Appy-Picking Month: An iPad Essential on Mindful App Updating

Clearly in the mobile device world, it is very important to update your apps frequently.  Apps first of all can have bugs, and these are fixed by these updates.  More interestingly, new features and content are often introduced through app updates, and you won't know about these if you just tap through and select "Update All" in the App Store.

So, let me suggest the "Mindful" way of updating your apps.  When you see you have updates, hang on until you have time to give the updates page a little skim:

If you want to selectively update apps, iOS6 makes this much easier by not kicking you to the home screen every time you tap Update.  Nice!

Skimming will allow you to view what is new with each app (sometimes you have to tap More to see this content). Why does this matter? Recently, for a few examples, the "skim" showed me that Toontastic had added a new series of playsets, My Playhome a parents' bedroom, Bag Game and Social Adventures had added the ability to add your own pictures to the bag (now for limitless contexts) and lessons, respectively, and Skitch a new interface that everyone apparently hates.

This all has to do with Appy-Picking because we make informed choices each day about which apps to employ for clinical purposes.  New content and features in our apps should absolutely influence those choices!

Happy Updating!