Software application in the context of Windows 10

A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on desktop computers, and web applications which run in mobile web browsers rather than directly on the mobile device.

Apps were originally intended for productivity assistance such as email, calendar, and contact databases, but the public demand for apps caused rapid expansion into other areas such as mobile games, factory automation, GPS and location-based services, order-tracking, and ticket purchases, so that there are now millions of apps available. Many apps require Internet access. Apps are generally downloaded from app stores, which are a type of digital distribution platforms.

Usability or user friendliness can be described as the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience. In software engineering, usability is the degree to which a software can be used by specified consumers to achieve quantified objectives with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a quantified context of use.

The object of use can be a software application, website, book, tool, machine, process, vehicle, or anything a human interacts with. A usability study may be conducted as a primary job function by a usability analyst or as a secondary job function by designers, technical writers, marketing personnel, and others. It is widely used in consumer electronics, communication, and knowledge transfer objects (such as a cookbook, a document or online help) and mechanical objects such as a door handle or a hammer.

ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI, and released in November 2022. It uses a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT), to generate text, speech, and images in response to user prompts. It is credited with accelerating the AI boom, an ongoing period marked by rapid investment and public attention toward the field of artificial intelligence (AI). OpenAI operates the service on a freemium model. Users can interact with ChatGPT through text, audio, and image prompts.

The service gained 100 million users in two months making it the fastest-growing consumer software application in history. ChatGPT's website is among the top 5 most-visited websites globally, It has been lauded for its potential to transform numerous professional fields, and instigated public debate about the nature of creativity and the future of knowledge work.

Online help is a form of user assistance that provides topic-oriented, procedural or reference information designed to assist in using a software application, web application or operating system. Online help linked to the application's state (what the user is doing) is called Context-sensitive help.

The help information can be created using help authoring tools or component content management systems and can be delivered in a wide variety of proprietary and open-standard formats. Help of this kind has largely replaced printed documentation.

Tracking system or defect tracking system is a software application that keeps track of reported software bugs in software development projects. It may be regarded as a type of issue tracking system.

Many bug tracking systems, such as those used by most open-source software projects, allow end-users to enter bug reports directly. Other systems are used only internally in a company or organization doing software development. Typically bug tracking systems are integrated with other project management software.

A software widget is a relatively simple and easy-to-use software application or component made for one or more different software platforms.

A desk accessory or applet is an example of a simple, stand-alone user interface, in contrast with a more complex application such as a spreadsheet or word processor. These widgets are typical examples of transient and auxiliary applications that don't monopolize the user's attention.

A word processor is an electronic device (later a computer software application) for text, composing, editing, formatting, and printing.

The word processor was a stand-alone office machine developed in the 1960s, combining the keyboard text-entry and printing functions of an electric typewriter with a recording unit, either tape or floppy disk (as used by the Wang machine) with a simple dedicated computer processor for the editing of text. Although features and designs varied among manufacturers and models, and new features were added as technology advanced, the first word processors typically featured a monochrome display and the ability to save documents on memory cards or diskettes. Later models introduced innovations such as spell-checking programs, and improved formatting options.

An Internet bot (also called a web robot or robot), or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) on the Internet, usually with the intent to imitate human activity, such as messaging, on a large scale. An Internet bot plays the client role in a client–server model whereas the server role is usually played by web servers. Internet bots are able to perform simple and repetitive tasks much faster than a person could ever do. The most extensive use of bots is for web crawling, in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers. More than half of all web traffic is generated by bots.

Efforts by web servers to restrict bots vary. Some servers have a robots.txt file that contains the rules requesting how bots should behave on website. Any bot that does not follow the rules could, in theory, be denied access to or be removed from the affected website. A website owner cannot force a bot to follow the rules or ensure that a bot's creator or implementer reads or acknowledges the robots.txt file. Some bots are "good", e.g. search engine spiders, while others are used to launch malicious attacks on political campaigns, for example.

In computing, a crash, or system crash, occurs when a computer program such as a software application or an operating system stops functioning properly and exits. On some operating systems or individual applications, a crash reporting service will report the crash and any details relating to it (or give the user the option to do so), usually to the developer(s) of the application. If the program is a critical part of the operating system, the entire system may crash or hang, often resulting in a kernel panic or fatal system error.

Most crashes are the result of a software bug. Typical causes include accessing invalid memory addresses, incorrect address values in the program counter, buffer overflow, overwriting a portion of the affected program code due to an earlier bug, executing invalid machine instructions (an illegal or unauthorized opcode), or triggering an unhandled exception. The original software bug that started this chain of events is typically considered to be the cause of the crash, which is discovered through the process of debugging. The original bug can be far removed from the code that actually triggered the crash.

Extract, transform, load (ETL) is a three-phase computing process where data is extracted from an input source, transformed (including cleaning), and loaded into an output data container. The data can be collected from one or more sources and it can also be output to one or more destinations. ETL processing is typically executed using software applications but it can also be done manually by system operators. ETL software typically automates the entire process and can be run manually or on recurring schedules either as single jobs or aggregated into a batch of jobs.

A properly designed ETL system extracts data from source systems and enforces data type and data validity standards and ensures it conforms structurally to the requirements of the output. Some ETL systems can also deliver data in a presentation-ready format so that application developers can build applications and end users can make decisions.

In computer programming, a macro (short for "macro instruction"; from Greek μακρο- 'long, large') is a rule or pattern that specifies how a certain input should be mapped to a replacement output. Applying a macro to an input is known as macro expansion.

The input and output may be a sequence of lexical tokens or characters, or a syntax tree. Character macros are supported in software applications to make it easy to invoke common command sequences. Token and tree macros are supported in some programming languages to enable code reuse or to extend the language, sometimes for domain-specific languages.

In metadata, the term data element is an atomic unit of data that has precise meaning or precise semantics. Data elements usage can be discovered by inspection of software applications or application data files through a process of manual or automated Application Discovery and Understanding. Once data elements are discovered they can be registered in a metadata registry.In the areas of databases and data systems more generally a data element is a concept forming part of a data model. As an element of data representation, a collection of data elements forms a data structure.