[Music] hi there Learners and welcome to module 1.4 of your grade 12 curriculum and today we are looking at software so we know software are programs that are designed to perform specific functions and we've spoken already about things like our office suite but today we're want to look at choosing the right software application software and then there's that troubleshooting Story coming up again fixing some of the software problems or issues that arise with software so when we are looking at purchasing software again like with the hardware we want to think about this we want to ask a couple of questions and we first want to look at the purpose of the software now many applications that can perform the task you want to perform there are many out there but sometimes the basic software could be adequate you might not need the most expensive piece of softare software for example notepad that's built into windows can write anything but Word Microsoft Word does exactly the same but provides a lot more features Microsoft Paint 3D or more advanced Adobe Photoshop so they both do the same thing but one is obviously more advanced than the other with this you need to also think of the following are you going to go for a web- based application or an installed applic now a web- based application means that this is an application that runs off the internet whereas your installed application means it's installed on your local hard drive now there are some advantages and disadvantages to that um a web-based application like your Google Suite um you have the software that's accessible from any computer using the internet you don't have to download anything the software is always up to dat no compatibility issues that's fine but you cannot use aof software if you don't have an internet connection and the performance of the software is affected by the speed and quality of your internet connection so the internet becomes a big thing um where that is concerned and some examples include the G Suite apps like Google Calendar Google Hangouts Google Drive Google forms Google Maps all of these things and it's all based on having an internet connection we've also got things like Office 360 or Office 365 and Google Docs you've got your Facebook apps Adobe Photoshop Express um so there are a number of examples then something that has come up in a few of the question papers in June September and the end of the year deals with subscription based software now with traditional traditional licensing models the user pays up front right you go into the shop you buy the software and you can use the piece of software indefinite itely with subscription based software the user you are going to pay monthly or yearly for the use of the software so if you buy in yearly it means every year you are going to have to pay for that right Office 365 gives you access to an offline version but you need internet connectivity at least once a month for updates and account verification so please know the difference between your traditional licensing model and subscription based software or your subscription based model when it comes to software you also need to think of compatibility okay is the software compatible with the operating system the app that you want to install does it work on your operating system I remember there was a huge thing when um huwei was blocking Google and Google Apps and you couldn't go into Google Play and then you had to look at a way around it and things like that um and it made that particular Suite of apps incompatible with their operating system right it didn't work on that so you need to look at your software and ask well what Hardware am I going to be using am I going to be using a Mac am I going to be using um a traditional you know Dell or ASO or any any one of these uh what operating system does it have does that software work with that particular operating system you need to look at compatibility between versions of the same application right now most software applications are what they call Backward Compatible which means it can work with the older versions because if they tell you that office 2025 is coming out next year do you think everybody goes and buys it no some people will still have older versions so the newer software is usually designed to be backward compatible with the older one and for this reason this is what we're talking about now we look at the system requirements and this is usually on the back of the box of the software that you are going to buy or it's listed on the website or wherever you are purchasing so we have two types of requirements the minimum and recommended so the minimum requirements is what does that piece of software need just to be able to run the recommended requirements is what does that piece of software need in order to run at its best okay so in this case you can see for Photoshop it needs an Intel Core 2 or AMD Athlon um 64bit processor 2 GHz or faster it needs 2 gigs of RAM but 8 gig can can you see there the minimum and what's recommended 3.1 gigs of space um this is the display but they recommend this one they're talking about video RAM they're talking about the operating system internet connectivity so please when you buy a piece of software always try to comply with the recommended because that just means that your piece of software is going to run at its best now we look at our application software these perform specific tasks so like your word processing your spreadsheet software your presentation your database software um these do specific things within its little category over there you also get productivity software for mobile users so um they are usually lightweight versions of the productivity software it's designed for those who are using it from their phones so automatic meetings scheduling video conferencing note taking all of those type of things um this is why you'll usually find a different version for mobile as opposed to your desktop or laptop there's also reference software right now I always laugh at this because I remember when I was at school doing referencing actually going to a library and opening a book and then eventually you add CDs that had the encyclopedia on it and now most of us just go to the internet and there are different apps that can help us with that as well so apps that focus on referencing only right remember an app does a specific or performs a specific task we've got web browsers right that allow us to navigate through the internet we've got email software that allows us to send emails and communicate with others we've got document management software as well that allows us to create our own document using the software that we want to right in word for example here I can take my word document and save it as a PDF then I can send it to anyone okay whatever I want to do so I can do those things there's also software that enhances accessibility efficiency and productivity for example voice recognition software and there's advantages and limitations to that so voice recognition soft is lovely for disabled users where they can enter text by dictating using like your microphone speaking rather than typing now you need to know that with software like this you've got to train it and most of you will remember this and know this from using Siri or using some sort of uh voice recognition software on on your cell phone sometimes you've got to change the way you speak and say uh Siri uh I had like to order a pizza because if you just say sir I want to order a pizza sir's going to be like what are you talking about what is this thing um the background noise and poor quality microphone can also have an impact on that so there are different types of voice recognition software out there um on your PC on the internet and on your smartphones and tablets as well there's also note taking software I know they usually bring ever note and one note yes so that's there to help you take notes but you can see each one performs a particular task whether it's education or training um um whether it's you know note taking but all of this is really uh just showing you what is out there as well now here they mention the software which where when and by whom and our software choices are mainly task related in other words what do you want the software to do do you want software for writing do you want software for working with photos do you want software to perform calculations do you want software for communication do you see because if we go back to the definition software is a program that's designed to perform a specific task what task do you want it to perform and that's where we start looking for that particular piece of software now once we found it and we installed it and everything is running along very smoothly we will come across issues right some problems and sometimes and we just look at a few basic ones sometimes you come across frezy in other words nonresponsive programs the software seems to freeze it just it doesn't want to do anything but the rest of the system works fine this is where we bring in the task manager by using pressing control alt and delete uh we can select the particular program particular uh software application and force it to shut down sometimes we have a software crash where the piece of software just closes right um something's gone wrong and it just shuts down many times you can simply reboot your PC and just try again sometimes you can just open your program again and it will run sometimes there could be an issue with it conflicting with something um you could try to uninstall that software and reinstall it sometimes you'll have to check on online forums and you can always email the company to inform them of the problem as well this is a big one make sure your software is up to dat sometimes it's got to do with with updates so the first thing you want to do is just make sure your your your software is up to date then we've got readon files now this already tells you that the file can only be read we can't do anything else with it right now what are we going to do with that file maybe where you loaded it from it was already in readon format you can copy it to another location and remove the attribute you can copy it and save it under a different name um just need to be careful in a network environment as readon files might be in use by another user and most of you will come across this when you are working from the server this is why we always copy from the server down to our desktop so that we avoid this issue and if a program crashes you want to reload the program to recover that file something that always comes up is the topic of bugs now what is a bug a bug when we talk about that it is not a virus it's an error that is introduced when the programmers wrote the software so it's a little mistake right um some of the risk of bugs and this is why they usually send out the software to test it first um it can corrupt data the software can behave in a dangerous manner you can have security breaches and this is why beta versions of the software usually made available for people to test Find the Errors and then report them and with this information the developers will continually work on improving the versions why do you think WhatsApp has all those updates it's because if they find anything or anything's reported to them they need to sort it out so updates are important now when it comes to designing the software um you'll find that most software should be using a user centered design in other words taking you as the user into consideration when designing that so when they design the software they need to look at the layout and readability you don't want to put too much on a single page you want to group related items together you want to have clear labels you want to have appropriate colors nothing to distracting um you want to use formatting to emphasize important Concepts you want to use Simple concise language these are the factors that you take into consideration When developing software some steps to include in the process of user Center design includes putting the needs of the user first testing this on real users so that they can give you feedback and tell you no this is not working or change this or that should be like that and you want to repeat and refine this process so you keep repeating this process until you've developed what you believe to be the final product and then after having said all of that we look at artificial intelligence now this is a branch of science which deals with helping machines find solutions to complex problems in a more humanik Manner and many of us have been getting involved with this um when it comes to chat GPT right um artificial intelligence involves borrowing characteristics from Human intelligence and applying them as algorithms in a computer friendly way now what is the aim of artificial intelligence the whole idea is to improve machine behavior in tackling complex tasks we want to create machines that can actually dare I say it think for themselves okay fields of study in AI include weather space exploration and driverless transport we've we've seen this story we've seen concept cars that are um operated only by Ai and you put them where you want to go to and this thing um navigates by itself now having said that as we finish off there are posing cons to AI yes with AI there's increased efficiency there we reduce the human risk we you know AIDS in decision making it's always available but as a result there's a cause of unemployment because people are going to lose their jobs because the AI can do what people can do but sometimes better there is the high ini investment there is the dependency on machines because you're using machines more and there's going to be a lack of creativity look nothing can make up for the creativity that is within us as human beings okay so no machine we'll be able to replicate that and folks with that we are at the end of our module I'll see you in the next one