iPad: The Missing Manual (2014)

Part 2. Pix, Flix, & Apps

Chapter 9. All About Apps

App is short for application, meaning software program, and the App Store is a single, centralized catalog of every authorized iPad add-on program in the world. In fact, it’s the only place where you can get new programs.

You hear people talking about downsides to this approach: Apple’s stifling the competition; Apple’s taking a 30 percent cut of every app sold; Apple’s maintaining veto power over apps it doesn’t like.

But there are some enormous benefits, too. First, there’s one central place to look for apps. Second, Apple checks out every program to make sure it’s decent and runs decently. Third, the store is beautifully integrated with the iPad itself.

There’s an incredible wealth of software in the App Store. These programs can turn the iPad into an instant-messaging tool, an Internet radio, a medical reference, a musical keyboard, a time and expense tracker, a TV remote control, a photo editor, a recipe box, a tip calculator, a restaurant finder, a teleprompter, and so on. And games—thousands of dazzling handheld games, some with smooth 3-D graphics and tilt control.

About 500,000 apps have been designed for the iPad’s screen. But there are also 1.4 million apps that have been designed for the iPhone—and you can use them on the iPad, too. (They appear either double size or with a big black margin.)

It’s so much stuff that the challenge now is just finding your way through it. Thank goodness for those Most Popular lists.

Two Ways to the App Store

You can get to the App Store in two ways: from the iPad itself, or from your computer’s copy of the iTunes software.

Using iTunes offers a much easier browsing and shopping experience, of course, because you’ve got a mouse, a keyboard, and that big screen. But downloading straight to the iPad, without ever involving the computer, is wicked convenient when you’re out and about.

Shopping from the iPad

To check out the App Store from your iPad, tap the App Store icon. You arrive at the colorful, scrolling wonder of the store itself.

It has five tabs (the icons at the bottom). Here they are, in order:

§ Featured is pretty clear: You can scroll vertically to see different categories, like Best New Apps or Previews, and horizontally to see more apps within each category.

The top row might say “Best New Apps.” Scroll sideways to see the apps that Apple is recommending (See All shows all the new apps).

At the top left, the Categories button presents the entire catalog, organized by category: Books, Business, Education, Entertainment, Finance, Games, and so on. Tap a category to see what’s in it.

§ Top Charts is a list of the 100 most popular programs at the moment, ranked by how many people have downloaded them. There are actually three lists here: the most popular free programs, the most popular ones that cost money (“Paid”), and which apps have made the most money (“Top Grossing”), even if they haven’t sold the most copies.

§ Explore lists apps that are popular near you. It uses your location to check for geographically relevant apps. Usually, this concept is most useful when you’re at a public institution: a museum, baseball stadium, train station, and so on. You may also see the newspaper apps for whatever town you’re in, or local bus and subway apps.

§ Purchased. Here are all the apps you’ve ever bought. On the Not on This iPad tab, of course, are the ones you’ve bought on other iPads or iPhones, available to download to this one right now, no charge.

§ Updates. Unlike its buddies, this button isn’t intended to help you navigate the catalog. Instead, it lets you know when one of the programs you’ve already installed is available in a newer version. Details in a moment.

About a third of the App Store’s programs are free; the rest are usually under $5. A few, intended for professionals (pilots, for example), can cost a lot more.

Search

As the number of iPad apps grows into the millions, viewing by scrolling through lists begins to get awfully unwieldy.

Fortunately, you can also search the catalog, which is efficient if you know what you’re looking for (either the name of a program, the kind of program, or the software company that made it).

Before you even begin to type, this panel shows you a list of Trending Searches—that is, the most popular searches right now. Odds are pretty good that if you want to download the latest hot app you keep hearing about, you’ll see its name here (because, after all, it’s hot).

Or tap in the search box to make the keyboard appear. As you type, the list shrinks so that it’s showing you only the matches. You might type tetris, or piano, or Disney, or whatever.

Tap anything in the results list (next page, bottom) to see a series of “cards,” one for each matching app. You can swipe horizontally to scroll through them. Tap one to view its details screen, as described below.

The App Details Page

No matter which button was your starting point, eventually you wind up at an app’s details screen. There’s a description, a scrolling set of screenshots, info about the author, the date posted, the version number, a page of related and similar apps, and so on.

You can also tap Reviews to dig beyond the average star rating into the actual written reviews from people who’ve already tried the thing.

Why are the ratings so important? Because the App Store’s goodies aren’t equally good. Remember, these programs come from a huge variety of people—teenagers in Hungary, professional firms in Silicon Valley, college kids goofing around on weekends—and just because they made it into the store doesn’t mean they’re worth the money (or even the time to download).

Sometimes a program has a low score because it’s just not designed well or it doesn’t do what it’s advertised to do. And sometimes, of course, it’s a little buggy.

If you decide something is worth getting, scroll back to the top of the page and tap its price button. It may say, for example, FREE or $0.99.

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If you see a little sign on the price button, it means that the same app works well on both the iPad and the iPhone.

If you’ve previously bought it, either on this iPad or on another Apple touchscreen gadget, then the button turns into a ; you don’t have to buy it again. Just tap to re-download. If, in fact, this app is already on your iPad, then the button says OPEN (handy!).

Once you tap the price and then INSTALL APP, you’ve committed to downloading the program. There are only a few things that may stand in your way:

§ A request for your iTunes account info. You can’t use the App Store without an iTunes account—even if you’re just downloading free stuff. If you’ve ever bought anything from the iTunes Store, signed up for an iCloud account, or bought anything from Apple online, then you already have an iTunes account (an Apple ID, meaning your email address and password).

The iPad asks you to enter your iTunes account name and password the first time you access the App Store and periodically thereafter, just to make sure some marauding child in your household can’t run up your bill without your knowledge. Mercifully, you don’t have to enter your Apple ID information just to download an update to an app you already own.

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If you have an iPad Air 2 or mini 3 model, and you’ve taught it to recognize your fingerprint, here’s the payoff: When you try to download an app, instead of having to enter your Apple password, you can just touch the Home button with your finger.

§ A file size over 100 megabytes. If a program is bigger than 100 MB, you can’t download it over the cellular airwaves to a cellular iPad, a policy no doubt intended to soothe nerves at AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Instead, over-100-meg files are available only when you’re on a WiFi connection.

Once you begin downloading a file, a tiny progress circle next to the app’s name fills in to indicate the download’s progress. (Tap the square Stop button inside the circle to cancel the download.) When the downloading is done, tap the OPEN button to open it and try it out.

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You don’t have to sit there and stare at the progress bar. You can go on working on the iPad. In fact, you can even go back to the App Store and start downloading something else simultaneously. You can easily spot your fresh downloads on the Home screens: Their icons fill in with color as the download proceeds, and after that their names are preceded by a blue dot.

Two Welcome Notes about Backups

Especially when you’ve paid good money for your iPad apps, you might worry about what would happen if your iPad got lost or stolen, or if someone (maybe you) accidentally deletes one of your precious downloads.

You don’t have to worry. Here’s a handy little fact about the App Store: It remembers what you’ve already bought. You can re-download a purchased program at any time, on any of your iPads, iPhones, or iPod Touches, without having to pay for it again.

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If some program doesn’t download properly on the iPad, don’t sweat it. Go into iTunes on your computer and choose Store→Check for Available Downloads. And if a program does download to the iPad but doesn’t transfer to iTunes, then choose File→Transfer Purchases from “iPad”. These two commands straighten things out, clear up the accounting, and make all well with your two copies of each app (iPad + computer).

Shopping in iTunes

You can also download new programs to your computer using iTunes and then sync them over to the iPad. By all means, use this method whenever you can. It’s much more efficient to use a mouse, a keyboard, and a full screen.

In iTunes, click the (apps) icon at top left; at top center, click App Store. The screen fills with starting points for your quest, matching what you’d see on the iPad: Best New Apps, Best New Games, and so on.

Or use the search box at top right.

From here, the experience is the same as it is on the iPad. Drill down to the Details page for a program, read its description and reviews, look at its photos, and so on. Click the price button to download and, at the next sync, install it.

iPhone Apps on the iPad

Apple wrote iOS 8 to run on both iPhones and iPads. As a side effect, you gain one fantastically useful perk: You can run all of those 1.4 million iPhone apps on the iPad.

Of course, those apps are designed to run on a smaller screen. So what happens on the much larger iPad?

In the olden days, iPhone apps started out floating in the middle of the iPad screen at phone size, surrounded by a sea of black. They ran perfectly fine that way. But you also could tap a little 2x button in the lower-right corner of the iPad screen to make the app fill the entire screen. The graphics were much coarser, since iOS 8 was basically just magnifying everything.

Today, the 2x button is gone. All iPhone apps automatically fill the screen. For the most part, the graphics aren’t as blurry as they once were; Apple has found ways to sharpen them up on the iPad screen.

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Ordinarily, the App Store app shows you only apps designed for the iPad’s big screen. Which is a shame, because there are hundreds of thousands more apps available for the iPhone, which you can run on the iPad.

To find them, do a search—and on the search-results page, use the top-left pop-up menu to choose iPhone Only.

Organizing Your Apps

As you add new apps to your iPad, it sprouts new Home screens as necessary to accommodate them all, up to a grand total of 11 screens. That’s 224 icons—and yet you can actually go all the way up to many thousands of apps, thanks to the miracle of folders.

That multiple–Home screen business can get a little unwieldy, but a couple of tools can help you manage. First, you can just use Siri to open an app, without even knowing where it is. Just say, “Open Angry Birds” (or whatever).

Second, the Spotlight search feature can pluck the program you want out of your haystack, as described on Spotlight: Global Search.

Third, you can organize your apps into folders, which greatly alleviates the agony of TMHSS (Too Many Home Screens Syndrome).

It’s worth taking the time to arrange the icons on your Home screens into logical categories, tidy folders, or at least a sensible sequence.

You can do that either on the iPad itself or in iTunes on your computer. That’s far quicker and easier, but it works only when your iPad is actually connected to the Mac or PC. Read on.

Rearranging/Deleting Apps Using iTunes

To fiddle with the layout of your Home screens with the least amount of hassle, connect the iPad to your computer using the white charging cable or over WiFi. Open iTunes.

Click your iPad’s icon () at top left, and then click Apps in the left-side list. You see the display on the next page.

From here, it’s all mouse power:

§ For each listed app, click the button so that it says either Install (if the app is on your computer but not currently on your iPad) or Remove (if it is; at that point, the button changes to say Will Remove). In other words, it’s possible to store hundreds of apps in iTunes but load only some of them onto your iPad.

§ Click one of the Home screen miniatures on the right list to indicate which screen you want to edit. It gets big. Now you can drag the app icons to rearrange them on that page. (Click the background to close the life-size image.)

§ Beneath the Home screen miniatures, iTunes displays similar mockups of each folder on your iPad. Because they’re visible here, all of them, all the time, it’s very easy to put icons into them—and to work with the multiple “pages” within each folder (read on).

§ It’s fine to drag an app onto a different page mockup. You can organize your icons on these Home screens by category, frequency of use, color, or whatever tickles your fancy. (The button above each pile of mockups means “Click to install an additional Home screen.”)

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You can select several app icons simultaneously by ⌘-clicking them (or Ctrl-clicking in Windows); that way, you can move a bunch of them at once.

§ You can drag the page mockups around to rearrange them, too.

§ To delete an app from the iPad, point to its icon and click the . (You can’t delete Apple’s starter apps like Safari and Mail.)

§ Create a folder by dragging one app’s icon on top of another (see Folders for more on folders).

When your design spurt is complete, click Apply in the lower-right corner of the screen.

Rearranging/Deleting Apps Right on the iPad

You can also redesign your Home screens right on the iPad, which is handy when you don’t happen to be wired up to a computer.

To enter this Home screen editing mode, hold your finger down on any icon until, after about a second, the icons begin to—what’s the correct term?—wiggle.

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You can even move an icon onto the Dock. Just make room for it by first dragging an existing Dock icon to another spot on the screen.

At this point, you can rearrange your icons by dragging them around the glass into a new order; other icons scoot aside to make room.

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You can drag a single icon across multiple Home screens without ever having to lift your finger. Just drag the icon against the right or left margin of the screen to “turn the page.”

To create an additional Home screen, drag a wiggling icon to the right edge of the screen; keep your finger down. The first Home screen slides off to the left, leaving you on a new, blank one, where you can deposit the icon. You can create up to 11 Home screens in this way.

You may have noticed that, while your icons are wiggling, most of them also sprout little ’s. That’s how you delete a program you don’t need anymore: Tap that . You’ll be asked if you’re sure; if so, it says bye-bye.

(You can’t delete one of Apple’s preinstalled apps, so no appears on those icons. If they really bug you, you can drag the little-used Apple apps into a folder somewhere.)

When everything looks good, press the Home button to exit Edit mode and stop the wiggling.

Restoring the Home Screen

If you ever need to undo all the damage you’ve done, tap Settings→General→Reset→Reset Home Screen Layout. That function preserves any new programs you’ve installed, but it consolidates them. If you’d put 10 programs on each of four Home screens, you wind up with only two screens, each packed with 20 icons. Any leftover blank pages are eliminated. This function also places all your downloaded apps in alphabetical order.

Folders

Folders are so useful on your Mac or PC—so why not use them on your iPad? Folders let you organize your apps, de-emphasize the ones you don’t use often, and restore order to that dizzying display of icons.

These days, each folder can have many pages of its own, each displaying nine icons. A single folder, in other words, can contain as many apps as you want—and therefore, only memory limits how many apps you can fit onto your iPad.

Setting Up Folders on the iPad

To create and edit folders, begin by entering Home screen editing mode. That is, hold your finger down on any icon until all the icons begin to wiggle.

Now, to create a folder, drag one app’s icon on top of another. The software puts both of them into a new folder and proposes a name, which you can change at this point. If they’re the same kind of app, iOS even tries to figure out what category they both belong to—and names the new folder accordingly (“Music,” “Photos,” “Kid Games,” or whatever).

You’re welcome to add more apps to this folder. Tap the Home screen background to close the folder, and then (while the icons are still wiggling) drag another app onto the folder’s icon. Lather, rinse, repeat.

If one of your folders has more than nine apps in it, then iOS creates a second “page” for the folder—and a third, a fourth, and so on. You can move apps around within the pages and otherwise master your new multipage folder domain.

You can scroll the folder “pages” by swiping sideways, just as you scroll the full-size Home pages. The only limit to how many icons a folder can hold is your tolerance for absurdity.

Once you’ve created a folder or two, they’re easy to rename, move, delete, and so on. (Again, you can do all of the following only in icon-wiggling editing mode.) Like this:

§ Take an app out of a folder by dragging its icon anywhere else on the Home screen. The other icons scoot aside to make room, just as they do when you move them from one Home screen to another.

§ Move a folder around by dragging, as you would any other icon.

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You can drag a folder icon onto the Dock, too, just as you would any app. Now you’ve got a pop-up subfolder full of your favorite apps—on the Dock, which is present on every Home screen. That’s a very useful feature; it multiplies the handiness of the Dock itself.

§ Rename a folder by opening it (tapping it). At this point, the folder’s name box is ready for editing.

§ Move an icon from one folder “page” to another by dragging it to the edge of the folder, waiting with your finger down until the page “changes,” and then releasing your finger in the right spot.

§ Delete a folder by removing all of its contents. The folder disappears automatically.

When you’re finished manipulating your folders, press the Home button to exit Home screen editing mode—and stop all the wiggling madness.

Setting Up Folders in iTunes

It’s faster and easier to set up your folders within iTunes, on your Mac or PC, where you have a mouse and a big screen to help you. Connect your iPad to your computer (by cable or WiFi), open iTunes, click the iPad’s icon at top left, and then click the Apps tab in the left-side column. You see something like the illustration on Rearranging/Deleting Apps Right on the iPad.

To create a folder, click a Home page miniature to expand it; now drag one app’s icon on top of another, exactly as you’d do on the iPad. The software puts both of them into a single new folder. As on the iPad, the computer proposes a folder name; an editing bar also appears so that you can type a custom name you prefer.

Once you’ve got a folder, you can open it just by double-clicking. It expands to life size, revealing its contents. Now you can edit the folder’s name, drag the icons around inside it, or drag an app right out of the folder window and onto another Home page (or another folder on it). Just keep your finger down on the mouse button or trackpad, no matter how long it takes, until the new Home page or folder page opens.

Below the Home pages, you’ll discover that each of your app folders now has an app-management screen mockup of its own, complete with a horizontally scrolling set of pages. That’s so you can move the “pages” around, organize the apps within them, and so on.

If you remove all the apps from a folder, the folder disappears.

App Preferences

If you’re wondering where you can change an iPad app’s settings, consider backing out to the Home screen and then tapping Settings. Apple encourages programmers to add their programs’ settings here, way down below the bottom of the iPad’s own Settings screen.

Some programmers ignore the advice and build the settings right into their apps, where they’re a little easier to find. But if you don’t see them there, now you know where else to look.

App Updates

When a circled number (like ) appears on the App Store’s icon on the Home screen, or on the Updates icon within the App Store program, that’s Apple’s way of letting you know that a program you already own has been updated. Apple knows which programs you’ve bought—and notifies you when new, improved versions are released. Which is remarkably often; software companies constantly fix bugs and add new features.

Manual Updates

When you tap Updates, you’re shown a list of the programs with waiting updates. A tiny What’s New arrow lets you know what the changes are—new features, perhaps, or some bug fixes. And when you tap a program’s name, you go to its details screen, where you can remind yourself of what the app does and where you can read other people’s reviews of this new version.

You can download one app’s update, or, with a tap on the Update All button, all of them…no charge.

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You can also download your updates from iTunes. Click Apps in the Source list (under the Library heading); the lower edge of the window lets you know if there are updated versions of your programs waiting and offers buttons that let you download the updates individually or all at once.

Automatic Updates

If you have a lot of apps, you may come to feel as though you’re spending your whole life downloading updates. They descend like locusts, every single day, demanding your attention.

That’s why Apple offers an automatic update-downloading option. Your iPad can download and install updated versions of your apps quietly and automatically in the background.

To turn on this feature, open Settings→iTunes & App Store. Under Automatic Downloads, turn on Updates. (If you’d prefer that your cellular iPad wait to do this downloading until it’s in a WiFi hotspot—to avoid eating up your monthly cellular data-plan allotment—then turn off Use Cellular Data.)

From now on, the task of manually approving each app’s update is off your to-do list forever. Only a blue dot next to an app’s name on the Home screen lets you know that it’s been updated.

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Fortunately, the iPad also keeps a tidy record of every app it’s updated and what that update gives you. Open the App Store app; tap the Updates tab. There’s your list, sorted chronologically. Tap an app’s row to read what was new in the update you’ve already received.

How to Find Good Apps

If the Featured, What’s Hot, and Charts lists in the App Store app aren’t getting you inspired, there are all kinds of Web sites dedicated to reviewing and recommending iPad apps. (Do a Google search for best iPad apps.)

But if you’ve never dug into iPad apps before, then you should at least try out some of the superstars, the big dogs that almost everybody has.

Many of the most popular apps are designed to deliver certain Web sites in the best-looking way possible. That’s why there are apps for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Spotify, Pandora, Flickr, Yelp, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Wikipedia, and so on.

Here are a very few more examples—a drop in the bucket at the tip of the iceberg—of the infinite app variety beyond those basics:

§ Google Maps (free). Google Maps is a replacement for the built-in Maps app. It’s much, much better than the built-in Maps program—even Apple has admitted that. Among other things, it offers Street View (you can actually see a photo of almost any address and “look around” you), it incorporates the Zagat guides for restaurants, and it’s unbelievably smart about knowing what you’re trying to type into the search box. Usually, about three letters is all you need to type before the app guesses what you mean.

§ Google Mobile (free). Speak to search Google’s maps. Includes Google Goggles: Point the iPad’s camera at a book, DVD, wine bottle, logo, painting, landmark, or bit of text, and the hyper-intelligent app recognizes it and displays information about it from the Web.

§ Echofon (free). Most free Twitter apps are a bit on the baffling side. This one is simple and clean.

§ Instagram (free) has a bunch of filter effects, as iOS’s Camera app does. But the real magic is in the way it’s designed to share your photos. You sign up to receive Instagrams from Facebook or Twitter folk. They (the photos, not the folk) show up right in the app, scrolling up like a photographic Twitter feed. Seeing what other people are doing every day with their cameras and creative urges is really inspirational.

Other essentials: Angry Birds and its sequel, Bad Piggies. Skype. Hipmunk (finds flights). The New York Times. The Amazon Kindle book reader, B&N eReader. Dictionary. TED. Mint.com. Scrabble. Keynote Remote (controls your Keynote presentations from the iPad). Remote (yes, another one, also from Apple—turns the iPad into a WiFi, whole-house remote control for your Mac or PC’s music playback—and for Apple TV). Instant-messaging (AIM, Yahoo Messenger, IM+, or Beejive IM). Yahoo Weather (gorgeous).

Happy apping!

The App Switcher

Often, it’s handy to switch among open apps. Maybe you want to copy something from Safari (on the Web) into Mail (a message you’re writing).

Maybe you want to refer to your frequent flyer number (in Notes) as you’re using an airline’s check-in app. Maybe you want to adjust something in Settings and then get back to whatever you were doing.

The key to switching apps is this: Double-press the Home button. Whatever is on the screen gets replaced by the app switcher.

You see a horizontally scrolling row of icons, representing the open apps. Above them, you see shrunken-down images of their screens (next page). You can actually see what’s going on in each open app. In fact, sometimes, that’s all you need; you can refer to another app’s screen in this view, without actually having to switch into that app.

When you scroll horizontally to look through your recently opened apps (they’re in chronological order), you may notice that the icons and their screens seem to scroll at different speeds. They’re moving so that the icon is always centered under its much larger screen.

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Thoughtfully enough, the app switcher always puts the previous app front and center when you first double-press the Home button. For example, if you’re in Safari but you were using Mail a minute ago, Mail appears centered in the app switcher. That makes life easier if you’re doing a lot of jumping back and forth between two apps; one tap takes you into the previous app.

When you tap an app’s icon or screen in the app switcher, you open that app.

Force Quitting an App

The app switcher lets you manually exit an app, closing it down. To do that, flick the unwanted app’s mini-screen upward, so that it flies up off the top of the screen.

(The app is not really gone; it will return to the lineup the next time you open it from the Home screen.)

You’ll need this gesture only rarely. You’re not supposed to quit every app when you’re finished. Force-quit an app only if it’s frozen or acting glitchy and needs to be restarted.

Your Favorite People

In iOS 8, the app switcher gained a new feature: a row of people icons at the top. These are the people you’ve contacted most recently. It’s sort of a master speed-dial list that’s always available, no matter what app you’re using—ready for quick messaging or FaceTiming.

The idea is to let you reach these people quickly and efficiently, without having to burrow through your Contacts, or without having to fire up an app (like FaceTime or Messages) and interrupt what you’re doing.

Here’s the procedure:

1. Double-press the Home button.

The app switcher screen appears. The icons you see at top are the Recents: people you’ve most recently texted or FaceTimed.

2. Tap the icon of the person you want to contact.

It expands to show icons for the different ways you’ve set up to contact that person: message, FaceTime (video), or FaceTime (audio). (You can scroll these icons horizontally, too.)

3. Tap the communication method you prefer.

If you tap , Messages opens, ready to send a note to that person. If you tap , FaceTime opens and initiates a video call. opens FaceTime and initiates an audio call.

The hardest part about this whole feature is just remembering to use it. You may be used to opening the app first and then choosing a person; using this VIP feature, you tap the person first and then choose the app.

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There may be one more element on the task-switcher screen, too: a faint app icon at the far left. That’s a document, email, or Web page being sent to your iPad by your Mac, using Handoff (see iPad as Speakerphone).

A Word About Background Apps

Switching out of a program doesn’t actually close it. All apps can run in the background.

Of course, if every app ran full-tilt simultaneously, your iPad would guzzle down battery power like crazy. To solve that problem, Apple has put two kinds of limits in place:

§ iOS’s limits. Not all apps run full speed in the background. Apps that really need constant updating, like Facebook or Twitter, get refreshed every few seconds; apps that don’t rely on constant Internet updates get to nap for a while in the background.

In deciding which apps get background attention, iOS studies things like how good your iPad’s Internet connection is and what time of day you traditionally use a certain app (so that your newspaper’s app is ready with the latest articles when you open it).

§ Your own limits. You can’t control which apps run in the background, but you can control which ones download new data in the background. In Settings→General→Background App Refresh, you’ll find a list of every app that may want to update itself in the background. In an effort to make your battery last longer, you can turn off background updating for the apps you don’t really care about; you can even turn off all background updating using the master switch at the top.

The bottom line: There’s no need to quit apps you’re not using, ever. Contrary to certain Internet rumors, they generally don’t use enough memory or battery power to matter. You may see dozens of apps in the app switcher, but you’ll never sense that your iPad is bogging down as a result.

AirPrint: Printing from the iPad

The very phrase “printing from the iPad” might seem a little peculiar. How do you print from a gadget without any jacks for connecting a printer?

Wirelessly, of course.

You can send printouts from your iPad to any printer that’s connected to your Mac or PC on the same WiFi network if you have a piece of software like Printopia ($20).

Or you can use the iPad’s built-in AirPrint technology, which can send printouts directly to a WiFi printer without requiring a Mac or a PC.

Not just any WiFi printer, though—only those that recognize AirPrint. Many recent Canon, Epson, HP, and Lexmark printers work with AirPrint; you can see a list of them on Apple’s Web site, here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4356.

Not all apps can print. Of the built-in Apple programs, only iBooks, Mail, Photos, Notes, and Safari offer Print commands. Those apps contain what most people want to print most of the time: PDF documents (iBooks), email messages, driving directions from the Web, and so on. Plenty of non-Apple apps work with AirPrint, too.

To use AirPrint, start by tapping the button; tap Print. You’re offered a Select Printer option. Tap it to introduce the iPad to your printer, whose name should appear automatically. Now you can adjust the printing options (number of copies, page range)—and when you finally tap Print, your printout shoots wirelessly to the printer, exactly as though your iPad and printer were wired together.

The Share Sheet

Every app is different, of course. But all of them have certain things in common; otherwise, you’d go out of your mind.

One of them is the Share sheet. It’s your headquarters for sending stuff off your iPad: to other apps, to phones, to the Internet, to a printer. It’s made up of several icon rows, each of which scrolls horizontally. (From top to bottom, you could title these rows “What to Share,” “Send by AirDrop,” “Send to an App,” and “Act on This Data Directly.”)

The Share sheet pops up whenever you tap the Share button () that appears in many, many apps: Maps, Photos, Safari, Notes, Voice Memos, Contacts, and so on.

The buttons you see depend on the app; you may see only two options here, or you may see a dozen. Starting on Preparing to Send, for example, you can read descriptions of the icons that appear when you’re sending a photo: AirDrop, Message, Mail, Twitter, Facebook, Copy, AirPlay, Print, and so on. The options here vary by app.

In iOS 8, moreover, there’s a More button at the end of each row. That’s an invitation for other, non-Apple apps to install their own “send to” options into the Share sheet. When you tap More, you can see the full list of apps that have inserted themselves here.

Now you can perform these tasks:

§ Hide a sharing option. Flip the switch to make one of the sharing options disappear from the Share sheet. (You can’t hide the sharing options that Apple considers essential, like Message or Mail.)

§ Rearrange the sharing options. Use the handle to move these items up or down the list, which affects their left-to-right order on the Share sheet.

AirDrop

It’s a headline feature: AirDrop, a way to shoot things from one Apple iPad, iPhone, or Mac to another—wirelessly, instantly, easily, encryptedly, without requiring names, passwords, or settings-up. It’s much faster than emailing or text messaging, since you don’t have to know (or type) the other person’s address. It’s available on the iPad 4th Generation and later.

NOTE

If your Mac is running OS X Yosemite, you can shoot files between it and your iPad, too!

You can transmit pictures and videos from the Photos app, people’s info cards from Contacts, directions (or your current location) from Maps, pages from Notes, Web addresses from Safari, electronic tickets from Passbook, apps you like in the App Store, song and video listings from the iTunes app), radio stations (iTunes Radio), and so on. As time goes on, more and more non-Apple apps will offer AirDrop, too.

Behind the scenes, AirDrop uses Bluetooth (to find nearby gadgets within about 30 feet) and a private, temporary WiFi mini-network (to transfer the file). Both sender and receiver must have Bluetooth and WiFi turned on.

The process goes like this:

1. Find a willing recipient. You can’t send anything with AirDrop unless the receiving iPad or tablet is running iOS 7 or later—and is awake. And only recent models work with AirDrop: iPad 5 or later, 4th Generation iPad or later, any iPad mini, and 5th Generation iPod Touch or later.

In other words, most AirDrop exchanges begin with your saying, “Hey, do you have iOS 7 or 8?”

2. Open the item you want to share. Tap the Share button (). If your app doesn’t have a button, then you can’t use AirDrop.

When the Share sheet appears, within a few seconds, you see something that would have awed the masses in 1975: small circular photos of everyone nearby. (Or at least everyone with iOS 7 or 8, or OS X Yosemite. Or at least everyone among them who’s open to receiving AirDrop transmissions, as described below.)

TIP

When you send a photo, the top row of the Share sheet shows your other photos and videos so that you can select additional items to go along for the ride. A blue checkmark identifies each item you’ve selected to send.

3. Tap the icon of the person you want to share with. In about a second, a message appears on the recipient’s screen, conveying your offer to transmit something good—and, when it makes sense, showing a picture of it (below, bottom).

TIP

Actually, you can select more than one person’s icon. In that case, you’ll send this item to everyone at once.

At this point, it’s up to your recipients. If they tap Accept, then the transfer begins (and ends); whatever you sent them opens up automatically in the relevant app. You’ll know that AirDrop was successful because the word “Sent” appears on your screen.

If they tap Decline, then you must have misunderstood their willingness to accept your item (or they tapped the wrong button). In that case, you’ll see the word “Declined” on your screen.

The One AirDrop Setting

Your existence probably won’t become a living hell of AirDrop invitations. Realistically, you won’t be bombarded by strangers around you who want to show you family pictures or Web links. Even so, Apple has given you some control over who’s allowed to try to send you things by AirDrop.

To see the settings, swipe up from the bottom of the screen to open the Control Center. There, in the middle, is the AirDrop button. Tap it to see these three choices:

§ Off. Nobody can send anything to you by AirDrop. You’ll never be disturbed by an incoming “Accept?” message.

§ Contacts Only. Only people in your Contacts app—your own address book—can send you things by AirDrop. Your iPad is invisible to strangers. (Of course, even when someone you know tries to send something, you still have to approve the transfer.)

NOTE

The Contacts Only option requires that both you and your recipient have iCloud accounts and are logged in. Your Contacts card for the other person has to include that iCloud address (or .me or .mac).

§ Everyone. Anyone, even strangers, can try to send you things. You can still accept or decline each transfer.

TIP

OK, there’s one other AirDrop setting to fiddle with: In Settings→Sounds, you can specify the sound effect that means, “AirDrop file received.”

(OK, OK, there’s one more setting. Deep in General→Restrictions, you can turn off AirDrop altogether. Now your youngster—or whomever you’re trying to restrict with restrictions—can’t get into trouble in a debauched frenzy of sending and receiving files.)

iCloud Drive

iCloud Drive, new in iOS 8, is Apple’s version of Dropbox. It’s a folder whose contents appear identically on every Mac, iPhone, iPad, and even Windows PC you own, through the magic of instant online syncing. It’s an online “disk” that holds 5 gigabytes (more, if you’re willing to pay for it).

The iCloud Drive is a perfect place to put stuff you want to be able to access from any computer, iPad, or iPhone, wherever you go. It’s a great backup, too, because anything you put into it is automatically duplicated on multiple machines.

Your first chance to turn on iCloud Drive was when you first installed iOS 8 (or bought your iOS 8 iPad). If you declined, maybe because you had no idea what it was about, then you can visit Settings→iCloud→iCloud Drive and turn iCloud Drive on now.

NOTE

iCloud Drive replaces a previous syncing feature that Apple called “Documents in the Cloud.” If you turn on iCloud Drive, the old system goes away; all the files you kept there are brought onto your new iCloud Drive. That’s fine, as long as you understand that non–iOS 8 (or OS X Yosemite) gadgets will no longer be able to see them.

Once you turn on iCloud Drive, you can’t go back to the “Documents in the Cloud” system. Sure, you can turn off iCloud Drive (in Settings), but all that does is stop syncing the drive’s contents with your other machines.

Now, it’s easy to understand iCloud Drive on a Mac or PC. It looks like any other disk, full of files and folders. You can even access them at iCloud.com (click the Drive icon), which is handy when you have to use someone else’s computer. Any change you make to the iCloud Drive or its contents is instantly synchronized across all your other gadgets.

But on the iPad, there is no traditional desktop. There are no disk icons. So where’s the iCloud Drive?

On the iPad, you can see what’s on your iCloud Drive only within apps that can open and save documents. That includes Apple’s apps—Keynote, Pages, Numbers, iMovie—and other apps that create and open documents, like, say, Scanner Pro and PDF Expert. Over time, more companies will make their apps compatible with iCloud Drive.

In all these apps, there’s an Open button or icon that presents the iCloud Drive’s contents. In Pages, for example, when you’re viewing your list of documents, tap , and then tap iCloud. There’s the list of folders on your iCloud Drive, corresponding perfectly to what you would have seen on a Mac or a PC. Tap a folder to open it and see what’s in it.

Note that iOS shows you everything on your iCloud Drive, even things you can’t open at the moment. For example, if you’re using the iMovie app, you can’t open a Pages file, so Pages documents appear dimmed and gray.

On the other hand, this arrangement offers some really useful perks:

§ You can open some kinds of files in different apps. A PDF file, for example, can open into Pages, or Photos, or iBooks. So PDF files show up as openable in all those apps.

§ When you delete an app, you no longer lose all the documents you created with it.

You can view your iCloud Drive folders either as icons or in a list view. Tap to open one; tap at top left to back out of whatever folder you’ve opened.

On an iPad, the iCloud Drive folder list is not quite the same thing as having a real desktop—you can’t rename, copy, or delete files or folders on the iPad, for example.

But it’s comforting to know that everything on your iCloud Drive that you can open is available wherever you go—and that you can now load up everyday documents (pictures, music, PDF files, Microsoft Office files, iWork documents) onto your iPad by dragging them into the iCloud Drive folder on your computer.

NOTE

Your free iCloud account includes only 5 gigabytes of storage—and that’s for everything on your iCloud Drive. If you’re willing to pay $1 to $20 a month, you can expand that storage to anywhere from 20 gigabytes to 1 terabyte. To do that, open Settings→iCloud→Storage→Change Storage Plan.