Saturday 22 December 2012

Why Most IELTS Test Takers Score Below Band 6 - And What YOU Can Do About It

If you must take the IELTS test and this is your first time, or you have failed to reach your target score in IELTS before, please know this:
The latest official report from the IELTS Organization showed that test takers from the top 40 countries scored on average below Band 6 (in Academic and General Training tests).
At the same time most universities want you to score 7 or above - and most immigration laws require band 6.5 or higher.
But how can you beat the average? Is it possible?
Yes, it is definitely possible. You CAN beat the statistics and easily get Band 7, Band 8 - or even Band 9.
IF you're willing to listen.
From: Simone Braverman
Founder of IELTS-Blog.com

December 23, 2012.
Dear Friend,
Any successful IELTS test-taker knows that ...
...there is NO magic way of getting a great score in the exam.
Here is the formula: Your success depends on one thing only - the way you solve the tasks. The way you answer the questions and write your reports and essays. And people, who know the right way, get higher scores. But people who don't - score average or below.
It's really that simple.
Good news is that anyone can learn the right way quickly and easily. Even better news is that in one moment you could have access to it.
You are literally one click away from a book that is GUARANTEED to help you maximize your IELTS score. It helped thousands of students to score higher in IELTS, and it WILL help you - that's a promise.
This book is 100% GUARANTEED to maximize your IELTS score and transform your exam preparation from chaotic and frustrating to systematic, productive and enjoyable.
Between you and me, does this sound familiar?
You must get a high score in IELTS, and have no idea how to do it.
Writing a good essay is hard, because you don't have enough ideas and they take long to generate. By the time you have something to write about, there is not enough time left to finish your writing. You have trouble expressing your thoughts and the sentences come out just wrong.
Graphs are difficult to describe because you have trouble analysing them (well, you're not a scientist, are you?), and no matter how much you try, any report is taking longer than 20 minutes.
How do I know this? Because I've been there, too.
I know what it's like to always run out of time in the Reading test, because the passages are hard to understand and the questions are confusing. I know what it feels like to be a slow reader and always lose time, or concentration, especially if the texts are long.
I, too, felt the frustration of losing points on grammar, because there is no time to check your answers. I understand the desperation of not being able to achieve you target Band score, no matter what you do.
Just like you, I used to get nervous while speaking, worried about my grammar or pronunciation, and was desperately looking for the right word to say. You are not the only one whose English is often misunderstood by people, and who is convinced that unless there is someone to practice in speaking with, they will never get better.
It's not just you, whose mind goes blank when you need to speak on a topic for 2 minutes, who's left with no ideas what to say or with no words in their vocabulary.
And it's not just you who panics in the Listening section, when they go too fast, or speak with an accent, or because it's hard to concentrate and you're afraid to miss the answers.
If any of this describes your IELTS preparation, I've got great news for you:
I've Had It All. And I Know How To Help.
You are about to be given a step-by-step guide to IELTS preparation, that will transform your studying from frustrating, labour-intensive, long, boring and hopeless experience into an effective, focused and a much shorter one.
At any step you will know exactly what you're doing and why, your confidence will grow quickly because of the results you will be getting, and you won’t be just studying - you will be preparing to maximize your IELTS score.
Even if you're working 8am to 6pm, even if you're a student and have other exams to worry about, and even if raising a family takes away almost all of your waking hours - this guide will help you fit IELTS preparation in any of your busy days.
And when you do take the IELTS exam, prepare to be surprised by your score - it might be higher than you expected.
If I showed you other people, just like you, who are doing exactly what you want...
Would you at least believe it is possible for you?
Just some of the people whose lives my advice changed forever:
Total band: 7.5 (yehey!)
"Hi Simone,

As I promised I am informing you about the result of my IELTS exam.

Listening: 8
Reading: 8
Writing: 7
Speaking: 7
Total band: 7.5 (yehey!)

Thanks again for everything that I have learned."

- Ann (Canada)

I needed a 7 and I've got it!

Hi Simone,

These below were my results. I needed a 7 and I've got it! I am really happy!

Listening 8
Reading 7.5
Writing 6
Speaking 7.5
Overall Band 7.5

Thank you so much for the preparation!

- Paula, Brazil
...Fantastic news: my band score is 8!

I thought I would contact you to share the fantastic news I received this morning. I took the IELTS Academic test in London and I have just received my result. My overall band score is 8!

For the preparation I accessed materials on your blog and used your book Target Band 7. I believe that without your help I would not be able to achieve such great result. Thank you ever so much.

Kind regards,
- Nora (United Kingdom)
Now I can enroll in university and further my nursing education

Your tips and book are a huge part of my success.

I got total band score of 7. I got all 7 in reading, listening and writing. My speaking is band score is 7.5. Now I can enroll in university and further my nursing education here in Australia.

I remember it was only 3 weeks before my test and I asked for your help. I was scared then and thought I would not make it in the test. The book explained everything clearly. Writing task became easy after I read your book. Every detail was being discussed. Thank you very much!

Sunday 27 May 2012

Apple Considering 14-Inch MacBook Air to Focus on Asian Markets?

DigiTimes reports that Apple is considering launching a 14-inch MacBook Air model, a move that would appear to be targeting Asian markets where the size is popular with consumers.
Apple is reportedly considering launching a 14-inch MacBook Air and may start mass production in the near future to fully enter the Asia PC market, according to sources from the upstream supply chain. 

Currently, 14-inch panels are the mainstream specification of the Asia notebook market, while consumers in Western countries prefer 15-inch models. In the global market, 14-inch models have an about 20-25% market share, but in Asia, the market share is about 35-40%, an indication of Asia consumers' fondness for 14-inch models, the sources noted.
Apple first launched the MacBook Air in a single 13-inch size, adding an 11-inch size as part of a revamp in late 2010. Apple has also been said to be bringing a MacBook Air-like form factor to its MacBook Pro line, although it is unclear whether the company plans to unify its notebooks under a single line or maintain separate Air and Pro categories. 


DigiTimes has an uneven track record when it comes to rumors, but the site has on occasion offered accurate information and so is followed fairly closely for its claims.

Sunday 26 February 2012

The iPhone and HTML5 – What’s Happening There?


There has been a fair amount of press concerning the new HTML5 standard and how it may impact video playback and rich web content as an alternative to Flash. HTML5 is supposed to be more efficient than Flash in terms of processing load. The testing is inconclusive but one area where HTML5 seems to be more embraced is with the iPhone.
One reason could be that using the least amount of processing power for a given application is very important. While the iPhone packs a lot of smarts into a small package, it certainly can’t compete with the processing power and graphics processing found in a full sized PC or Mac.
A clear indication of the iPhone’s move towards more HTML5 is demonstrated in the new YouTube app for iPhone. The new application allows iPhone users to browse and search for videos, access details of their account, and stream video playback without the Flash plugin.
Other video providers including CBS networks are reported to be developing players based on HTML5 for their streaming content.
So for these and other developers of iPhone apps, they have begun writing them for HTML5. Some of the acknowledged advantages of Flash such as better fonts, a game engine, and other high end graphics are not nearly so critical for the small screen in the iPhone.
And the efficiencies and flexibility they can achieve with HTML5 more than make up for some of these advantages found in Flash. And support for HTML5 versus Flash in the iPhone is strongly by Steve Jobs who felt that the slow and buggy flash plugin to the iPhone was due to “lazy” developers at Adobe.
It has also been reported that the use of Flash in iPhone applications would significantly impact battery life from 10 hours down to about 1.5 hours. If this is true, it is obviously a significant detriment to using Flash in a mobile device like the iPhone. Jobs is a very strong proponent for HTML5 and indicates it is absolutely the way to go for iPhone apps.
In defense, Adobe has stated that their upcoming Flash player version 10.1 will show great improvement on mobile applications and that they are also working on its performance with Mac OS X.
So while the debate ranges on whether Flash is superior to HTML5 or vice versa, development of iPhone apps for HTML5 are well established and continuing to grow strong.

Thursday 23 February 2012

The Accounts and Twitter Framework on iOS 5


Adding Twitter support is something that makes quite a lot of sense for a number of applications. If you're in a news reader application you might want to let your followers know about an interesting article you just read. If you're in a conference schedule app, you not only want to let your followers know about the awesome talks you're listening to but you also might want to know which other talks other conference attendees are tweeting about to decide whether they are actually even more awesome than that talk you're stuck in...

Starting with iOS 5, Apple has introduced an official API for accessing Twitter from your iOSapplications. Before iOS 5, integrating Twitter in your apps was a rather cumbersome experience which required us developers to jump through many hoops.
In this post I want to outline the most important features of the iOS Twitter and Accounts APIs and explain how to use them to write a decent Twitter client for your next app in very few lines of code. The full source code is available on Github for your convenience.
The Accounts and Twitter frameworks perform much of the heavy lifting required when talking to Twitter, such as
  • Providing a secure local storage for user accounts, including their credentials
  • Providing an easy way to sign API requests you send to Twitter. You no longer have to include code to handle OAuth or xAuth in your app - this has all been done by Apple for you
  • Providing a basic UI for composing tweets, including switching the user account you tweet from, uploading images in a tweet and including your current location
Lots of free stuff, so let's have a look at how much (or little) code we actually need to write to tap this source of awesomeness.

Using the Accounts Framework to fetch the list of accounts

The Accounts Framework provides access to all Twitter accounts the user has added to their iPhone using the settings app. Currently, the Accounts Framework only supports Twitter accounts, but you'll soon realize it has been build so that it basically can be used to access any other kind of account in future releases. Maybe the next version of iOS will easy access to Google+ and Facebook accounts - we'll see.
To use the Accounts and Twitter frameworks, we need to add them to the project:
Add Accounts and Twitter frameworks to the project
Add Accounts and Twitter frameworks to the project
Once that's done, we can use the Accounts framework to fetch the list of Twitter accounts on the device.
- (void)fetchData
{
  if (_accounts == nil) {
    if (_accountStore == nil) {
      self.accountStore = [[ACAccountStore alloc] init];
    }
    ACAccountType *accountTypeTwitter =
      [self.accountStore
        accountTypeWithAccountTypeIdentifier:ACAccountTypeIdentifierTwitter];
    [self.accountStore requestAccessToAccountsWithType:accountTypeTwitter
      withCompletionHandler:^(BOOL granted, NSError *error) {
      if(granted) {
        dispatch_sync(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
          self.accounts = [self.accountStore
            accountsWithAccountType:accountTypeTwitter];
          [self.tableView reloadData];
        });
      }
    }];
  }
}
As many other new APIs that perform potentially blocking I/O, the Accounts framework uses blocks to execute your code as soon as the data you requested is available. When querying the accounts database, we can specify the kind of accounts we're interested in - ACAccountTypeIdentifierTwitter in our case. If we're granted access to the accounts database, we fetch the list of accounts usingaccountsWithAccountType:. As soon as we've got this list, we want to save it in a ivar / property and update the UI. Since there is no guarantee we're on the UI thread when our completion handler is run, we use dispatch_sync to ensure assigning the list of accounts and updating the UI is run on the UI thread (dispatch_get_main_queue() returns the GCD queue of the UI thread). For more information on blocks and Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) check out this excellent blog post.
Displaying the accounts in a UITableViewController is straightforward:
- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView
                          cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
  static NSString *CellIdent = @"Cell";
 
  UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdent];
  if (cell == nil) {
    cell = [[UITableViewCell alloc]
      initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleSubtitle reuseIdentifier:CellIdent];
  }
 
  // Configure the cell...
  ACAccount *account = [self.accounts objectAtIndex:[indexPath row]];
  cell.textLabel.text = account.username;
  cell.detailTextLabel.text = account.accountDescription;
  cell.accessoryType = UITableViewCellAccessoryDisclosureIndicator;
  return cell;
}

Displaying the public timeline of the selected user

When the user selects one of the accounts, we want to display a list of recent tweets for this selected account. We'll use TWRequest to fetch the list of recent tweets.
TWRequest is the centerpiece of the iOS Twitter Framework and relieves us of the burden of having to perform OAuth authentication and request signing on our own. In order for it to do this, we need to provide a reference to the account whose timeline we want to read. We also need to provide the URL of the Twitter API endpoint we want to access. While this might seem a little bit cumbersome at first, this allows us to access not only current API calls but also any new APIs Twitter might come up with in the future without requiring Apple to update the API. Pretty nifty.
- (void)fetchData
{
  TWRequest *postRequest = [[TWRequest alloc]
    initWithURL:
      [NSURL URLWithString:@"https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/home_timeline.json"]
    parameters:nil
    requestMethod:TWRequestMethodGET];
 
  [postRequest setAccount:self.account];
  [postRequest performRequestWithHandler:^(NSData *responseData,
                                           NSHTTPURLResponse *urlResponse,
                                           NSError *error) {
    if ([urlResponse statusCode] == 200) {
      NSError *jsonError = nil;
      self.timeline = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:responseData
                                                      options:0
                                                        error:&jsonError];
      dispatch_sync(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
        [self.tableView reloadData];
      });
    }
  }];
}
Again, we need to provide a completion handler which will be invoked as soon as the call to Twitter returns. As you can also see, we're using the same approach as before to make sure we update the UI from the UI thread. It's also interesting to see Apple provides us with their own JSON parsing framework - no longer do we need to integrate third party libraries to serialize / deserialize JSON data.

Sending Tweets

So far, we can choose a Twitter account from the list of Twitter accounts on our iPhone and display the home timeline of this particular user. But how about sending a tweet?
Sending tweets is really easy: you just have to instantiate a new TWTweetComposeViewControllerand display it - iOS will take care of the rest:
- (void)composeTweet
{
  TWTweetComposeViewController *tweetComposeViewController =
    [[TWTweetComposeViewController alloc] init];
  [tweetComposeViewController setCompletionHandler:
    ^(TWTweetComposeViewControllerResult result) {
    [self dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:YES];
  }];
  [self presentModalViewController:tweetComposeViewController animated:YES];
}
The completion handler is merely needed to dismiss the tweet composition view after the tweet has been sent.

Conclusion

Integrating Twitter in your own apps has never been easier. With just a few lines of code, we implemented a basic version of a Twitter client that you can use to display a user's home timeline and send tweets. Elaborating this code base is left as an exercise to you - feel free to fork the code on Github and send me pull requests as you add interesting features!
Here's an impression of the current state of the application:
Thanks for reading this post. Follow me on twitter here to be notified about updates and other posts I write. Or, subscribe to my RSS feed here

 

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