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Forwarding a message to another recipient without having to re-type it. • Exporting a message as a text file. People use email client programs and web applications to send messages for both work and social purposes. They can do this on many devices, including computers, mobile phones and Wi-Fi-enabled devices, such as game consoles, MP3 or MP4 media players or PDAs. This provides much swifter exchange of information with less environmental impact than posting letters. It also avoids the expense of phone calls. Although transmission typically takes only seconds, the message is sent via the sender’s mail server to the recipient’s mail server. Here it is stored until their email client program or webmail downloads it from the server and displays it. Therefore, recipients in different time zones do not have to be available simultaneously, as they would for a two-way or multi-way ‘conference’ phone call. Email can also help, together with other communication technologies, to save the time, monetary and environmental costs of travelling to meetings. An obvious advantage of using a webmail service is that, even if you are not carrying a portable computer or email-enabled device with you, you can still access your email by visiting an Internet café anywhere in the world. Instant messaging
Instant messaging (IM) is a service provided by an instant messaging server, although the user’s application program may be a web application. Features of instant messaging programs include: • sending typed messages between users whenever a character is typed or the Enter/Return key is pressed, depending on the application; • display of the availability or other status of contacts on a contact list; • multiple, simultaneous, two-way conversations; • group conversations; • optional telephony and video; • export of a conversation as a text file. People use IM programs and web applications on a similar range of devices and for similar purposes as email. The major difference is that even with only text,
users have more sense of a conversation, because they perceive communication as being instant or in ‘real-time’ (Figure 1.9).
Figure 1.9 An instant messaging conversation.
Web authoring software In order to produce a website, we can use a simple text editor program to write HTML code for the content and to create interactivity on web pages. The code is written in a ‘scripting language’, which is a programming language that controls the behaviour of an existing program, in this case any web browser that will display the website. Interactivity means opportunities for someone using a website to interact with and change what is displayed. A web authoring program allows a user to generate code for a web page automatically. A web authoring program is often described as ‘web design’ software, although it is used for building a website rather than designing it. By default, the content of a web page is displayed in a web browser in the sequence in which it was written, so a web authoring program is more similar to a word processing program than to a DTP program. Features of web authoring programs include: • creation of a sequence of content, with importing of text and the full range of multimedia files; • templates to which web pages may be attached to place common content in certain regions, rather like a master page in a DTP application;
Chapter 1 Generic application software 13