TeamViewer’s ability to remote control from iPhone and iPad allows you to easily access your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer using your iOS smartphone or tablet. My friend suggested that perhaps I could give Universal Control a try.Imagine you are on your way to a business meeting when you remember there’s important information on your office computer that you still need. (I wanted to keep my same desk configuration but switch it so that my iPad Pro was driving the display instead of my Mac Studio.) I was complaining to a friend of mine about how I was struggling to properly test external display support on the current iPadOS beta because it was such a pain to detach my display, keyboard, and trackpad from my Mac and reattach them to my iPad. A surprising use of Universal Controlįinally, this week I uncovered a surprising use of Universal Control that I had never anticipated. Not having to lift my hands and type awkwardly on the MacBook Air when I wanted to use it seemed like a little thing, but it ended up making a huge difference in my workflow. Universal Control made it feel much more like I was using a single computer running two different operating systems. This summer, I just plopped a MacBook Air on my desk next to my Studio Display and let Universal Control bridge the gap. It’s been an issue for me for decades since I started reviewing macOS twenty years ago. This summer, I also needed to get up to speed with macOS Ventura while not breaking all of my software that required macOS Monterey. And, of course, this feature would never work if Apple hadn’t added pointer support in early 2020. Behind the scenes, Apple is taking advantage of all the continuity features it’s added to its operating systems over the years–AirDrop and Shared Clipboard chief among them. It’s sharing a keyboard and trackpad across multiple devices, yes, but it’s also sharing clipboards and even drag-and-drop across devices. Universal Control is an impressive set of technologies. It didn’t feel weird or artificial the way using Sidecar did. Very quickly, I realized I could place my calendar, Twitter, Slack, or Discord over on that iPad and use it as an auxiliary display–and it was useful because the iPad still behaved like it did when I was using it on its own. Why turn on Sidecar and drag a Safari window over onto the screen when I can just use Universal Control to bring up Safari and visit that webpage right on my iPad? Most of the uses I have for the iPad involve apps that run natively on the iPad. But Universal Control is, at least for how I work, so much better. Now I realize that for a few years, macOS has had Sidecar, a feature that lets you turn your iPad into a second display for your Mac. And it meant I didn’t need to pick my hands up from my keyboard tray to drive the apps on the iPad. The iPad was so rarely on my desk that I hadn’t even considered that I could use Universal Control, but here it was. Once I had placed it there, it just took one overly enthusiastic trackpad movement, and my pointer had broken through the side of my Mac display and appeared over on my iPad. Sidecar lets you use an iPad as a Mac display, but Universal Control lets you do more.
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