by Lynette Alice

Created on: April 08, 2010

The iPad has been out just long enough now that people have figured out how to make it do things that the manual never discusses. Whether it is just a matter of the right people knowing what to look for, manipulating the way the things were meant to be done (without voiding the warranty of course), or something stumbled upon by mistake, the iPad is full of neat tricks. How useful they are is debatable, but for the curious here are some iPad tips and tricks.

If you need to restart your iPad you do not have to power it down. Likewise there is an easier way get out of an application that freezes. To perform a soft restart, hold the top power button and the front home button at the same time for about 3 seconds. It really is that simple and it isn’t in the manual. When an iPad app freezes up, hold the home button for a few seconds and it will force the application to quit. These options are so much easier than a full power down.

Copying text is easy - you just double tap a word and you’re good go. The problem that everyone is complaining about is copying a paragraph of text at a time. The highlighting system using the blue knobs you have to stretch to highlight a full body of text is clunky and annoying. There is a limited solution however. The limit is it only works to highlight a block at a time. To highlight a full block of text on an iPad, tap it 4 times and you’re done and ready to paste in wherever you need to. Sure it is slower than ideal to do it a paragraph at a time, but it is still way better than using the knobs.

One thing that really stinks about the iPad new owners are discovering is that the iBooks app is a loser. Unlike the iPod that lets you import whatever you have, the iPad iBooks app only supports ePub in that regard. You're free to BUY hot new releases for the iBook store, but if you happened to buy that hot new book from anywhere but the iBook store you will not be reading it on your iPad. This means there is a ton of stuff you can’t download and read. The offered selection of free iPad books on a whole stinks, but you can get around it to a degree. Project Gutenberg offers about 30,000 ePub books for free that iPad will recognize. The downside is that you won’t get anything new - just publications that have already seen their copyright expire.

To mute the iPad so you don’t get any embarrassing audio blasts at the worst possible time, hold the volume button for 2 or 3 seconds and you’ll be safe. It

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