For those of you who never had to cope with a Windows machine,  let me briefly explain what Steam actually is. Steam is a digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer, communications platform and content delivery system. It is used to distribute a large number of games and related media entirely over the Internet, from small independent efforts to larger, more popular games. Steam is set apart from similar services primarily by its community features, completely automated game update process, and its use of in-game functionality. The platform allows users to purchase computer games entirely digitally. Instead of receiving a box, disc, or even CD key, purchased software is immediately and permanently attached to the user’s Steam account. Content can be downloaded from Steam servers an unlimited number of times to any number of Internet-connected computers that have the Steam client installed.
There is a drawback though: You can only have one active session per user per computer at the same time. This means that you won’t be able to share your account with someone else.

Steam on Mac

You start by downloading the Steam software here. The steam software is basically a glorified browser with game launching capabilities. So far so good, and a high quality game, Portal, is even free till May 24th. I eagerly hit the “install” button, which prompts Steam to add the game to my library and to download it.

Downloading

Here comes the first nasty surprise: download speeds of less that 100 kb/s. This could have been due to the launch on the Mac platform and the huge amount of data pumped through the lines, but Valve should have anticipated this and used a few extra servers. Two days later, the downloads are barely faster, but I found a workaround. Go to Steam > Preferences > Downloads and change your region. After a few tries, I found that the server called “Cambodia” is, ironically, the fastest, and I can now download using my line’s full speed.

The interface

If you’ve come this far into the settings, you must by now have cursed a few times at the extremely poor interface. Cosmetically, it’s OK. The large all caps fonts remind me of the Windows Phone 7 interface, and the green-grayish tone give it a sleek military look. But the shortcomings really reside in the usability of the software. The scrolling is choppier  than on a netbook with memory leaks, and the window management is just plain illogical. For instance, the main window remains active even if a subwindow (settings, for instance) is opened. Clicking “OK” in the preferences will just send the subwindow to the back, which means that you’ll have to navigate to the subwindow again to re-click “OK”. No idea why it’s only working the second time. Also, the minimize / maximize / close buttons on the top left are too far on the right, and they don’t respect the color scheme you’ve selected in the your OSX settings.

Finally, there’s the dock icon, which should win an award for the ugliest, worst designed, least thought-out dock icon ever. My guess? Someone at Valve downloaded a photoshop template for iPhone app icons, copy pasted the Steam logo in there and that’s it. The result? It looks oversized and out of place. But the good news is that you can create your own.

Gameplay

Even if Valve doesn’t produce the games but merely distributes them, it’s reasonable to assume that they at least supervised the production of the ports for Mac OSX. After all, success or failure of Steam depends on how well people will be able to play their games on Mac.
To test the game play, I decided to try two games: one that I had played before on a PC, and one that I had never touched before.

Portal was the first one installed, because it’s free. I had never played this one before and didn’t know what to expect. Turns out the installation and set up went smoothly, and once the game was launched, it was really really hard for me to come back to reality. The game is awesome, unlike anything I’ve tried before. It’s smart and will make you use your brain, which can’t be said of the majority of games out there. I won’t describe what the game is about, but I recommend you try it out. Performance-wise, I have nothing to complain about on my MacBook Pro 2.4 Core2Duo, 4GB Ram, Nvidia 8600M GT and 7200 rpm 500GB hard drive. I got a smooth 60 fps with the settings maxed out, with a few acceptable slow downs.

The second game, I know very well. It’s Sid Meyer’s Civilization IV, an award wining, turn-based strategy game that even got ported to the iPhone. I love this game and spent hours playing it on Windows. I really coulnd’t wait to try this out on my Mac, and I was pleasantly surprised. Performance is good, with a few minor render problems, which I found out were known for year. Way to prepare your software for a big release Valve!

The mess

I can live with a few bugs, and decided to install the various expansion-packs. This is where things started to go downhill. Not only couldn’t I start the expansion packs, but the base install of Civ broke too. Something went wrong during the installation, obviously. While investigating the issue, I discovered that Steam stores its files in user/documents/steam content. Now, if you’re using a Mac, you probably know that the documents folder is off limit and taboo for any application. Only user generated content belongs in this folder. This really needs to be fixed.
Anyway, it seems that an update killed my Civ installation, and from a look into Steam’s forums, every OSX Civ in the world is now unusable. It’s not like Civ is a hugely popular game and like Steam sold millions of copies of that game, right? And it’s not like Civ is one of the only interesting games available on Mac either. I opened a support ticket, and the only answer I got back were was a message with instructions about looking up a folder in C:/etc… I mean, do these people even read before answering?

Conclusion

Steam is a bitter sweet experience. Sweet because the idea is beautiful, and bitter, well, because apparently it’s too good to be true. The few hours I spent using Steam transported me into my dark Windows years. Strange errors, unexpected crashes, the incompetence of a large multinational… Deja-vu. Providing games on Mac is not just converting their code; it’s taking advantage of the unused superiority and potential of OSX. The good news is that most Mac games come with Steam Play, a feature allowing you to use your games on Windows as well. Oh irony, Mac software bad enough to make me use my bootcamp installation!

Maybe all hope isn’t lost. Let’s wait and see. Meanwhile, pirating is just easier.

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]]> http://techhaze.com/2010/05/steam/feed/ 6 http://techhaze.com/2010/04/mac-app-transmit-4/ http://techhaze.com/2010/04/mac-app-transmit-4/#comments Tue, 27 Apr 2010 11:47:13 +0000 Florian Wardell http://techhaze.com/?p=2904 Today, one of my favorite Mac apps graduated to version 4.0, and it’s absolutely awesome. Transmit 4.0 is the best FTP client I’ve seen on any platform, and the developer studio behind it, Panic, deservedly uses the motto “shockingly good Mac software” to promote it. Transmit is the Swiss army knife any web developer or power user should own: the best just got better.
Some of you might wonder what a FTP is and what Transmit has to do with it. Well, FTP is an acronym for File Transfer Protocol. As the name suggests, FTP is used to transfer files between computers on a network. You can use FTP to exchange files between computer accounts, transfer files between an account and a desktop computer, or access online software archives. More importantly, FTP is the primary way of uploading and modifying files on a server. For instance, once I finished creating TechHaze, I uploaded all its files onto a server (which you access trough your browser) with the help of an FTP client (Transmit 3, in this case). Interested? Here is our review:

The user interface

Whether you like it or not, the UI is the first thing you’ll notice in a new app. It’s a good thing that first impressions are important, because Transmit’s new interface is absolutely gorgeous. Panic is well know for their sleek UIs – some elements of Coda, one of their other apps, have been implemented in Snow Leopard by Apple, which says a lot – but this time they’ve really outdone themselves. Believe me, I spent a while trying to find something negative to say about the design, but I honestly can’t find anything. The buttons, the shadows, the gradients, the icons, every little detail is gorgeous, every pixel is where it should be. I’ve tried resizing the window, something that usually throws the design equilibrium of an app out of whack, but the user interface is just too good. Screen real estate is fully used, there’s information everywhere, but it’s still very readable and balanced. It’s not eye candy for the sake of beautiful pixels – well, a little – but for the sake of interactivity and usability: you’ll quickly notice that everything in this app has a function.

The workflow

The best user interface is useless if the workflow isn’t any good. The beauty of Transmit is that workflow and UI are so closely linked that the UI’s sleekness is reflected in the way you use the app.
For instance, favorites and bookmarks are nothing new in FTP clients, but there’s something about Transmit 4 that just makes you want to keep everything organized and tidy. It keeps iDisk locations, bonjour locations, automatically catalogs your history, and has folders for bookmarks. You can either rapidly add bookmarks right from the favorites screen, or add them as and when you’re connected to your servers. These favorites will even automatically sync over MobileMe, keeping Transmit on all your Macs updated with the same data.

Once you’re connected to your server, you can get to work, and nothing will distract you from your task. The right pane shows you local files, and the left pane shows your remote documents on the server. Tab bars on top of both panes indicate your current folder in each location. Click the little toggle switch and it immediately switches the view to a remote or local location in either pane, making the UI extremely versatile. You can even be browsing two different FTP locations and transfer files to and from them without having to bring them down to a local folder, thanks to Transmit’s user transparent temp folder. Beautiful. Transmit 4 allows you to connect to FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3, and WebDAV servers.

The new features

• Sync is a great addition to Transmit. You choose which direction of the synchronization flow and run through easy to understand settings like whether you want to delete orphaned destination files, how to determine if a file has changed, among others. At the bottom, Transmit will display a beautiful speech bubble, reading out in layman’s words what’s going to happen to your files once you do synchronize. If you want to be extra cautious, you can even simulate the sync.
• Disk mounting allows you to mount a server location on your computer’s desktop. This basically means that you can browse your server just as if it were a hard drive on your computer, even after quitting Transmit!
• Places are basically shortcuts to different folders within the same FTP location. This is really handy of you host more than one website on your server or use sandboxes. Add to this the ability to use both panes for the same FTP location, and it’s usability heaven.
• And much, much more: It’s been a long 5 years since Transmit 3 came out, and Panic has packed this release with new features. At its core, Transmit is now 64-bit. Panic also says that they’ve rewritten and fine tuned the FTP engine to make it scream, and trust me, it feels just crazy fast. Uploading, on my 2000 kb/s connection, is about 6x times faster than on Transmit 3 or any other FTP client. There’s also many more view options, including the famed Cover Flow and Quick Look support. And, if you choose to do so, you have have folders show up above files in a list. Last but not least, there’s a throttler, which was one of the big drawbacks of Transmit 3.

Verdict

This software is beautiful, polished, useful, oh, and did I mention beautiful? It’s also very stable. I haven’t had a single crash with the beta, and the 4.0 version is just as smooth-running. Transmit is the best FTP client in the world, all platforms included. I mean, what other FTP client do you know that gets people exited? I am quite sure some people will get themselves a website just to try that baby out. This kind of software is quite unique to the Mac platform: Transmit has a style that would just not be present if it had been created by a vast open source community or large developer studio belonging to Microsoft. No, there are only a handful of developers behind this app, and they have a recognizable feel for aesthetics and usability. Trust me, once you’ve used a Panic app, you’ll recognize a Panic app.
It’s also this kind of software that will ensure that I will never look back to Linux or Windows. Mac apps have something about them; I don’t know if it’s the way they are designed and polished till they shine, but even Transmit’s website is a little gem of webdesign.
Take Billings, Tweetie, AppZapper, Bodega, DaisyDisk… These apps are genuinely good, and they will stand the test of time. Transmit, after all, has been around since OS9, on which it ran under the name of “Transit”.
All right, enough about this app, let me find something to review that I can actually criticize!

Transmit costs $34 for a single user license, and it’s $19 for upgrades.

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Launch video

We could write a long boring list of new features, but Adobe’s launch video is an hour-long series of demos of all the new key functions. Enjoy!

Price, avaibility

There are five different editions of Creative Suite 5: Web Premium, Production Premium, Design Standard, Design Premium and the Master Collection.
CS5 is now fully 64 bit with Premiere and After Effects being 64 bit only, which should hugely improve performance. CS5 introduces over 250 new features over fourteen new versions of point products (all products except Acrobat Pro), and there’s a brand new product called Flash Catalyst, which is included in all of the editions except Design Standard. Flash Builder 4 (previously Flex Builder) is now also bundled with the Design Premium and Master Collection editions.
Adobe is also launching CS Live, a collection of online services designed to help you speed up your productivity and make it easy to collaborate with others on your projects that work in line with the CS5 applications. All these different bundles can be a little confusing, here is a recap to make things clearer (click to enlarge):

The list price for the software, which will be released within 30 days, will be US$2,599 for Master Collection CS5, $1,899 for CS5 Design Premium edition, $1,799 for CS5 Web Premium edition, $1,699 for CS5 Production Premium edition and $1,299 for CS5 Design standard edition.

Worth the upgrade?

It depends. If you’re a professional and if your income relies on such software, you’ll judge by yourself if you need the new tools, but chances are that you’ll want to simplify the workflow. The most incredible innovations this year seem to be bundled in Photoshop, which makes CS5 very attractive for photographers or graphic designers. If you’re using CS3, combining the advancements of CS4 and CS5 should definitely be worth the price though. Also, if you’re a student or if you’re upgrading from a previous version, don’t forget that you get a huge discount! I suggest you use the free, one month try period and see for yourself if the new tools are worth upgrading.

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