Lingopal’s Facebook page has recently featured in a Facebook consultant Aymeric Gaurat-Apelli’s blog as an example of how a business might successfully use Facebook Pages. First a disclaimer – we employed the services of Aymeric’s consultancy, so while it might look a bit like a mutual admiration society, our Facebook page has advanced in leaps and bounds since we acted on his advice.

As someone for whom social media is a little unnatural (wrong generation? – just), having a Facebook page gave me a sense of unease. What was I meant to post? How often? Why? What’s wrong with just the website? Can’t we just make an app like Farmville? What the hell is Farmville? These and many more questions had been swimming around my head for some time, to the point where I was getting an involuntary eye-twitch (actually that may have had something to do with a tempestuous Brazilian girl).

On the advice of a friend, I started reading Six Pixels of Separation, by Mitch Joel – that really helped in demystifying what social media is and how it works. It also made me realise how important it is to have a Facebook presence for Lingopal. That was all very well – anyone can have a Facebook presence – but how do you have a good, or great Facebook presence?

So I scoured the internet trying to track down really successful pages, and the guys who made them. There were reasons why some pages/apps got thousands, if not millions of followers (and I’m not talking about the huge multinational brands with budgets to match), and I wanted to be able to use that reasoning when it came time to make our Facebook page. And that led me to Aymeric, who, in an earlier career, was a successful Facebook developer.

Aymeric was able to assist not only in very practical terms (showing me how to edit code, create an FBML page, use graphics etc), but he also explained why we do things, and how users may be compelled to interact. He also (and this is pretty important to any business owner) explained why it made good sense to first experiment with some of the simplest and cheapest ways to use Facebook, rather than go off and develop a whizz-bang app which might fail.

We’re only starting out with just a few hundred followers, but now that I have a better understanding of what’s required and how I can efficiently do it, it’s not so much a chore but rather a fun challenge.

Astute observers of our new website will notice there is a link called ‘Android’. Yes, we are in the process of porting all our language apps over to Android. Last week a man from FedEx delivered an HTC Legend, quite a sleek little number with a 1-piece aluminium body. Overall I’m pretty impressed with the Android OS. It does things a little bit differently but for the most part it’s intuitive, and it’s certainly quite quick (my iPhone 3G is a laggard with the latest OS).

We hope to be releasing the first Android versions to the Android Market very soon. Here’s a sneak peak.

If you haven’t visited our website in a while, you might notice that it’s undergone a spruce-up. The last one still makes my toes curl, but in terms of a clean look, multi-language support, simplicity and a really easy back-end (yep, even I can do it), then this is a pretty good result. You’ll also notice there are feeds in the front page to our Facebook page and Twitter posts. Feel free to ‘like’ us (that sounds so clumsy) and follow the tweets (@lingopal).

On the subject of the Facebook page, this is something we really want to push. After launching it a few weeks ago, we’re gradually getting in some followers, and the stats show that they’re enjoying the Daily Diversions – interesting little language snippets from around the world. We’ve got some cool plans for Facebook in the future, but for now we need to get a critical mass of followers.

Here’s a typical post:

It’s been a while coming, but I was very happy to check my mail today and see this:

It wasn’t a simple process however. In fact, it took 4 separate attempts before they were accepted by Apple. And it had nothing to do with the binary. Rather, it was all in the description of the In App Purchase.

We deliberately designed the Lite apps not to be simply a cut down version of the premium apps, but to allow the easy upgrade path within the app. In effect, you always have the option, via a simple 2-step process, to pay and release all the premium content.

And that means having to describe what the user will be getting if they upgrade.

See that ’23 More Categories’? There’s a little box in the Apple submission system where I had to put that in. There’s a bigger box just below where I can put a more detailed description. Here’s what I originally inserted:

Little Box: All Categories Upgrade

Big Box: Upgrades Lingopal to include all 25 categories

And it got rejected. I thought I had written as accurately and simply as possible what purchasers would be getting. So I tried again, with a slight tweak for the Big Box content. It too got rejected.

You have to remember that this isn’t just a quick change, email it to Apple then they get back to you overnight. There’s a process and it takes days, if not weeks. While this was going on I was trying to get some guidance from Apple about what was and wasn’t permitted in the text. There are some guidelines, but I couldn’t see anything in them which suggested I was in breach of them. I was very fortunate to actually get someone from Apple on the phone (I bet there aren’t too many people who can claim that), and while Richard Chipman was very courteous and did his best to help, it was still very much a trial and error process.

Eventually, by writing ’23 More Categories’ and ‘Gives Lingopal 23 more categories and hundreds more phrases’, the apps got accepted.Perhaps Apple could provide some ore concise guidelines so developers don’t have to constantly poke around in the dark?

So this now means that people can download a Lite app for free – that’s all the languages plus Lingopal 44 – and get to play with the app, before deciding whether they want the extra content. As it stands it’s still a pretty useful app, and it’ll be interesting to watch how it gets taken up over the next few weeks and months.

Keep a lookout for a new update with a couple of fancy features very soon. In the meantime, all our Lingopal Lite apps can be found here (though curiously the Lingopal 44 Lite isn’t yet showing, though its status is ‘Ready for Sale’).

After four attempts (more on that soon) we’re happy to announce that the first of our Lite apps – Afrikaans – has been made available in the apps store. This means that you can ‘try before you buy’.

The Lite apps will still be fully functional, though limited to only 2 categories (Essential & Flirting). If that’s all you need, then bully for you. If you want a little more, then Apple’s In App Purchase trick let’s you upgrade to the Premium version in just a couple of simple steps.

As I mentioned earlier, it took quite a while to get approved, and now we’ve got the remaining Lite versions (including Lingopal 44) in review. We’re hoping they’ll be approved in the next couple of days.

Sound is a funny thing, and I am not even going to attempt to begin to explain its intricacies here. If you are interested in such things as sample rates and artifacting and normalisation then I suggest you read about them here. What I will say is this.

When we recorded all the sound files for the Lingopal apps, we used professional recording studios – the kind with the artist locked in a sound-proof booth – and recorded the files in the largest format possible, which are wave files. There may well be larger file formats around but this is an industry standard. The wave (or .wav) files would make any of our applications prohibitively enormous, so they had to be compressed.The trick is to compress them as much as possible, without  killing the quality of the sound. Unfortunately with every compression you’re going to do that to some extent.

Originally we compressed all the apps down pretty low to 16kbps. These have now been decompressed to 32kbps. That doesn’t mean the sound files are twice as good, or loud, but there is definitely an improvement. This is most noticeable when listening to the files with head-phones on, but it’s obvious with the iPhone speakers too. Unfortunately we’re limited by the capabilities of those speakers, but we think that, if and when Apple brings out a new iPhone with better speakers, then we’ll be well placed to take advantage of it.

In doing the builds we made a couple of errors. The Spanish and German languages had a lot of their sound files removed. They might look like this:

German & Spanish have plenty of sound missing - the fix is on its way!

Fortunately this was brought to our attention pretty quickly, and I’m happy to say that the corrected versions are on their way to the iTunes store now. Apologies to those who have been inconvenienced by it.

It seems there is quite a popular youth-oriented TV program called ‘We Got Married’, and from what I can gather, and I haven’t gathered much, two popular celebrities are paired together and pretend, mostly in front of guests, to be married.

In this episode, a young Afghan guy visits Ga-In from Brown Eyed Girls fame (a Korean pop group) and Jo Kwon, a Korean boy band, 2AM. In their efforts to speak to this fellow, who speaks English, Ga-In and Jo Kwon use Lingopal on Ga-In’s iPhone. Hilarity ensues! as the publicists would say.

It’s all here on the allkpop website.

That’s Ga-In on the right. Delightful.

A great weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

An unfortunate few customers of Lingopal encountered (and uncovered) a bug which completely cut off the sound of the app. Uninstalling and reinstalling worked temporarily; then the bug would show again.

It was a very frustrating bug for us to sort out, but after a great deal of time (for which I unreservedly apologise), we found that if a unique set of choices was made by a user, then this bug would activate, as it were.

A few days ago I spent several cheery hours uploading 47 different applications to the iTunes store, happy in the knowledge that we had fixed this error, and that those patient customers who had been missing their Lingopal sounds would soon have it restored. If you haven’t done so already then I suggest you download v.1.1.

That’s the good news. One bad boy slipped through the cracks. Lingopal Flirta is not showing the Categories, which makes it pretty awkward to use. Fixing that is now top of our priorities and we hope to release the update very soon.

Thanks in advance for your patience.

We’ve had a bunch of reviews, and rather than clutter the website with links to them, I’ve decided to put some of them here. Browse away.

AppUp (Japanese)

German review of Lingopal Italian

Bondi is a suburb in Sydney, Australia. It is the home of arguably Australia’s most famous beach, and it’s not hard to see why. It stretches a kilometre, has great surf, and according to the Sydney Tourist Guide, ‘offers topless sunbaking.’ Fantastic.

World famous Bondi Beach

Tourists from all around the world come to visit. Here is a picture of Rachael and her friend Coleen, from Cornwall, England.

Fun in the sun!

There are even competitions at Bondi Beach. I couldn’t find a picture of a sand-building competition, but I did find this one, of Miss Bondi 2008. That cheerful fellow in the centre looks familiar …

So with all these tourists and backpackers around, it makes sense that a young chap could do alright with some foreign ladies, does it not? And if language should be a problem, then what better to break the ice than a cheeky phrase?

This video explains it all.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDhshjLrMe8[/youtube]