Two ways to the App Store on the iPhone
David Pogue's iPhone Tips
Fresh off writing iPhone: The Missing Manual, Second Edition, David Pogue shares some of his favorite tips for both the original iPhone or the iPhone 2E.
Excerpts from iPhone, The Missing Manual, Second Editon:
The following is an excerpt from the new O'Reilly book "iPhone: The Missing Manual, second edition".
You can get to the App Store in two ways: from the phone 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, keyboard, and big screen. But downloading straight to the iPhone, without ever involving the computer, is also wicked cool—and it’s your only option when you’re out and about.
Shopping from the Phone
To check out the App Store from your iPhone, tap the App Store icon. You arrive at the colorful, scrolling wonder of the Store itself.
Across the bottom, you’ll see the now-familiar iPhone lineup of buttons that control your view of the store. They include:
- Featured. Here are the 25 programs that Apple is recommending this week.
- Categories. This list shows 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 25. Tap this button to reveal a list of the most popular 25 programs at the moment, ranked by how many people have downloaded them. You can also tap the Free button at the top of the screen to see the most popular free programs. There are lots of them, and they’re one of the great joys of the App Store.
Search. Scrolling through those massive lists is a fun way to stumble onto cool things. But as the number of iPhone programs grows into the thousands, viewing by list begins to get awfully unwieldy.
Fortunately, you can also search the catalog, which is a very efficient way to go 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). Tap in the Search box to make the keyboard appear. As you type, the list shrinks so that it’s always showing you only the matches. You might type tetris, or piano, or Disney, or whatever.
- 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.
Once you’re looking at the scrolling list of programs—no matter which button was your starting point—the next steps are the same. Each listing shows you the program’s name, its icon, and its price. About a third of the App Store’s programs are free; the rest are usually under $10, although a few, intended for professionals (pilots, for example) can cost a lot more.
Best of all, this listing shows each program’s star rating, which may be the most important statistic of all. You can think of it as a letter grade, given to this program by everyone who’s tried it out so far and expressed as an average. (In small type, you can even see how many people’s opinions are included in this score.)
Why is it so important? Because, ahem, not all of the App Store’s goodies are equally good. Remember, these programs come from a huge variety of people—teenagers in Hungary, professional software companies 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.
