Apple supports 10 new languages
News and Announcements for Apple DevelopersNow you have more ways to reach millions of users around the world. We have expanded language support in iTunes Connect, so you can localize app metadata, keywords, and screenshots in 10 new languages: Traditional Chinese, Norwegian, Turkish, Finnish, Danish, Indonesian, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese, and Greek.
Some great news from Apple, is that soon they will be supporting more languages on iOS ! Now developers will be able to translate their apps and descriptions into 25 languages now that they’ve added ten new languages above.
Speeding up a slow MacBook Pro
It’s natural that a computer over time will start to slow down. If you think of it you now have a whole host of new programs on it, your hard-disk is fuller and perhaps you’ve changed a few system settings. There are a few ways that you can insure that your Mac is running as fast as it should be.
Making your Mac run faster
You can try the following ideas here
- Free up some space on your Hard drive by either deleting programs or files you no longer need for or backing up files to an external hard disk or cloud space
- Add some RAM
We went for the latter choice here, and we updated our RAM. We first tested our system to see how much RAM it had and how much it can hold, we used a tool from Crucial http://www.crucial.com/systemscanner.
Here’s a picture of the RAM in the back of our MacBook Pro. We followed the instructions in the video below and it was all done in less than five minutes.
We bought our RAM on Amazon.
Video on how to replace RAM
Ten Top Mac Blogs
1. Macworld: Our number one for news for everything Mac & Apple. We like the way that they have the categories nicely separated, so if you are only looking for reviews you can quickly find them here.
Post frequency : Multiple times a hour
2. The Unofficial Apple Weblog: Also referred to TUAW on the net. TUAW has many authors who write about the latest news in Apple. Some of my favorite posts are about the latest patents filed by Apple. TUAW also has a in-depth tutorials in their How To section.
Post frequency : Multiple times a day
3. TheAppleBlog: This site has been online for a long time, it’s oldest post goes back to 2004 ! They boast 1/2 million plus reader each month, and provide an apple forum which has a vibrant community behind it.
Post frequency : Multiple times a day
4. Download Squad: This is now owned by AOL, and is located at switched.com. These guys offer reviews, and what we particularly like is they have tips too.
Post frequency : Multiple times a day
5. The Apple Core: This ZDNet is a massive blog network, and often has some of the best information out there. They cover rumors as well as news, and their reviews are pretty in-depth.
Post frequency : Multiple times a day
8. Reddit: No need to register to read the numerous posts here. A user led news voting system, where people share their stories and their peers vote on them based on merit. This is coupled in that the quicker a news article gets votes, the higher it will appear on their page.
Post frequency : Multiple times a day
9. MavReview.net: A smaller blog with reviews & updates about Apple products. They often cover some of the new smaller apps before they get main stream coverage.
Post frequency : Every other day
10. MacTrast.com: A busy Mac blog, that has a big twitter following. They cover the news as it happens throughout the day.
Post frequency : Multiple times a day
If you have a new Mac, and want to learn about your new computer, we recommend you start reading these blogs.
iCloud reminder
Here is a screenshot from our iPod touch. Apple are great at pushing reminding you to use their services. We are not sure if this is a good thing or not, but nevertheless, Apple are doing it. We don’t use out iPod touch for anything that much, so it’s not so important, but we do wonder how effective these types of time based reminders are.
We also were a little surprised that backups will only happen when the device is locked. Which I guess is smart, but if you only turn your iPod on to use it for music every now and again, you won’t get the chance to have it in such a state.
iCloud Backup Questions
- Would you be motivated to backup your phone / iPad or iPod ?
- Do you use iCloud to backup your system or do you save it to your computers hard disk ?
- Have you bought extra iCloud storage space ?
Anyway we better go away and back up the system …. because Apple said so.
Xcode for Snow Leopard no longer supported ?
It appears that Xcode for Snow Leopard is no longer actively being supported. If you want to develop iPhone apps and you are still on Snow Leopard, then you are either stuck on 5.0, or you will have to shell out $30 to upgrade your OS to Lion on the iTunes store so that you can develop for 5.1.
So if you are holding out for the new version, after 6 months of waiting, it sadly doesn’t appear to be coming, and you will need to upgrade. There are some hacks that you can do to get the 4.3.1 running on Lion, but it can also lead to an unstable developing environment. Apparently the complier has been updated and it’s not
More…
Quick access to camera
With the new version of iOS from Apple, they’ve made it easier to take photos. In the latest update of iOS 5.1 you can see a new icon on the bottom right of the screen. Here you don’t need to tap twice to get it, rather you can drag it all the way to the top, and as you do the camera shutter is revealed. We quite like this improvement as it allows us to be able to take those quick snaps on our phone.
In a recent update Apple enabled the feature where you can use the plus volume button on your phone to take pictures. This is especially handy if you have your phone in the portrait mode. 
The shutter appearing as we are opening the camera via the quick slide.
Apple increase over the air limits
This news comes from the Apple Developer news blog, where they say that you can now download even larger apps over the air (i.e. on 3G or LTE, or EDGE if you still use that). We reckon this is to do with the new larger size of many apps, especially ones for iPads, as they now have images that can support the large Retina Screen.
Great apps come in all sizes. If you happen to offer a larger app, we’ve made it even easier for App Store customers to get your app wherever they are. We’ve raised the Wi-Fi download requirement from 20 MB to 50 MB so customers can download apps up to 50 MB in size over their cellular data network.
One thing you should be aware of is that your data limits set by your provider could easily be eaten up quickly if you download too many 50MB files over the air. We also guess that this will include downloading podcasts. Our plan currently allows us to download 500MB, for our iPhone, so we will definitely need to keep an eye on things.
How to find new apps ?
Let’s be honest finding new apps on iTunes or the AppStore just really doesn’t work. Either the interface is too clunky, it’s too slow, or well it just doesn’t work. Finding new apps, especially ones that are new or not highly popular is next to impossible. It’s just the way the AppStore listings work, Apple’s take on it is to make it easy for people to find popular apps, but less known one will more or less suffer as they won’t be discovered. This is both bad for app developers as well as consumers.
Enter LinguaSearch, (http://appsinmylanguage.com) by AppLingua (http://applingua.com/) have come up with a rather novel App Search engine. Which is tailored to working in 14 locations, including Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Italian languages.