It would appear that Apple has opened up the UK App Store to the iPad – up until a few days ago you would get a message saying “Your request could not be completed” if you tried to launch the store directly from the iPad. Apps such as iBooks & Pages don’t seem to be available yet but at least it makes it easier to browse and install all the non-Apple apps. You can also download updates for previously installed apps.
If like me, you decided you couldn’t wait for the iPad to come out in the UK and ordered one from the USA, you may be wondering how you can get Apps on it. If you try to load the App Store from the iPad you’ll get a message saying “Your request could not be completed” – the reason being that the UK App Store won’t be available till the iPad is officially launched on the 28th May.
What you can do however is find and add iPad Apps via iTunes on your Mac or PC, and there are a few ways to do this:
Go to the iTunes store and search for “iPad” or “HD”, this will show lots of iPad Apps free & paid, the downside is that you have to browse through quite a few pages as all the different categories are lumped together – games, books, business etc. But it does work and you can then download them.
The next method I discovered of finding iPad apps is by using the App Store drop-down menu and clicking on some of the categories. For example if you click on “Books” you might find you can then browse all the Book Apps, and even view the top free and paid ones. I say “might” as normally you would only expect to see iPhone/iPod books, the only thing I can think is that once you have connected you iPad and/or downloaded some Apps, iTunes automatically chooses to show iPad Apps. The only category this doesn’t seem to work for is “Games” where you will only find iPhone/iPod Apps displayed.
The third method again uses the iTunes search, but this time try searching by category, so for example if you search for “utilities” you then get a page with the option to view all iPhone utility Apps, and just below that the option to view all iPad utility Apps. Unlike the previously mentioned method you can also browse all the available iPad games. You can quickly see a list of all the searchable categories by using the App Store drop-down menu.
To transfer all your downloaded iPad Apps to the iPad itself you will need to select the iPad under the “Devices” menu down the left. From there it’s just a case of clicking on the “Apps” tab and syncing them. The first time you do this you might need to uncheck all of your iPhone/iPod Apps. After I had done that the first time I connected the iPad, I then found that any other iPad Apps I downloaded were automatically checked, so now I just need to click on “Sync” when I need to transfer new Apps.
Unfortunately those methods don’t allow you to get all Apps, for example you won’t find iBooks, iWork etc. To get those you will either need to set up a USA account complete with US address and payment method, or wait for the UK launch.
Just in case an Easy Content Unit is a little slow to load (happens every now and then), I thought this might help – an animated gif in the background that tells the visitor that the unit is loading.
Once the unit has loaded it hides the animation (just need to make sure your unit has a background colour set). Could hopefully lessen the chances of a user leaving the page if the ECU doesn’t appear straight away.
It only really works for ECU units like the one below and does involve a little bit more work than just pasting the ECU code.
This is what you would see if the unit above didn’t load straight away –
Might be possible to improve on this idea?
If anyone wants to use this idea feel free to pinch the code & graphics -
Since ECU have now improved speeds and set up a caching feature, this loader is no longer needed
Whether you design sites on a Mac or a PC, chances are you won’t always have immediate access to all the popular browsers. As a Mac user I sometimes need to test sites in IE 6 & IE 7.
For IE 7 I can reboot my iMac with Vista, but when I need to test in IE 6 it usualy involves booting an old PC which is not only slow, I also then have to worry about whether the antivirus is up to date etc.
Thanks to Browsershots I can test my sites in IE 6 & IE 7 and a list of other browsers from my iMac. You do sometimes have to wait a few minutes to view the results and there are limits on the amount of tests you can run per day, but it’s a free service. You can even test a site in IE 4!
