As iPads are the hot gift this year, we thought we’d continue to offer some tips and tricks for new users. 

The first is just a reminder of how powerful the search screen on the iPad is. When you are on your home screen, you can swipe from right to left to access this screen (or simply press the home button again). When you search for something from this screen, it looks through the contents of your iPad to find matches. It can be the quickest way to find an email, a contact, or even an app for those of us with pages of them. It also gives you the choice to search the web or wikipedia for your term. In the example screenshot above, I searched for “Cape” and it found the contact information of a Cape Mac coworker, a song with the word Cape in it, and some emails referencing the Cape. 

The next two tips are about apps. I like having my home screen organized — I have folders for each type of activity from work to play, and I’m constantly rearranging things based on usage. To organize your screen, press and hold any app until they all start to wiggle. From here, you can pull apps on top of one another to create folders, or drag them to the edge of the screen to put them on other pages. You can also delete apps this way — once they’re wiggling, just press the small x in the left hand corner to delete the app altogether.

A handy and underused tool on the iPad is the task bar. If you press the home button twice quickly, like double tapping a mouse button, the task bar appears. This is a list of your most recently used apps — it allows you to switch between them quickly by pressing their icon without having to go back to the home screen each time. This can also help resolve issues if your iPad is acting up or your battery seems to be draining too quickly. Simply press and hold any of the icons on the task bar until they begin to wiggle, and then press the red circle that appears in the upper left hand corner. This closes the app down altogether (it does not remove it from the iPad!). There are mixed feelings about whether all of these apps are running — most close within 10 minutes of the last usage, but some apps continue to use data in the background (like Pandora). 

Our last tip is a big one — when your iPad doesn’t seem to be functioning correctly, you can do a reset on it. This is a process similar to forcing your computer to restart when it’s frozen. Simply press and hold both the home button and the button on the top right hand side of the computer (when it’s in portrait mode), and continue holding until the silver apple logo appears. If the screen “Slide to Power Down” appears, simply ignore it and keep holding. This is your first step if something’s going on with the iPad — it solves a vast majority of the issues our customers have.

We’ll keep featuring iPad and mac OS tips and tricks here, so keep an eye out!