have Mail open in Split View: press and hold on an email message and it’ll open in the center of the screen on top of all your apps, not just in the space you’ve given Mail.