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!