Universal Control is F’ing Amazing
Just installed Monterey v.12.3 and iPadOS 15.4, accepted the fact that this Universal Control thing was BETA by clicking on “connect my devices” or whatever, and wow. I didn’t expect it to be this good.
It’s seemingly seamless. It’s incredibly comfortable. And could very well change my thoughts on even bothering with Sidecar.
I’ve liked Sidecar…MacOS’s option of turning an iPad into a second monitor, but it has always been a little creaky to me. I can get it to behave when I have a wired connection between computer and iPad, but if I’m relying solely on wifi, it does some strange things. Trying to have internet calls of any kind (Zoom, Facetime) are severely hindered—which I understand on some levels, but not to the degree that I experience bad behavior—and generally any kind of network-based connections suffer. Virtual TableTop software, external mice and keyboards just don’t work as well when Sidecar-ing over wifi only.
And I have to test Universal Control in those situations, too. But I’m hoping that it’ll be a better experience since the Mac isn’t trying to add an entire external monitor wirelessly…it’s just throwing a KVM into the mix. A KVM switch, which I just discovered is short for “keyboard, video and mouse”, provides a software or hardware solution for sharing mice and keyboards with two computers. That’s all Universal Control is, but none of my KVM experiments have ever been this smooth. It’s comforting, actually, that I’m not thinking about window management, here. I’m using device management, which means I can give the job to the computing device that is best suited for it. Great, great, great.
Can’t imagine what a non-beta version of this’ll be, but I’m sure I’ll have thoughts!