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Week 2: iPad – tips and tricks
2. Apps and the iPad
You know your iPad can run apps, but it's not limited to those apps that
originally shipped with it. Apple's App Store has over 500,000 apps, and many of them are
worth your time. But how do you find the good ones?
That's what this video is about, making the most of the App Store.
Now there are two ways to browse the App Store: On your computer within iTunes and on the
iPad itself.
We're going to start with iTunes on your computer – Windows or MAC.
Launch iTunes and choose the iTunes Store in iTunes Source pane.
The iTunes Store's homepage is devoted to music, movies, and TV shows. We're only after
apps, so we're going to click on the App Store link. This takes us to the App Store homepage.
Let's check out the top of that page. Apple promotes the coolest new app in banners
at the top of the page. You'll also find some collections that are
based on a particular theme. For example, if it's around the holiday, you
may see some kind of holiday theme or something that's popular at the time; for example, the
Olympic Games.
Move down to New and Noteworthy, and you're going to find apps that Apple also thinks
are worth your attention.
But if you want to see what's hot with other iOS users, check out a few other areas. Scroll
down to What's Hot. These are apps that had been recently released that have been selling
pretty well. Now 'recently released' is the key phrase here. These aren't long-time performers,
but rather, apps that have been popular for short time. They are worth checking out, but
as they haven't been here for a long time, they may still be rubbish.
One place I do look for better apps are the Top Charts list.
1. There are a couple of them. The first is Paid Apps. These are apps that are selling
really well, and of course, they are selling. You have to pay to get these apps.
2. Scroll down and you'll also see the top Free Apps. These are free applications, but
are very popular, and this is what people are downloading.
3. If you want to see long-term performers that are doing well, keep going until you
get to the Top Grossing area. These are apps that are not only popular, but they've made
a lot of money for the people who have developed them.
Now Apple has put together some other lists that you should look at.
Click the Apps Starter Kit. This is an App Store Essentials collection, and it contains
applications that are quite popular and very useful.
For example, here Flipboard is a way of looking at stories from the Internet.
iBooks is incredibly popular. It's the way that you look at books on the iPad and other
iOS devices, and here's TuneIn Radio, which provides access to radio stations anywhere
in the world. If you like games, check out the Games Starter Kit.
The Hall of Fame are apps that are not only popular, but Apple likes them too.
Now you can dig down even further by clicking on the App Store Quick Links and looking at
one of the category's list. So let's look at Photo & Video.
This is similar to the regular Apps homepage; however, it's devoted to a specific category.
So again, you see New and Noteworthy, What's Hot, and then you see a listing of all the
apps that are available in this category, also top Free Apps and top Paid Apps.
Okay. So let's select an app from the App Starter Kit and look at it in greater depth.
So let's choose a free app. ABC iView. This is the catch-up on demand app from the ABC.
So here we are on the page for this app, and what you can see, of course, is:
* the title. * the description.
* You can learn more about the application by clicking on a More link, right here on
the page. * You'll see new version information.
* There are also some screenshots for the iPhone and iPad versions.
* When you want to buy the app, you just simply click on the Price area.
* In this case, this is a free app. We'll go ahead and download it.
* It will ask my Apple ID and password. * Click get, and it is now downloading this
app.
Move further down the page, and look at Customer Ratings. This is one way to tell if the app
is worth it or not. First of all, you're going to get Star Ratings.
These are people who have downloaded and / or purchased the app.
People can rate the app out of 5 stars and then the ratings are averaged.
Another thing to be careful about is to look at the number of ratings that are here.
If an app has 3, 4, 5, 6 ratings, it doesn't tell you very much. But if it has lots and
lots of ratings, you have an idea that many people have rated it, and you're going to
get a better and a more accurate idea of how good this app is.
Also go to the Sort By menu, and choose Most Recent. Then take a look at the ratings. The
reason you do this is because it's possible that an update has come out and maybe it's
introduced some bugs, or there were bugs before and the update fixes those bugs. By looking
at the Recent Reviews, you can see how the very most current version is doing.
Read a few of the reviews. Read five, six, maybe ten reviews and get an idea of how people
really feel about it, instead of just picking one review and saying, oh, well, that guy
didn't like it, so clearly it's no good.
One more thing that I'd like to point out is the Apps entry under Library on your iTunes
sidebar. Select this and you'll see a list of all the apps that are stored in your iTunes
Library. What we're specifically looking at here is the Updates entry at the bottom of
the window. Click on that and you'll see how many updated apps are available to you. Now
you can choose these things individually.
So if you want to just download one of these, simply click on Get Update, and
that single app will update. Or you can go to the top of the window and select
Download All Updates. Once you purchase an app, the updates are free; however, if they
come out with a brand-new version, then yes, you've to pay for it again.
Generally, we would update the apps on the iPad.
The App Store as seen from the iPad So now we've seen how the App Store looks
on your Mac. So now lets take a look at the iPad.
Of course, all the music, movies, and TV shows have been moved off to a
separate iTunes app. So within the App Store app, you'll see nothing but apps.
In this case, you navigate through a series of buttons.
So by default, you'll see the featured button and you see the featured screen. So, banner
at the top, New and Noteworthy, Categories below, Staff Favorites, and
some Quick Links at the bottom.
If you want to see What's Hot, there's a button at the top for that.
And you can check apps by release date by tapping that.
Tap Top charts, and again, you can see top paid and free apps. By default, you see ten.
If you tap on Show More, you get another ten. Below that are the Top Grossing iPad apps,
and again, you can show more of those by tapping Show More.
Tap Categories. Just like on your computer, you can go through categories, so we'll look
at Entertainment, and here we have a page that has all our entertainment apps on it,
Now the last button is Updates. On the computer, we saw we had a few updates,
and here we have a few updates. To update them all, I will just simply tap
Update All. I enter my password, and what happens then is the App Store disappears,
Return to the app Store, and let's take a look at Genius.
Now this is how Genius works. The App Store knows who you are by your account,
and it also knows all the apps that you've downloaded.
So what it will do is it will make recommendations based on the apps that
are on your iPad, but rather everything that you've ever acquired with
that account. So it will say, based on app A, we think that
you'd like app B. It includes the name of the app and the price.
You can also tap a Not Interested link, and this means, no, please don't
recommend something like this to me again. I either have it, or I don't want it.
And there are some for iPad apps, and there is also a button for iPad upgrades,
and that's how Genius works. It works very much the way that the Genius
feature works for music in iTunes, and of course, we cover that kind
of information in iTunes Essential Training elsewhere.
And that's pretty much it. Familiar territory if you've used the App
Store in iTunes, and now you know that you can use it on your iPad and you could
obtain these applications over a Wi-Fi network, or over 3G.