February is here! Hard to believe 2012 is more than a month old already, isn’t it?

We’d like to keep you up to date with everything going on here at Castanet, and fill you in on some of the exciting things we’re working on.

Our Garage Band contest is still going on, and you’ve got until February 10th to submit your songs. The response has been amazing and we’ve got some difficult decisions to make in choosing the Top 10.

The Castanet Pin-up contest has also been very successful, and like the Garage Band contest it’s tough deciding amongst all the great entries. All our monthly winners go into a calendar with 100% of the proceeds going to charity. You can vote on January’s pin-ups right now...

Did you take the time to tell us about your Okanagan Wine and Dine experience? We were overwhelmed and impressed with your cool culinary commentary, and are almost done picking winners for the gift certificates…

John Thomson is a Kelowna business legend, and we’re happy to have him back on Castanet. Look for his first weekly column sometime this month...

Love movies? Our new columnist and movie reviewer Rene Gross really loves them, and he’ll be keeping everyone up to date on what to watch and why.

Also, get ready for some really thrilling new content in the months to come. We’re so excited about some of the fabulous features planned – we hope your enjoyment will match our excitement!

And finally, we know our site can be pretty extensive, and you may be missing out on some content:

• Every weekend, our news team brings you a video week in review. It can be found in the top right hand corner of our site in the soon-to-be-revamped video section. Also, we've got an audio news segment that runs throughout the weekend, which can be found in the headlines.
• Have you seen our Okanagan Business Directory, Castanet411?
• How about catching up on Snap’s Faces of the Okanagan? 
• And are you keeping up with all the celebrations in people’s lives? Our Celebrations page has birth announcements, weddings, big birthdays and more. Send us your announcement!

What’s new and exciting for us here at Castanet? Lots!

There’s so much to share with everyone, I don’t even know where to begin.

We all love a good contest where everyone can get involved, so let’s start there.

Along with Wentworth Music, Castanet is proud to announce our first Garage Band Music Contest. Whatever your or your band’s musical style, you can jam away and share your creations with us. We’ll post all your entries in our special garage band page where people can vote. At the end of the month, the top five bands will square off in a live event to be held at Sapphire Night Club in February.

The big winner will receive a substantial gift certificate from Wentworth Music, some major exposure on our site, and of course the pride and distinction of being named the best.

Look for an official contest announcement with all the details before the end of the month.

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The garage band competition is just the beginning for all the cool contests we’ve got planned for 2012.

Also coming up in January is our long-awaited search for the prettiest women in the Okanagan. The Sun has the Sun Girl, but why should they have all the fun?

Here in the Okanagan, we have some of the most beautiful women anywhere, and it’s about time they get to shine.

All the details are still being ironed out, but starting soon anyone over 18 will be able to send us their photos and short bio to be considered as our pick of the week.

We still don’t have a name for the feature yet, and we’re looking for your help. Think you have a great name? Share it with us, and you can win something really cool… we promise you’ll love it.

Each month, a winner will be picked and the monthly winners will appear in a calendar – with all proceeds going to breast cancer research – that we will be producing near the end of the year.

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Christmas is only a few weeks away, and with it comes a visit from the ghost of columns past. I’m proud to announce the return of Celebrity Soup, which will be as snarky as ever. No celebrity is off-limits, and I promise it will be fun for everyone. The world of Hollywood may be serious business, but the celebrities, power players and games that go on every day cannot be taken seriously – and that will serve as the mission of the column.

Kathrine’s Entertainment Reel will still be going full steam ahead, and will focus on the movie world. Plus, look for some awesome new segments to show up in ‘The Reel’ – coming soon!

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Looking for a comprehensive list of things to do for the holidays? The most excellent Kelowna Community Resources Holiday Guide has it all.

Dinners, hampers, children’s events, Christmas events, Christmas services, donation info, sponsor a family info, volunteer info… it’s all here.

Check it out!

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One area of our site that you may have missed is our Shopping Central Flyer Guide. Get instant access to your favourite national brand stores and the local businesses you love.

We find the links; all you have to do is view and save! 

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We’ve got lots more to come, so stay tuned to this What’s Up page for details.

Big things are happening on Castanet, and I’m proud to be a part of the team here. You may know me from my current Tech Soup column - which runs every Friday - or perhaps you used to read my daily ramblings on the world of Hollywood in Celebrity Soup. I can’t quite pull myself away from all the entertainment news, so I’ll still be covering some of the hot stories for Castanet.

As the new Content Manager, one of my main responsibilities is to make sure all the great events happening in the Okanagan are visible on our site.

There are several ways to get your event up in our event listings, but the easiest is to navigate to the Events page (from the navigation menu in blue near the top of our site choose Events from either the Entertainment or Community drop down list). Just under the blue navigation menu on the right-hand side you’ll find a rectangular red button called ‘Share Your Event’ (see photo below).

Fill in the relevant information, hit Submit, and your event will be ready for approval. You may also e-mail events@castanet.net.

Or, maybe you’ve got something cool you’d like to share with the world. It doesn’t have to be an event; it can be a video you’ve created, a song, a story you think people would love to read about... pretty much anything. We’ve got some great contests coming up where you’ll get to show us your creative side, so stay tuned to our What’s Up section for more info!

In the meantime, feel free to e-mail me at mark@castanet.net and we may just feature your story or highlight your business.

Do your new apps crash after you just did an upgrade to them? Do you have some apps that no longer open. Mark Edstrom from dpi says the problem started with Apple's launch of iOS5.

"If people download new app updates before they upgrade to the new iOS 5 they will find most apps will not work and they will probably crash."

Photo:  Apple Canada

Edstrom says it's the same for the Castanet app. If people update their app without doing the new iOS 5 upgrade their phones will reject the app.

He recommends iPhone4 users upgrade their phones to iOS 5, before they do anything else.

"Everyone should be doing it for their iPhones. If not, their apps will be crashing and their phones will not be running at peak performance. Their apps are going to be outdated and it's going to be a problem across the board."

The app designer says, "If you have the iPhone4, with the old operating system, and you do not update to iOS 5 and you do not update your apps you might be fine for a while but everything will be outdated."

App updates are sometimes automatic and if you click 'yes' before you go to the new operating system problems will occur, so it's best to do the upgrade sooner than later.

"If you do the update (iOS 5) which is great because there's a ton of new features. The next step would be to update all of your apps. The thing is. there will be 10 to 30 apps on your phone doing these updates and it will probably take an hour or more to do the update," says Edstrom.

It's always good to backup your phone before you do the update. This will ensure you do not lose any of your information. There have been some reports of pictures and video being lost after the upgrade.

Edstrom says any company that had an app, had to quickly update it to make it stable for iOS 5.

"There were tons of problems and many major sites had issues."

The new Castanet app is also ready for your upgrade.

"If you go ahead and do the iOS 5 update then the Castanet app will be work fine."

Apple says the new iOS has 200 new features. Edstrom agrees, he says there are a lot of benefits to the iOS 5 upgrade.

"The new iOS 5 is great, there's iMusic, iMagazine, new texting options and iMessage. It uses data instead of phone service so it's cheaper and it's more functional."

The developer says Apple should have had a grace period allowing app creators a chance to catch up before they launched iOS 5. Now everyone is on the same page and the phones are working properly.  

Edstrom tells Castanet the new iOS 5 is not for iPhone3s, "It's not compatible with it."

He says people with the '3s' should investigate before they do anything with the new upgrade.

Click here for more information from Apple.