REMEMBER WHEN COMPUTER STORES displayed shelves upon shelves of software in colorful shrink-wrapped cardboard boxes? The App Store ditches the physical racks and crowds of people but still offers thousands of programs, neatly organized into more than 20 categories, right on the other side of your Internet connection. Once you’re online, you can either:

Either action gets you to the App Store. If you choose the iTunes path from the comfort of your laptop or desktop computer, you’ll probably end up browsing the store’s selections from a bigger screen—but you also have to take the extra step of syncing any purchases you make from iTunes over to your iPad (Sync and Organize Apps in iTunes).

NO MATTER HOW YOU get there, the App Store has plenty to offer. In most cases, you land right on the Store’s home page, where Apple employees regularly spotlight new, timely, or interesting apps and games.

If you tap any app’s name or icon, you go to that app’s Store page, where you can read more about what the app does. You can also view sample screenshots, read reviews from people who bought the app, and check out the app’s system requirements to make sure it’s compatible with your iPad model’s hardware and software. For apps intended for both the iPad and iPhone, some developers give you a choice of screenshots to inspect; next to Screenshots, click the iPad button (circled) to see just the iPad images. (The main App Store screen also lets you choose to see iPad-only apps or apps primarily intended for the iPhone.)

App pages for games often include an age rating to help parents decide if the game is appropriate (or not) for children. Store pages dedicated to free apps include a Free download button, and apps where you have to shell out some simoleons have a Buy link. (If you buy an app, it gets billed to the credit card in your Apple account. Turn the page to learn how to set up an account.)

Across the top of each app’s page, you’ll see a category listed, like “App Store > Sports” or “App Store > Photography.” If the app you’re currently looking at doesn’t quite fit the bill for you, click the category name to see similar apps.

BEFORE YOU CAN BUY any of the cool stuff in the Store, you need an account with Apple, otherwise known as an Apple ID. You may have created one when you waded through the setup screens for your new iPad, or you might already have an Apple ID from previous Apple purchases—you can use that name and password here and the bills will go to the credit card you have on file.

If you’ve never bought any of Apple’s online products, like iTunes music, or if you skipped setting up an Apple ID when you initially set up your iPad, you need to create an account before you can buy anything. You can do this on either your iPad or your desktop computer.

To set up an account from the iPad’s Home screen, tap the App Store icon, flick to the bottom of the page, tap Sign In, and then tap Create Apple ID. Enter the requested information on each screen.

To set up an account through your computer, open iTunes and click iTunes Store. Click the Sign In button in the upper-left corner of the window and click Create New Account. (You can also choose Store→Create Apple ID instead.)

On either your iPad or computer, follow these three steps:

You must read and agree to the terms of the legal document on the first screen. This long statement informs you of your rights and responsibilities as an iTunes Store and App Store customer. It boils down to two core points: Thou shalt not download an album, burn it to CD, and then sell bootleg copies of it around town; and Third-party crashware apps are not our fault.

Click the Agree button to move on to step 2. Here, you create an Apple ID, password, and secret question and answer. If you blank out and ever have to click the “iForgot” button on the Store sign-in box, this is the question you’ll have to answer to prove you’re you. Apple also asks you to type in your birthday to help verify your identity (you must be over 13 to get an account).

On the third and final screen, provide a valid credit card number with a billing address or a valid PayPal account name.

Once you verify your email address by clicking the link in the confirmation email Apple sends you and then signing in to the Store with your new credentials, you’ve got yourself an Apple ID. From now on, you can log in from your computer by clicking the iTunes Store button in iTunes and clicking Sign In on the next screen. Because this account is now linked to a credit card, be extremely careful with your Apple ID. Ignore email messages claiming to be from Apple, asking you to go to an embedded link and re-enter your credit card information. Those are scams. The Tip below tells you how to change your payment details.

OKAY, YOU’VE FOUND THE App Store and have an Apple ID; now you’re ready to start loading up your iPad with all the cool programs, games, and utilities you can fit on it.

NOT EVERY APP IS a five-star winner. One may turn out to be different from what you envisioned, or it may not live up to your expectations in other ways. Perhaps some of those bigger games and programs just take up too much of your limited iPad real estate. Some apps may even be buggy or crashy, and perhaps you want to remove them instead of waiting for the developer to post an update (Update Apps).

You can uninstall an app two ways:

JUST AS YOU CAN buy apps on either your computer or tablet, so you can search for them through your iPad or iTunes on the desktop. This comes in handy if you don’t know the exact name of the app you seek, or you want to throw a few keywords into the search box and see what comes up.

Here’s how to search:

Once iTunes completes a search, tap or click an app name to go to its Store page for more information.

THE BULK OF THE App Store’s more than 700,000 programs are for iPhone and iPod Touch owners (for now, anyway). But don’t let that stop you from shopping, because most iPhone apps run just fine on the iPad, so there’s no software shortage for the slab here.

And while iPhone/iPod Touch apps work on the iPad, most of them weren’t designed for it. As a result, they may seem a bit sparse on the big screen (below left). Still, you can run iPhone and iPod Touch apps on the iPad two ways:

The longer the iPad is available, though, the more apps will appear written (or rewritten) expressly to fill its big glorious screen. In a year or so, the 2X feature may seem like a quaint little kludge.

BACK IN Chapter 1, you learned how to rearrange the icons on your iPad’s Home screen. And after reading the first few pages of this chapter, you may now have a ton of groovy new app icons all over your iPad—but not in the order you’d like. Sure, you can drag wiggling icons all over your 11 pages of Home screen, but that can get a little confusing and frustrating when you accidentally drop an icon in the wrong place. Plus, that iPad screen is awfully large (unless you’re cruising around on the more petite iPad Mini) and you could throw your shoulder out dragging those apps such a long distance.

iTunes offers an easier way to fine-tune your iPad’s Home screens: arrange all your icons using your big-screen computer:

But what if you have too many apps for the iPad’s limit of 11 Home screens? You can group apps into folders or, even if an app’s not visible on one of your Home screens, you can find it by flicking your finger from left to right on the very first Home screen and typing the app name into the search box that appears.

Organizing your apps in iTunes also makes it easier to sync ’em on and off the tablet as you need them. For example, keep all those hefty travel-themed map and city guides in iTunes until you need to move them to the iPad the night before you leave—and sync them all off when you get back from your trip.

MANY APPS HAVE ALL their functions and controls within each program; you get to them by tapping Setup or Options (or something similarly named) while you run the app. Some apps, however, have a separate set of preferences, located in the iPad’s Settings area, under “Apps.”

For example, your nifty little weather program may include the option to display the temperature in either degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius, and wind speeds in either miles per hour or kilometers per hour, depending on the measuring standards of your country. You set these preferences by choosing Home→Settings and flicking all the way down the screen to the collection of individual apps. Tap the name of the app whose settings you want to adjust.

WHEN YOU SEE A red circled number on the iPad’s App Store icon, you know you have some updatin’ to do. Updates can add new features, fix bugs, or improve program performance. The number in the red circle represents the number of apps that have updates waiting for you to download. All updates for a particular version of an app are free.

To see a list of the apps awaiting an update, tap the App Store icon. On the next screen, tap the name of the program you want to update, tap the price button, and then tap Install. If you have multiple programs with updates ready, you can install all of them at once by tapping the Update All button in the upper-right corner. (Already in the App Store? The Updates icon at the bottom of the screen shows the number of updates waiting; tap it to see them and get all the new stuff at once.)

You can also snag updates through iTunes. Go to the Library pop-up menu and select Apps. If you see a gray circle beside it with a number in it, you’ve got updates (the number tells you how many). The center of the screen shows what apps need updates. Click the [Number of] Updates Available button at the bottom of the screen. On the next screen, a button in the top-right corner (circled below) lets you install all the updates at once. You can also update programs individually by clicking the Get Update button next to each app’s name.

If you don’t see an update notice in iTunes but want to check for updates anyway, click the Apps icon to display all your downloaded apps, and then click “Check for Updates” at the bottom of the window (circled on Troubleshoot Apps).

Once you download your updates, sync your iPad to install them on the tablet.

MOST APP STORE PROGRAMS work perfectly well at what they were designed to do, but things can occasionally go wrong. Maybe a little bug made it through the testing process. Or maybe an iPad software update changed the way the operating system interacts with the app.

Whatever the case, you can take a few basic troubleshooting steps for apps that aren’t playing nice with the iPad:

Other steps to try include deauthorizing (Deauthorize Your Computer) and reauthorizing (Authorize Computers for iTunes and Home Sharing) your computer for purchases from the iTunes and App Stores, or reinstalling the whole iTunes program on your computer (Download iTunes and iTunes Updates, and Reinstall iTunes). Just logging out of your Store account and logging back in may resolve certain issues.

If all that fails, it’s probably the app’s fault, and you can report the problem. If you’re on your iPad, tap the App Store icon, find the app’s page in the Store, and tap Ratings and Reviews. At the bottom of the screen, tap App Support (circled) to see what the developer has in the way of technical help.

If you’re logged into your iTunes Store account on your computer, click your user name in the top-right corner. In the sign-in box, click the View Account button, sign in again, and click the Purchase History button on the Account Settings page. Click the “Report a Problem” button at the bottom of the page, and then click the arrow next to the problem program in your list of recent purchases. Now you get an electronic form you can fill out and send to Apple.