Steam on OS X: Nice But Certainly No Nirvana

Last Wednesday, Valve officially released Steam for OS X. Along with the release was the promise of the release of essentially the entire Source library for Mac eventually.

To date, only one Source game is available - Portal, but it has been offered free for a limited time. Portal is a pretty great game, so Steam + Free Portal is pretty decent gift to the Mac community. And honestly, I'm still optimistic - but having played around with it for nearly a week now, most of my original feelings about Steam haven't changed.

For one thing, Steam is buggy. I can't speak to the PC version anymore - but I never knew it to be terribly stable. The OS X version likes to do things like block you from closing Steam because a game is running - even though a game is not in fact running. The browser Steam uses shows an almost interesting lack of performance considering how basic most of the pages are constructed. It will lock up. It will zombie.

Also, Steam is just poorly designed. Essentially one large custom browser with a lot of access rights, Valve didn't bother to actually coordinate your Steam account with your community account, forum account or support account in 2008 - and they apparently haven't bothered to add such things by 2010. The end result is a decent browsing experience, a relatively robust checkout experience and a a lackluster everything else (at best).

Partially because of that - Steam is quite possibly the most user unfriendly gaming product in the history of gaming. It's not just that their support section feels like a bad PHP script bolted onto the side of an online store, but rather that is the support for a product which can at any time update code on your hard drive without any control on your part, completely trash your game, and then simply walk away.

And remember people, Steam does not offer refunds (unless you feel like reporting them to the BBB it seems). So if Valve forced an update on you and it broke your favorite game - well, tough. And I've had Torchlight less than a week and guess what? That very thing has already happened. I don't think there is a Mac user on the planet right now who can play the game.

And has Valve responded to any of the many forum posts about it? No. Have they sent out any tweets from the Steam twitter account? No. Have they bothered to respond to any of "Ask A Question" support tickets (I could go on for some time about how annoying that they frame support issues as me asking questions. I shouldn't have to ask Valve why their QA sucks)? Not that I've read and certainly not mine.

So yeah - Portal for free running natively on the Mac? That's a nice thing. And if down the road I can play Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead off the MBP as well, then that will be a win. But Steam is still Steam - it's a buggy mess and does nothing to empower users when things go wrong. So remember Mac users - Steam is buyer beware for the digital age.

Apple And The HDTV: Our Mini As Media Server

For a while there, we used my Mini to download movies and then when we wanted to watch them on the big screen, we just moved it into the living room and hooked it directly up to the the TV.

Then we got the 50" plasma, our laptops and the PS3. It got to be easier to just download stuff to my laptop and then wirelessly stream them to the PS3 and view it that way. It was also a pretty cool party trick.

Two problems with that, though, is that movie watching became dependent on how well my network was running - usually OK, but sometimes we'd get the occasional annoying pause - and I couldn't use my laptop while we were doing things. Well, I probably could but I didn't really want my compiles slowing down Doctor Who.

So now we have the Mini permanently behind the TV, hooked up via DVI. If I've torrented something, I can just access the Mini's Drop Box folder, drag and drop the torrent file to it, and then Transmission picks it up and does the work. We've got a bluetooth keyboard and a trackball, but then I found AirMouse for the iPhone which works like a total charm for couch orientated control. If need be I can VNC in as well.

The only other trick I'm considering is a way to email myself torrent files, have an app on the Mini which monitors the inbox and pulls them if found.

But put that on the large pile of unfinished apps, games and Great American Novels I've planned as well...

As I'm writing this, there are questions about whether Apple will keep the Mini in its lineup. I certainly hope that they do - it's a great design and fits a niche that few other computers really can. Without the Mini, we'd be stuck with a Windows based solution for sure to get anything nearly this convenient.

Funny Thing, Technology

I had a simple goal this morning. Upgrade the Mini to Leopard, hook it up to the HDTV and see about making it into an iTunes/Torrent server. Install disc in hand, everything went horribly, horribly wrong.

The disc consistently ejected itself. Some googling offered up a few solutions which seemed to fit the scenario but nothing really worked. Resetting the PRAM allowed the DVD to at least be recognized but when the install started it would just eject once again.

What seemed to be required was a firewire cable and a spare Mac, to boot the DVD via remote for the Mini. A trip to Best Buy later I had what was apparently the very wrong firewire cable. So I went back to beating up the firmware.

Finally, and this is some hours later - it occurred to me clean the damn DVD.

It's worked fine ever since.

Funny how a four cent alcoholic tissue makes a five hundred dollar machine behave.

Channel Flip Helps Get Your Mac Game On

Katharine is either a Mac geek or plays one on TV, and does a wonderful job of covering major issues with gaming on that "other" platform. She covers the basics, gaming on a Windows partition and even gaming gaming with Crossover. And all this with an English accent.

On a side note, I'm quite excited that Blizzard in continuing a tradition of Mac dedication by having an OS X version of Diablo III ship with the Windows version. It is a lot more than I've come to expect than some other companies I might mention...

Some iPhone SDK Disappointments

The simulator not supporting Open GL is definitely a bit of a downer, but the Core graphics set is pretty decent for a lot of uses (although obviously not for rotating a 3D teapot, for instance).

I didn't realize, though, that the SDK does not seem to support accessing the iTunes library for playback. This really seems like a fairly strong handed restriction - I could see restrictions on manipulating the library itself but removing access completely shuts out a large portion of the functionality. So no new visualizers, music based games, podcasting, or mix software for you. I can't see where there's a DRM issue here, it's not like you'll be burning CD's off the thing ... so it really feels more like a stranglehold on the iTunes experience.

Also the SDK's dev site has a bit to be desired. There's no real search functionality, Getting beyond the surface topics and basic tutorials are difficult at best and OS X topics are interwoven with the iPhone ones with the occasional "has not been reviewed for accuracy" on the latter note. For instance, I can't even find a page that overviews the above and if you google "iPhone SDK restrictions", two full pages of result don't include any information from Apple.com itself.

I was going to take some time today and try and port my old visualizer code over to the iPhone ... but apparently that's out...

The iPhone SDK Actually Kinda Rocks

Work has bequeathed onto me a MacBook Pro and lo it twas glorious.

Seriously, compared my that demon possessed Lenovo Thinkpad this thing is a saint. It's not just the normal Apple pretty pretty that makes me say this - I'm actually get more done, more quickly. I no longer spend minutes out of every hour fussing with lost connections, confused video modes or rebooting because life just got a little too hard for an OS.

Now this didn't take place simply because I'm a swell guy and I complained to no end about the last laptop, but rather the advent of the iPhone SDK and the office's interest in the thing. This is a Mac only affair and I never, ever thought I'd be getting Apple hardware specifically to code Apple software ... but here we are.

The good news is that the iPhone SDK is pretty good. I've played with XCode in the past with some success and it only seems to have been improved since then. This is also a Cocoa only kit, so those dragging Carbon around like the kindly old relative it is will need to send it off the nursing home. Objective-C is the new black. And by black I mean the framework for builing anything on the iPhone.

Honestly, I don't even know why Objective-C has C in the name. It's somewhat C-like in structure, I guess. The grammar will throw any newbie in for a curve for at least an hour or so ... it actually helps if you've jumped the divide into C++ or the like for periods of time.

Don't get me wrong - there's nothing bad about the way Obj-C is setup. If anything, there's a lot of good to it - just be prepared to unfocus the eyes a bit to adjust. It's a little like those 3-D pictures they used to have the mall.

To date I have a simple app which pulls some XML off a server, produces a few lists off it and can generate some descriptive text. It's more or less a basic mutant RSS reader in an iPhone form. This is all running off a simulator as right now there's no legit way to load the app onto hardware. The simulator is extremely functional, though, and editing, compiling, previewing, and then repeating gets to be a quick affair.

So the question is - if one were to get their hands on this ... what would you write? What kind of games make sense in an iPhone world? Is there something that you wish you could accomplish in the palm of your hand not covered by a Safari based solution right now?

Nothing Apple Works On Vista Right Now

In a follow up to the earlier report that Vista exploded Internet Explorer before viewing a Mac ad online, it appears that not of Apple's is working on the new OS:

Today's tech support document names a range of additional Windows applications from Apple that don't support that new operating system.

These include: QuickTime, the iPod shuffle reset utility, Bonjour for Windows, AirPort for Windows, the iDisk utility, AppleWorks for Windows, and Apple Software Update for Windows. The stand-alone iPod updater for iTunes 6 for Windows also isn't ready for Vista.

-- Apple's Windows Apps Not Vista Ready.

Ouch. I would think, given the number of iTunes seats are probably sitting on a Windows hard drive - that this is actually a pretty big deal. Least it pops the Microsoft conspiracy of the week.



tagged: apple, vista