I’m the proud owner of a new MacBook Air. It’s beautiful, I love it, people stare at it on the airplane, etc., etc. For the owner of a tech company, I’ve never been much of an early adopter, unlike some of our clients (and you know who are)… having said that, when it became necessary for me to get a new one, well heck, why not go for the Air? I am certainly a frequent traveler, and the few pounds I’m saving with the Air are no doubt going to pay off in the long run.
Anyway, as part of the exciting getting-acquainted process with my new computer, I’m determined to put in the time to make this thing as lean and mean as I can make it, with only the apps that I actually use, and only the features that I care about. In that regard, Mac’s automatic multilanguage support has been immensely annoying to me.
For example. I have known some great Portuguese people, and I’d love to visit Lisbon, but I certainly don’t need support on my computer for two dialects of Portuguese. What’s that you say— maybe I’ll make a couple of Portuguese friends from different regions of Portugal? OK, fine. But I doubt they’ll need to use my version of Stickies (which has support for 18 languages!).
There’s a program called Trimmit that I have used in the past, that handles this pretty well. But as far as language support goes, I just learned that you can change it yourself on an app by app basis, using Get Info:
Unclicking all those languages except English reduces the size of these apps alarmingly. For example, iCal goes from a bloated 89.1 MB to 13.4. Address Book goes from like 48MB to 5.
I can’t figure out why Apple doesn’t let you choose which languages you want to support during the OSX setup process; after all, they begin the whole process by asking what country you’re in. The least they could do is offer me some checkboxes at the start of the process. But anyway, I’m looking forward to some speedier computer interactions!
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They let you skip all those extra languages when you install the OS. The problem is, a MacBook Air preloaded the with OS already contains them all by default. I’m sure there’s a script out there somewhere that automatically removes the extra languages for all the apps if you hunt for it. The site macosxhints.com usually tracks those sorts of hackery.