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iPad Course at Sandbach U3A – Handout#3 RUNNING APPS ON YOUR IPAD – THE BASICS This is what you bought your iPad for. Apps deliver the features that you want. STARTING AN APP
Perhaps the easiest way is to simply ask Siri to do it for you. "Launch Music" will open the Music app, and "Open Safari" will launch the Safari web browser. You can use "launch" or "open" to run any app, although an app with a long, hard-to-pronounce name might cause some difficulty. When the icon for an app has been placed on the Home screen, all you do to start the app is tap the icon. Open Spotlight Search and type the name of the app you want.
SWITCHING APPS If you want to switch to another app that you started:
Double-press the Home button. Swipe the list of apps until you see the one you want. Tap the icon for the app.
STOPPING AN APP Unlike the application programs on a desktop or laptop computer, you don’t need to close an app when you want to do something else. If you press the Home button, an app you were using continues to operate even you are not interacting with it. Your email app will accumulate unread messages; your alarm app will check if you need to be told something and so on. Running a few apps in the background doesn’t use up the battery or storage significantly; this is how the iPad is designed to work. You can save some battery power by stopping an app but, if you want to use it again, you will have to spend some battery power getting back to where you were. However, if you want to stop an app, double-press the Home button to see the apps running currently. Swipe left or right to find the app you want to remove and swipe its preview screen upwards. If you power off the iPad, every app stops. When you power on again, you must restart any that you want to use.
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iPad Course at Sandbach U3A – Handout#3 CREATING AND EDITING TEXT The iPad was not designed for entering large amounts of text. If you touch a field on the screen that can accept text input, your iPad will display a keyboard where you can enter what you need. If the keyboard feel is important to you, consider a physical keyboard either in a docking station or as a Bluetooth attachment. The keyboard:
changes according to the context in which it appears and you can change it by selecting the appropriate icon. has a built-in English dictionary and can summon dictionaries in other languages, when you choose a keyboard for that language. adds your contacts to its dictionary automatically. Analyses the letters you type to predict the word you intend to type. Suggests corrections as you type. Tap the suggestion that you want it to enter. If it doesn’t recognise the word you typed, tap your word to decline the suggested options and it will be added to the dictionary. Displays keys that are bigger and easier to use, if you hold the iPad in landscape orientation.
When the keyboard appears the letters are shown as upper case. Afterward they change to lower case. Tap the Shift icon to display the next letter as upper case. If you want all the letters in upper case, double tap the Shift icon. Tap it again to switch back to lower case. In the bottom left is a ?123 key. Tap that and the keyboard shows numbers and some special characters appear. This keyboard has a key labelled #+= that displays a keyboard containing some more special characters. The Enter key changes according to the context. TYPING TEXT Start the Notes app. Start slowly until you are familiar with the way the keyboard works. Tap a key to make the letter or character appear. If you are typing a password, the character is quickly replaced by a black dot to prevent shoulder surfing. If you enter the wrong character, press the Delete key. This removes the character to the left of the cursor like the Backspace key on a PC. Some of the keys offer a variety of accented forms, if you tap and hold them, a palette of alternatives appears and you drag your finger to the version you want. The character you are pressing when you lift off your finger is the one that appears on the screen.
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iPad Course at Sandbach U3A – Handout#3 CAPS LOCK Sometimes you need to type all the letters in capitals and hitting Shift before each letter is a pain. Make sure the Caps Lock function is turned on in Settings > General > Keyboard, and then double-tap either shift button whenever you are typing to turn on Caps Lock. TYPE A NUMBER, SYMBOL, OR CAPITAL LETTER WITH A SINGLE TAP Most people probably type a number or a symbol by tapping the 123 button, tapping the number or symbol you want to type, and then tapping 123 again to go back to the letter keyboard. But, if you are mainly typing alphabetic characters, there’s a much faster way. Instead, tap the 123 key and without lifting your finger, move it to the symbol or number you want to type and then lift it from the screen. This trick also works for the Shift key — touch your finger to the Shift key, move it to a letter, and you’ll quickly get that letter in upper case. HIDDEN PUNCTUATION Apostrophes and speech marks can be fiddly on the iPad's virtual keyboard because they are tucked away on a second keyboard. In fact, there are shortcuts to both on the main keyboard. Just tap and hold the exclamation mark to get an apostrophe and tap and hold the question mark for speech marks. If you set the “.” Shortcut option in Settings > General > Keyboard, you can double tap the space bar to make a sentence end with a full stop then blank. SHORTCUTS If there are certain phrases, names or other terms that you type frequently, you can create shortcuts for them under Settings > General > Keyboard. Type "su3a", for example, and the iPad will enter "Sandbach & District U3A". If you want to add words to the built-in dictionary so that they are not flagged as misspellings, add the word as a shortcut but omit the shortcut and enter only the full phrase. When typing text in the Safari app, you can long-press the period key to choose various web address endings e.g. .co.uk, .com, .net etc SPLIT AND MOVABLE KEYBOARD You can split the keyboard in two and each half in the bottom corner of the screen so that you can type with your thumbs. Click the typewriter icon on the keyboard and select the Split option. Select the Merge option to join the two halves together again. To move the keyboard around the screen, tap the typewriter icon and select the Undock option. You can then move the keyboard up and down the screen by dragging the typewriter icon. 3
iPad Course at Sandbach U3A – Handout#3 PREDICTIVE TEXT You can switch on a predictive-text feature that suggests the complete word from your initial letters. Tap the word you want from those displayed in the bar at the top of the keyboard. If you want to suppress the bar to see more of the screen, drag the top down and it collapses into a narrow band with a lighter line in the middle. Drag that up to restore the bar. Your iPad might also suggest the next word based on the word you just finished. If you see the word you want, press it to add to the text. Tap a suggested word to accept it. Carry on typing to choose your own words. People with fat fingers may find it helpful to use a stylus designed for iPad screens to press accurately on small icons. EXPLORING THE KEYBOARD Before you start typing, check that all the relevant Settings are correctly set in General > Keyboard. Open the Notes app and type the little playlet shown in Handout #4. You will have to type all the letters of the alphabet, all the numbers and most of the special characters. DICTATING VOICE INPUT Voice Control on the iPad works with third generation and later models running iOS 6 and higher. If your iPad is one of these and you have an active internet connection, it will accept dictation. If you set Voice Typing on in the Settings and choose that method on the keyboard using the Settings key in the bottom left. If you have dictation activated in Settings, a microphone symbol appears as an option on the keyboard Settings key. When you touch the microphone key, a window appears at the bottom of the screen with a picture of a microphone. When the screen tells you to speak, dictate the text you want speaking straight at the iPad. If you don’t speak for a while, you may need to wake it up and start speaking again. Make sure you do this in a quiet place otherwise you confuse the system. You can dictate punctuation – comma, full stop, exclamation mark, question mark, colon, new line. Try dictating the nursery rhyme “Doctor Foster went to Gloucester” A close approximation of what you say will appear in the text space. If one of the words on the screen is different from what you intended, tap it to see a list of alternatives. Tap the word you want. It doesn’t always register capital letters where you would like them; if that’s important, you must go through the text afterwards to change the letters you want.
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iPad Course at Sandbach U3A – Handout#3 EDITING TEXT Once you have some text, there’s a good chance that you will want to change it. There may be missing words, misspelled words. You might want to tidy up the result of your dictation. You might have entered some text in the wrong field and have to move it to the right one. This section explains how to do it. MOVING THE CURSOR Touch the text at the point where you want to make a change and the cursor appears there. If you tap and hold on a word, a magnified version of the space around the cursor appears above it to make it easier to make fine adjustments to the cursor position. When you stop moving the cursor, you can type some more, delete characters, or choose options from the menu that appears e.g. select text or paste from the clipboard. The text you put into the clipboard stays there until you clear it or overwrite it with something else and it can be pasted into the same or a different app. Remember that the delete key works by backspacing! Place the cursor to the right of any text that you want to remove. SELECTING TEXT The menu that appears, when you stop moving the cursor, also appears if you tap the word where the cursor is. If you double-tap a word, it is selected and changes colour with tabs at the start and end of it. You can now drag the start and end tabs to select all the text you want to delete, copy, or move. When you have selected the correct block of text, choose an option from the menu above it. To paste the clipboard text into an app, tap on a place where you can enter text and tap on the paste option that appears in the menu. FORMAT TEXT AS BOLD, ITALIC, UNDERLINED When you have some text selected as shown above, you can select the BIU option from the menu and then select one of the options to make the text bold, italic or underlined. SELECTING TEXT ON A WEB PAGE Selecting text on a web page works the same way as selecting other text except that you can’t double-tap. (Double –tap on a web page activates the zoom feature.) The options on the action bar are different for text selected on a web page and you can’t cut, which implies you are deleting text; you can’t do that on a web page. Use copy instead.
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iPad Course at Sandbach U3A – Handout#3 CORRECTING MISTAKES If you happen to type something that you want to undo, tap on the 123 button on the keypad. This should bring up a key called ‘Undo’ on the left. When you tap this, you undo one instance of typing. To redo the typing you just removed, select the numeric keypad, tap on the #+= button and the undo button changes to redo in order to help you re-type whatever you undid.
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