Steam – Now in OS X Flavour!
Mar0
It’s been a long time coming, but the nice people at Valve have announced that Steam is coming to Mac. When? April.
This is possibly the biggest boost to gaming on the Mac since the move to an Intel architecture, especially given that Valve is bringing its entire Source-powered line-up of games with it on launch, without needing to buy another copy. I expect to see the quite lengthy list of games on Steam which already have a Mac port move over in the near future as well.
And now, some eye candy.
New Tag Goodness
Mar1
It is with joy that I announce that Microsoft have updated their tag reader application on the iPhone, doing something which nobody else has managed to do so far and feed the camera stream directly into the application so you don’t need to go through the annoying take-confirm-verify sequence that you have to put up with in the old version and every other 2D code reader I’ve seen on the platform.
Microsoft doing something right. In other news, temperatures in hell plummet with ice on the runway grounding several pigs.
Safari 4
Feb2
Today I got an update through Twitter which piqued my interest.
oooh, Safari 4 is spangley and new!
Safari 4? I must have it! I leap gazelle-like to the Safari page on Apple’s website look at the shiny pictures and download the beta, only to be defeated by PAVCON being slow. 18 minutes later my download is complete, I rev up the installer, only to find that I now need to download a security patch. Software Update looks after this for me, but again I am defeated by PAVCON being slow. However, perseverence and two restarts later drop me into Safari 4 Beta.
My first impression is one of space. Safari 3 was very spacious, but 4 seems to just have oodles more. This is helped by a Chrome-like moving of browser tabs onto the menu bar of the application, tucked neatly out of the way. I’ve got to admit I’ve not been a fan of the way the tab bar slid in and out and altered the window dimensions.
My Top Sites
Next up after the shiny welcome page (All done in HTML 5 and CSS 3) I was dropped into my Top Sites, another Chrome-like display of where Safari thinks I like to browse. It’s mostly right, but I’d appreciate the ability to forcibly add my own top sites. The locking of sites and the ability to reposition them is nice, but not really enough.
The new CoverFlow interface for flicking through bookmarks and history is really, really useful when you can remember what a page looks like but no real content. The new address bar dropdown is nice and helps you find the site you’re after if it’s buried in your favourites somewhere. Likewise the inclusion of Google Suggest and search history in the inbuilt search bar is a much wanted addition.
On the subject of the address bar, however, a change I don’t like. The stop/refresh button has moved all the way to the end of the address bar, replacing the Set SnapBack button (For the curious, SnapBack is now relegated to the History menu, for searches only). I’d much rather have the option to go back to the big, chunky button. This also replaces any semblance of a load progress bar, turning into a not-very-helpful spinner when something is happening.
Speedwise it’s a noticeable improvement in lots of things, except for occasions when (I presume due to its beta nature) it slams into a brick wall of epic slowness for no apparent reason. Whatever happens it’s a major load, causing the beachball of doom to rear its colourful head and bring every other app on my system to a crawl.
I’ll keep you posted on anything interesting, but that’s my initial impression.
Fingamoddle
Jun0
Spore Creature Creator is good fun, and I’m delighted to discover that both it and the full Spore game will arrive in a native Mac version, so I don’t have to mess around with Parallels to play what looks to be an extremely fun sandbox game. Sadly, however, I can’t buy the full version for my Mac in the UK, or pre-order the full thing. How irritating.
The procedural animation and texturing is simply awesome by the way, hats off to the team.
It Really Just Works
Apr0
My iPhone has been playing silly buggers for a few days now, so I decided to bite the bullet and do a restoration on it. Having had some experience of restoring various gadgets to factory settings and the subsequent pain of getting them back how I liked them, this was something I approached with no small amount of trepidation.
Dock iPhone… it shows up in iTunes and predictably throws up an Unknown Sync Error (-39). No worry, I’ve already decided to click the “Restore” button. A single approval window appears, and I confirm my intent.
iTunes goes away and unpacks the new firmware, wipes my phone, re-flashes it and then restarts it without any input from me. I even went and played on Facebook whilst it was getting on with it. Next thing I know, the iTunes icon is merrily bopping away in my Dock and asking me if I would like to set my iPhone up as a whole new device or if it should just restore my backup.
Simply put, I restored my backup and it’s currently got all my settings (As far as I can tell) absolutely as I left them and is busy restoring all my media/contacts/email and so on. Apple wins for easy fixing of mildly broken phone, infinitely easier than fixing most other broken devices, even those with so-called ‘one-click recovery’. Even so, it worries me that people feel the need to put in a big “Fix It” button no matter how easy to use it is. Perhaps a more elegant solution would be an option tucked away in a menu, and a ‘cock-up counter’ which automatically asks you something like “Your device has failed to sync properly the past 10 times you have docked it – would you like to run an automated recovery and restoration of your backup?”
I’m Back!
Nov0
Following that brief and somewhat irritating spite of hackers, who got in through a hole in someone else’s unmaintained site (The offending user has been thoroughly rollocked), my blog is back with no loss of content despite their best efforts, all for a mere 3 minutes of my time. Ladies and gentlemen, this is why you take backups.
I also took the opportunity to upgrade my slightly old codebase to the newest WordPress version, so I’ve got some new buttons to click. Nothing to worry about though. Sit back, relax, enjoy life.