Essential Digital Skills Level 1

111 videos, 7 hours and 55 minutes

Course Content

Understanding applications

Video 58 of 111
7 min 44 sec
English
English
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In this video, we will look at a little bit more information about apps. Now app stands for applications. Now, with these apps, these are typically small programs that would sit on your smartphone or on your tablet. Now sometimes, apps will also run on computers as well, but normally, they will be a full program, but what we are concentrating now is apps on phones and also tablets. Now, what I am using here is an Apple iPad. Just so you can see the different apps. So on the screen here, you will see there is lots of different apps that are available, just by panning to the left or the right, you can see different ones that are just stored on this particular app, this particular iPad. Now, what you can do with the apps is to view them at any time, you can also change them just by touching on the screen, you can change it, so they start shaking and then they have got a little X in the top. So what you can do then, is just click on the top of it, hit the X, and it will allow you to delete that app if you want to.

Let us cancel that, to leave it there. You can change it. Now if you want to make it so that these apps stop shaking in the edit, you either just leave it for a few seconds, then it will go, or you can hit the done button in the top right corner, and then the apps will stay there. Now with the apps, you can also change the layout of them, again, just touch the screen till they start moving, and then you can drag an app and move it into another location. So whatever you want to do, you can just change them around. You can also make folders on apps as well. So if you want to try and group everything together, so if you want to have different things, so if maybe we want to have these two here, one is for the Screw Fix, one is for B&Q. So if we take the B&Q one and we hold it over the Screw Fix and we let go, it has put them into a little folder. Now it has come up with a general word of lifestyle there, but what we are going to do, is just hit the X button on the right, the keyboard pops up, and we are just going to call these... Oh, I will just call it building.

So now, we have got the name of it, hit done, and then if you just tap the screen, we are straight back, we have got a folder there with the two apps inside the folder, and if we click it again, they are there. Now if we want to take them out, we can drag them and put them back on the main screen. Now we have only got one left, we can drag that out and put it on the main screen, and that folder has then vanished. Again, just touch the screen and the X has vanished again. Now, one important thing with apps is we have got to make sure they are kept up-to-date. So there is always a program on whichever system you are working with, to update the apps. So within this one is called the App Store, so we can just click on that. And once we click on it, it is where you would download apps, but we will look at the updates to start with. So at the top, there will be the picture, and this picture will be with you, so we just picture there, touch that, and what we can do now is look down and we see the apps there, and you see there is 16 needing updating.

Now, it is worth it before you update, if you just drag the screen down a little bit, you will see that changes, and then you will see it has downloaded at the very latest. So in total now, there are 24 apps that need updating. Now we've left this purposely so that you can see this, but you can set it so that it updates them regularly itself, but it is always worth checking in to make sure you are using the latest versions. So we could either update one individually, so if I were to update the BBC iPlayer, I just touch on that and that will start downloading. And they usually download really, really quickly, but it just takes a bit of time sometimes, depending on the app. If you want to download everything and update it, hit the update all, and know what that is doing, it is now updating every single one of those apps. Now while it is updating those apps, you cannot then use those apps, because it is going through the update process.

But if you have got an app that stores information, for example, the B&Q one we said earlier, if you have got some saved products or anything like that, they are often saved within the app, it is the app program that has been changed, yet your data is usually safe within the app, so you are not going to lose any information just by updating them. So as you see here, it is starting to work down, we have only got 21 to go, and you can see there is a little timer on the right-hand side. If I want to stop it, so this Amazon Prime, I want to stop that download, if I just touch the square in the middle, it will stop it completely, and it has vanished from the screen because it has just been added to the bottom of the list because it is one that has not been updated yet. You will carry on updating, so all the apps are then updated, and... When it finishes, so you do not need to do anything, you can just leave that and you do not need to worry.

So the other thing you can do with the App Store is finding apps that you want to work with. So on this screen here, you will see there is lots of different sections, so there is games and there is other programs that you might want to download, and to move the screen, all I am doing is touching the screen and swiping it upwards, or I can swipe it downwards, and then I can see what sorts of things are there if there is something new that I want to download. I can also search. So if I hit the search button on the bottom right, some default things have come up. Now with apps, there is sort of two key types of apps, one is the free apps, and these are free to use, and then there is the paid apps, which sometimes are free to use, then you can upgrade to get the full features. And also, you have what is called in-app purchases. Now, this would be where you have the basic use of the program, but then you have to pay a little bit more if you want a little bit more out of it.

These are... Typical examples of these would be some games, that may be the game is free, but if you then want extra aspects of the game or extra features with the game, you have to pay extra for them. So just be aware if you are using these tablets and phones and you are giving it to children, then there is always the worry that they are going to start running up a bill, so you need to make sure the settings are okay within the payment side of the device you are dealing with. What you can also do at the top, and you got a search field, so within that search field, you can then enter in the sorts of app you want. So if we are looking at one here, we can just put gardening in, then we hit the blue search button, and that will then search through the database of all apps that come up with gardening. So the first one here, we have got something called Picture This, and this is an app that you can literally take a photo of a plant in your garden, and it will tell you what it is, and the information.

Now, this has already been downloaded on the account before, so you have got a little cloud icon. So what that would do is you hit that button, which will then download it onto this device. It probably means that this has been loaded onto a different device, but now let us put it onto this one. And then you can just pan down and have a look. So if we wanted to get the BBC Gardeners World Magazine, we hit the get button, and after a few seconds, it is saying, "Double click" on this particular device. It has also got a face ID, so it is firstly looking at your face, and also, you are clicking the button. Now, one thing you do need to do with face ID often turns it around into portrait mode. So what we mean by portrait is this way around, rather than this way around.

Sometimes, the face IDs do not always pick up your face correctly. So as you can see on here now, the app is downloading, this seems to be quite a larger app, it is taking a little bit more time to download than the others. So we will just leave that, and then that will put that onto the home screen of the iPad. So as you can see here, there is loads and loads of different apps to choose from, and also, there is collections and all sorts of other things on there. So when you are choosing apps, have a look through them, but when you are choosing them, just be aware, some of them do cost. They are usually always clear that they do cost. Also, you can download an app, you can have a look at it, if you do not like it, you can always delete it later on. It is quite a simple process as we showed you earlier.