Application softwares are one of the softwares which are used widely in computers. These types of programs do specific jobs for the computer user, including works such as solving equations, producing bills, result processing of educational institutions, data processing of accounts etc. which are made according to the requirement of the institutions or companies. Application softwares may be provided by the computer manufacturer or supplier, but mostly, the software may be designed and prepared as the requirement is encountered. A single application software is often called a job. Sometimes a job or application software may be divided into smaller tasks. A job may comprise job and data. And, the program which does a task, is called user program.
Altogether there are three types of Application Software. They are:
- Tailored Software
- Packaged Software
- Utility Software
- Tailored Software: These softwares are specially created or designed to solve a job or a task. As a tailor measures the dimensions of a person for sewing his clothes, a tailored software is made on the basis of the specific requirement. For example, result processing of exams, printing of certificates etc. The data and processing of data seems similar but actually they are different in many ways. For different purposes different programs are to be designed. Such a software is called tailored software. High level languages such as COBOL, BASIC, FORTRAN, Pascal, ALGOL, Logo, P1/1 or C languages are used to prepare tailored softwares.
- Packaged Software: A packaged software is a generalized set of programs which can be used to deal with a particular application, e.g., producing bill or payroll. Packages tend to be available for applications which are common to many users. Computer manufacturers or specialist commercial organizations called “Software Houses” produce application packages, which they can sell to a number of customers. Some examples of packaged software are Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop etc.
- Utility Software: Utility softwares are also called service programs which provide very important and useful service to the computer user by providing facilities for performing common tasks such as data transfer, search and merge of files, data and file recovery, diskette management etc. Utility softwares can be classified as:
- Peripheral transfer programs, for example file copying.
- Editors, which are used to make changes in locations of data.
- Sort utilities – Sort utilities are used to rearrange the records into a sequence.
- System utilities – These programs provide information about the current file usage status, memory, users and peripherals, for example DISKINFO.
- File maintenance utilities – These programs may be used to perform tasks such as reorganising files, indexing files and arranging the files in sequence.
- Debuggers – These programs are used as an aid to removing “bugs” from programs.
- Dump utilities – Dump utilities are used to copy the contents of main storage on an output device.