Useful iPad Tip of the Day -- Force Reboot and a Bonus

OK, it might be trivial, but I admit I didn't know it (and kudos to Apple for that). iPad is truly, almost ridiculously stable device. Until today I really didn't know how to force it shutting down. And this is even more impressive given how intensively I am using the iPad to debug on it with Xcode.

Still, today the iPad got stuck with a black screen. I guess it was Xcode fault causing some sort of deadlock. The screen was completely black, except the top bar showing the clock, battery and the WiFi indicator.

It didn't respond to touches.
It didn't respond to pressing the home button.
It didn't respond to pressing and holding the sleep button (top right).

It did respond to rotation though (rotating the black screen and the status bar) and I was able to take screenshots of that black goodness (see below).

So how do you reboot it?

Press and hold for a few seconds both the Home button and the Sleep / Wake button. This forced the iPad to reboot. Problem solved.

Well, not so fast. Next time iTunes attempted to sync the iPad, I was greeted with a message that it cannot be synced as the required file was missing.

And here we come to the bonus -- simply shutting down iPhoto (on the Mac) solved my problem, but apparently some people had to manually delete the iPhoto cache folder as well.