iPad All-in-One For Dummies, 7th Edition (2015)

Book I. Getting Started with iPad

Chapter 4. Overview of Bundled Apps

In This Chapter

Getting the most out of the Internet with Safari, Mail, and Messages

Using cameras and organizing and sharing your photos

Getting organized with Calendar, Contacts, Notes, and Reminders

Going places with Maps

Using apps for e-reading and playing music, podcasts, and videos

Shopping for content at iTunes and apps at the App Store

Reading periodicals with Newsstand

Playing around with Game Center

Making video calls with FaceTime

Using fun photo effects with Photo Booth

iPad comes with certain functionality and applications (which you probably know as apps, for short) already installed. When you look at your Home screen (1 of 15 possible Home screens that you can fill with other apps without doing workarounds to add more Home screens), you’ll see 15 icons for apps, plus 1 for accessing iPad Settings.

Four icons are displayed across the bottom in iPad’s Dock: Messages, Mail, Safari, and Music. The other apps (Videos, Photos, Camera, Maps, Clock, Photo Booth, Calendar, Contacts, Notes, Reminders, Newsstand, iTunes Store, App Store, iBooks, Game Center, and FaceTime) are above the Dock and include apps for organizing your time and contacts, playing videos and reading periodicals, snapping pictures, gaming, shopping for content, and yet more. An Extras folder contains helpful Tips and the My Podcasts app.

The Dock icons appear on every Home screen. The others appear on the first Home screen unless you move them elsewhere. Note that you can add up to two additional apps to the Dock, if you want to have those apps available on every Home screen or replace apps in the Dock with others. With iOS 8, iBooks and Podcasts are included as bundled apps, and they appear on the second Home screen.

This chapter gives you a quick overview of what each bundled app does. You find out more about every one of them as you move through the chapters in this book.

Settings is a very important item on the Home screen you should know about: It’s the central location in iPad where you can adjust all the settings for various functions, change settings for how apps (both preinstalled and the ones you add) function, and perform administrative tasks like setting up email accounts or a password. Read more about using Settings in Chapter 8 of this minibook. You can also find advice about using settings for various apps in Books II, III, and V, and information about email settings in Chapter 7 of this minibook.

Another built-in feature (but not an app on your Home screen) to check out is Siri. See Book V, Chapter 6 for more about this cool personal assistant that does everything from finding the nearest Italian restaurant to providing the latest stock quotes.

Getting Online with iPad

iPad would kind of be a very expensive calendar, address book, and music player if you couldn’t go online to browse, buy things, get email, stream video and audio, and more. Two bundled apps, Safari and Mail, help to connect your iPad to many of the Internet’s resources.

Going on Safari

Safari is Apple’s web browser. If you’ve owned a Mac computer, iPhone, or iPod touch, you’ve already used Safari (see Figure 4-1) to navigate around the Internet, create and save bookmarks of favorite sites, and add web clips to your Home screen so that you can quickly visit favorite sites from there.

If you’ve been a Windows user in the past, you may also have used Safari, or you may be more familiar with browsers such as Internet Explorer, Chrome, or Firefox. If you haven’t used Safari, don’t worry; the browser should be pretty easy for you to get the hang of, with its familiar integrated address/search field, tabs, navigation buttons, and bookmarks.

Using a browser on iPad is a lot of fun because of the touchscreen functionality that gives you the ability to zoom in or out on a page by flicking two fingers inward or outward. Tabbed browsing allows you to move easily among open web pages, and the All Tabs view new with iOS 8 for iPad lets you see all your open tabs as thumbnails on a single screen. You can read more about using Safari in Chapter 6 of this minibook.

Figure 4-1: Find what you need on the web with Safari.

Be sure to check out iCloud connectivity with a feature called Handoff. If you have several Apple devices, you can use iCloud tabs to pick up where you left off searching or viewing tabs on one device on another.

You can get done much of what you want to do on your iPad by using Siri. This personal assistant, which you learn more about in Book V, Chapter 6, can help you go to a web page, create and send an email, enter an event in Reminders or Calendar, and more.

Getting Mail

iPad lets you get all your mail in one place through the Mail app — the program you use to access email accounts you set up in iPad. You can set up accounts that you have with popular email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, and Outlook.com. You can also access accounts through iCloud or Microsoft Exchange/Office 365. (Your work email account might use Microsoft Exchange, for example.) Almost any IMAP- or POP3-type account (the two most common mail protocols) is supported, which lets you access the email accounts you have with your Internet service provider (ISP).

After you set up an account, when you tap the Mail icon, your email will display without your having to browse to a site or sign in. Then you can use tools to move among preset mail folders, read and reply to mail, and download attached photos to the iPad. You can also use the Print feature in Mail to print your email messages to a printer that supports AirPrint. You can read more about setting up and using email accounts in Chapter 7 of this minibook.

In portrait orientation, emails are displayed full screen, and you can use a drop-down menu to view your inbox. In landscape orientation, the inbox stays put on the left side of your screen.

iPad users (except those with an original iPad or iPad 2) can use the Dictation feature to enter email addresses and messages in Mail by tapping the Dictation key on the onscreen keyboard and speaking them. See Chapter 3 in this minibook for more about the Dictation feature.

Using iMessage to connect

iPad’s instant messaging app is called Messages. This app allows you to use the iMessage service to swap text messages with others in real time using a cellphone number or email address. You can forward your conversations to others as well.

You can use the Messages settings to turn on the app or allow others to get a read receipt when you’ve read their messages. You can also use the data in your Contacts app to make addressing messages quick and easy. New with iOS 8 comes the ability to send audio or video messages.

Shooting and Organizing Photos

All iPads (except for the original iPad) include front- and rear-facing cameras. You can use the cameras to take still photos or shoot videos (both of which are covered in Book II, Chapter 4). To review and play around with photos you snap or bring onto the iPad from another source, you have the Photos app.

Examining the iPad cameras

The third-generation and later iPads have a super-clear Retina display and rear-facing iSight camera for viewing and taking the best iPad-generated photos and video yet.

Take a quick look at your camera’s features by tapping the Camera app icon on the Home screen.

You can use the controls in the Camera app to

· Switch between the front and rear cameras.

· Change from still-camera to video-camera operation by using the Camera/Video slider.

· Take a picture or start recording a video.

· Turn on a grid to help you autofocus on still photo subjects.

· Use square, time-lapse, or panorama settings and use filters to modify the colors and other effects on a shot.

· Open previously captured images or videos.

When you view a photo or video, you can use an iPad feature to send the image via a tweet or email, share it via iCloud Photo Sharing, send it to those close to you via AirDrop, post it to your Facebook or Flickr account, print images, use a still photo as wallpaper or assign it to represent a contact, or run a slideshow or edit a video. See Book II, Chapters 4 and 6 for more detail about using the iPad cameras.

Perusing your photos

Photos isn’t exactly Photoshop or any other sophisticated photo-imaging program — it’s just a pretty simple app for organizing and viewing photos with a few very simple editing tools including a set of filters for cool effects. Still, although it doesn’t do much, its features are very easy to use.

Photos (see Figure 4-2) allows you to organize pictures in folders; email, message, or tweet photos to others or post photos to Facebook; use a photo as your iPad wallpaper; or upload someone’s picture to a contact record. Photos organizes photos by year or location taken.

You can use tools to apply filters, rotate, enhance, remove red-eye, or crop photos. You can also run slideshows of your photos. You can open albums, use the pinch or expand gestures to shrink or enlarge photos, and scroll through photos with a swipe.

Figure 4-2: A simple but fun way to view your photos.

You can use the Photo Sharing feature to share photos among your friends. In addition, you can share photos and other content using Twitter, Flickr, iCloud Photo Sharing, or Facebook from right within several apps, including Photos.

The sexy part of Photos is the way you interact with the photos with your fingers on the touchscreen, moving from one collection to another, scrolling through collections, and expanding or shrinking photos. You can also use Photos to convert your iPad into a digital photo frame while you have it docked or charging, and you can run slideshows of your photo albums as well. If Photos sounds like fun (and it is), read more about how it works in Book II, Chapter 6.

Using Apps to Stay Organized

Scheduling your time, tracking contacts, jotting down notes — they’re all a part of keeping organized in today’s hectic world. iPad offers five apps to help you do just that: Calendar, Contacts, Reminders, Clock, and Notes.

More recent iPads have native print capability, which can be useful for printing Notes documents, for example. You have to have a printer that supports AirPrint wireless printing to use this method. See Book V, Chapter 1 for more about printing.

iPads have a multitasking feature that you can turn on or off in the General pane in Settings. That means that you don’t have to return to the Home screen every time you want to switch among all these great apps. As on the iPhone, multitasking is dead simple. With one app open, just press the Home button twice or place five fingers on the screen and pinch them together. A horizontal display of app icons for any open apps appears along the middle of the screen along with photos of recent contacts. Scroll to find the one you want, tap it, and it opens. To quit an app, just slide it upward. You can also use four fingers and swipe to the left or right to move through any currently running apps or apps you’ve used recently.

Tracking your schedule with Calendar

What would any computing device today be without a calendar feature, given our busy lives? If the calendar features on your computer and mobile phone don’t already keep you on track, try iPad’s Calendar. This app provides a handy onscreen daybook that you can use to set up appointments and send alerts to remind you about them. You can also sync Calendar with other calendars that you maintain online such as on Google, Yahoo!, computer-based calendars via iTunes, or iCloud.

See Chapter 5 in this minibook for more about syncing and Book V, Chapter 3 for details on using Calendar.

Keeping in touch with Contacts

Today, it’s all about who you know and staying in touch. Contacts is the built-in address book feature (see Figure 4-3) for the iPad that lets you do just that. You can use Contacts to enter contact information (including photos, if you like, from your Photos app) and share contact information via Mail or Messages. You can also use a search feature to find contacts easily.

Contacts is another app that you can sync with your iPhone or computer to save you tedious reentry of information. Read more about this in Book V, Chapter 5.

Want to find your contact in the real world? Tap that person’s address in Contacts, and the iPad Maps app shows you how to get there! You can also tap an address that you find in Maps and add it to Contacts.

Figure 4-3: Keep the basics about all your contacts in this handy app.

Making Notes

Notes is a simple notepad app in which you can enter text or cut and paste text from a website or email. You can’t do much except create and edit your notes, or email or print them — the app has no features for formatting text or inserting objects. You’ll find Notes handy, though, for simple scribbles on the fly.

You’ll feel right at home with the clean interface that Notes sports. The font also has a clean, sans-serif look, and the icons along the top are pretty straightforward. You can move to the previous note, email a note, trash a note, or move to the next note. You can even tap the Dictation key on the onscreen keyboard of an iPad (except for the original iPad and iPad 2) and speak your content.

If this simple note-keeper appeals to you, read more about the Notes app in Book V, Chapter 2.

You can enter info into Notes using Dictation or the onscreen keyboard. If you are a heavy note taker and dictating notes has no appeal, consider buying a compatible Bluetooth keyboard or keyboard dock for easier typing.

Keeping yourself on track with Reminders

Reminders is a handy electronic to-do list in which you can enter tasks or pull tasks from the Calendar app. You can organize reminders into custom categories and see them in a list or organized by date, which also displays a useful monthly calendar on one side of the screen.

Of course, an obvious feature of an app called Reminders is that you can set it up to remind you of an event. Location-based reminders (which work most efficiently with the always-on 3G or 4G connection on iPad 3G/4G models) prompt your iPad to remind you about an event based on your location; for example, set a reminder to buy milk when you get to a specific location, and you receive the alert when you arrive at the market. This feature uses Location Services to track your whereabouts at any point in time.

Staying on time with Clock

This app is a simple utility that is especially useful to all you world travelers. Clock allows you to display clocks from around the world side by side, so if you’re in Paris, you can easily see what time it is in New York.

Clock also has a feature that lets you set alarms to keep your day on schedule. Finally, you can use timer and stopwatch features. The timer lets you do things like time the cookies you just put in the oven, and the stopwatch lets you add up the minutes of your morning jog or workout. You can even use the lap-timer feature to keep track of multiple laps in a workout, such as those runs around the track or swimming pool laps.

Going Places with Maps

The Maps app allows you to view classic maps or aerial views of addresses; get directions from one place to another by car or on foot; and check on traffic in large cities.

If you own a Wi-Fi–only iPad, a less sophisticated system than 3G/4G can identify your current location and help you find directions from there to other places. 3G/4G iPad owners enjoy a much more targeted location system using GPS, but all models can take advantage of the ability to bookmark or share locations, or add an address to Contacts.

See Book III, Chapter 2 for step-by-step procedures for using the Maps app.

Being Entertained by iPad

One of the joys of the iPad is its use as a media consumption tool. Playing music and watching videos are very entertaining uses of iPad, indeed. The bundled Music and Videos apps make playing media easy to do. In addition, by using the iBooks app, you can use your iPad as an e-reader, and the Podcasts app opens up a world of audio content.

Playing around with Music

Unless you’ve been living in a cave without 3G/4G or satellite TV for the last several years, you know perfectly well that the iPod has historically been the Apple-preferred player. On your iPad, the Music app is your media player with a heavy emphasis on music. You can use Music to play music, audio podcasts, or audiobooks.

One of the nicest things about Music on the iPad is the fact that the iPad comes with a very nifty sound system and stereo speakers, so listening with or without headphones will be a pleasing experience for everyone who’s addicted to MP3 listening devices. You can also browse your music by a variety of criteria, such as artist, album, song, or genre.

iOS 8 gives Siri access to the Shazam music identifier service. Sitting in a café and want to know what that song is that’s playing on the music system? Just ask Siri, which checks with Shazam and offers you the chance to buy the music from the iTunes Store

Watching Videos

You can use the Videos app to play TV or movies, and it offers some useful features for controlling video playback.

The Videos app is a media player like Music, but it specializes in playing videos and offers a few more features, such as breakdowns of the various chapters in the video and information about related movies and casts for media you got from iTunes. You can move between widescreen and full-screen display, and it shines at showing high-definition content, especially with the third-generation (and later) iPad’s awesome Retina display. See Book II, Chapter 3 for more on the Videos app.

Reading e-books

With iOS 8, the popular e-reader app, iBooks, comes preinstalled. Using this app, you can read books, add highlights and bookmarks to text, look up definitions, and more. You can access the iBooks Store from iBooks to buy content, or use other sources to purchase and download books.

iBooks allows you to adjust text size and background to make your book pages more readable. Also, the iPad’s highly portable size makes taking your books on the road very easy. For more about downloading apps for your iPad, see Book II, Chapter 1, and to work with the iBooks’s e-reader app itself, go to Book II, Chapter 7.

Listening to Podcasts

My Podcasts is another app that now comes preinstalled on your iPad in the Extras folder. My Podcasts is a gateway to a world of audio content, from popular content such as The Daily Show to comedy and motivational talks. Most podcasts are free, and you can download individual shows or subscribe to ones that publish on a regular basis.

Going Shopping at iTunes and the App Store

The iTunes app takes you to the iTunes Store, where you can shop’til you drop (or your iPad battery runs out of juice) for music, movies, TV shows, and audiobooks and then download them directly to your iPad. You can also preview content before you download it. See Chapter 5 in this minibook for more about how to buy apps, and www.dummies.com/extras/ipadaio for a listing of some of the very best apps out there.

Ready for more shopping? Tapping the App Store icon takes you directly to the Apple online store, where you can buy and download apps that do everything from enabling you to play games to building business presentations. At last count, more than 550,000+ apps were available for the iPad, with more being added all the time. Some were created for iPhone/iPod touch and run on the iPad; some were created especially for the iPad. And some are even free!

Check out the iTunes U app that gives you access to hundreds of great online courses from sources such as major universities. You can download iTunes U for free from the App Store.

Reading Periodicals with Newsstand

Newsstand is a handy interface for subscribing to and reading magazines, newspapers, and other periodical apps. Publications you subscribe to are laid out in neat rows on virtual shelves, and there’s a handy Store button to shop for more periodicals.

Playing with Game Center

Game Center is a way to essentially browse game apps in the App Store by bestselling titles and compare your scores with your friends. Tap Game Center on your Home screen and tap one of the sets of colorful icons that appear on the Game Center screen, and you’re taken to the App Store, with information about a game displayed.

From then on, it’s about obtaining the game (either free or for a price through your iTunes account) and playing it. You can add friends to build your gaming social network and play and track scores for interactive games. See Chapter 5 in this minibook for more about buying apps, and Book II, Chapter 8 for more about gaming with your iPad.

Connecting with Friends on FaceTime

iPads (with the exception of the original iPad) ship with front- and rear-facing cameras, which unleash all kinds of possibilities. One of the coolest is using an app called FaceTime. The FaceTime video calling app lets you use the iPad’s video cameras to talk face-to-face with someone who has an iPad (except an original iPad); Mac (running OS X 10.6.6 or later); fourth- or later-generation iPod touch; or iPhone 4 or later. (See Figure 4-4.) You can call someone via his or her iPhone cellphone number or email address.

Figure 4-4: Talk face-to-face using FaceTime.

FaceTime even works directly over a cellular connection, though you’ll pay for it by eating up your data allotment.

You can also hold audio-only FaceTime sessions. This feature is handy when you don’t want to drain battery power, when you want to use less bandwidth, or when you’re having a bad hair day.

You’ll want to start trying FaceTime with all your friends who own a compatible Apple device, so head straight to Book II, Chapter 4 to get up to speed on FaceTime features.

Exploring Fun Photo Effects with Photo Booth

The very fun Photo Booth app has been included with Mac OS X for some time, and it came to the iPad with the release of iOS 5. It lets you take photos with weird and wonderful results (see Figure 4-5). You can use the built-in effects, such as Kaleidoscope, Mirror, and Thermal Camera, along with your iPad camera, to take photos that turn out unlike any others.

Figure 4-5: Manipulate photos in a variety of ways with Photo Booth.