Macintosh

Valve Brings Steam Service to Mac

It’s officially official: Valve will bring its Steam online distribution service and titles from its massive library of hit games to the Mac this April, the company confirmed Monday.

The successful content-delivery service will bring Valve titles like Left 4 Dead and the upcoming Portal 2, as well as games from other publishers, to Apple computers for the first time.

The move was telegraphed last week in a series of teaser posters that mashed characters from Valve games into retro Apple ads. Dan Connors, CEO of Telltale Games, called Apple and Steam a natural fit.

“If there’s anything like iTunes on the PC right now for games, it’s Steam,” Connors said. “So you’ve got two great leaders in digital distribution coming together.”

More >

CamTwist – Version 2 is out

stickam

Camtwist Verion 2 has finally hit the streets – Higher resolutions suppotted and a host of new features – This is MAC Only and basically gives you multiple effects as a virtual Camera. Example include having your Video, A chat bx underneat and the current iTunes song playing.

iStopMotion2 – Boinx Software

monkey-shot-600Remember how you watched, fascinated, when King Kong climb the Empire State building? When Luke Skywalker rode the ice beasts? When Wallace and Gromit hunted down the Were-Rabbit? For centuries now, stop motion animation has made the fantasies of film makers come true.

It’s simple to use, it’s deceptively powerful, and it’s tremendous fun. It brings purpose to the digital lifestyle, making it more than a marketing phrase for Apple.

Kirk Hiner

More >

Mac inability to see Windows Shares.

ist2_3470051_file_sharing

I am running Mac OS X 10.5. 6 and through the long history of the updates from 10.5.0 till now there has been a problem with seeing Windows Shares on the Mac Finder. The way it should work is simple enough, you open a window showing your drives and listed right there would be all the shares it has found but the list remain empty meaning you have to do this the hard way.

More >

What were they thinking when they wrote this?

While I am a proud owner of a iMac 24″ with all the trimming – I have come across 3 ‘features’ that in my eyes are plain stupid on the OS X Platform. Remember that I have various machines running XP, Vista, Ubuntu – so I am not a die hard Apple fanatic that will defend it no matter what, its good but not perfect.

More >

iLife '09 – a quick review

iife09Apple brought out there updated iLife Suite – the last one came part of OS X (leopard) 10.5 Series and this comprises of:

  • iPhoto
  • iMovie
  • Garageband
  • iWeb
  • iDVD

More >

Apple ripoff pricing

Ilife 09 on the apple store USA comes in at $79 but if you now convert across to UK prices – that £69. I used XE to see how much it really is – it comes out as £56 and let us not forget that shipping is added anyhow on top of those prices. The only thing I can think of is Taxes – maybe it is more to sell to UK?

The problem of swapping the $ sign for the £ sign happens way too much though – making the price of the item double the price, they wonder why people torrent? well this is maybe one of the reasons.

More Effect for iChat & PhotoBooth (MAC)

The Mac comes with a program called Photobooth and this has the ability to add effects to shots taken from the webcam:

CatEye

CatEye

You can download these effects (Free) from:

http://mac.sofotex.com/download-135415.html

10.5.3 Is out for OS X

I have been testing 10.5.3 for some time now via the Developers Program and was keen that it fixed a lot of the problems I was having with the Stock 10.5.2. I need to add that so far 10.5.x was not looking good for me and had a lot of rough edges that needed sorting out.

I know from my daily usage that 10.5.3 has fixed a lot of the memory issues, the dock Issue and countless more, only now I consider that Leopard is on the right tracks to been a quality Apple Product as Tiger was. I have also downloaded the update for the hackintosh (my Dell GX620) and this went on fine after I followed the RTF document that came with it – it also came down pretty fast considering it was a torrent. I was half expecting it not to come back up but it did after a 2nd reboot. I had on hand the fixed Drivers for the Intel GMA950 and sure enough the Resolution was forced back to 1024×768 – soon fixed by injecting the Kext.

Still having Issues with OS X

When I first got the mac, I had loaded a lot of things on there and when it started to go wrong, I just assumed that I had some crap that was causing the problem, so I wiped the machine but choose to retain the user settings. Upon reboot I had everything more or less as I left it. After another month or so when the machine was getting real bad, i choose once again to wipe it but this time format the HD and start from scratch – this was we could not blame the programs or add-ins but we could point the finger at the OS.

One of the problems that was common was randomly on the Dock when you opened a folder which had Fan View it is supposted to spring open as so:

Now this could work for weeks on end but then one day it would go – the symptoms were the fan View would be corrupted and the Dock would be gone with just the Icons Floating on nothing.

I had spoken and posted about this to various mac users and they somehow never had this problem. As I suggested I did a complete wipe and only installed the programs I needed and made sure any hacks installed were limited to just what was required to make movies work etc. One thing I have always blamed – was iChat, how this could corrupt the Dock is anybody guess but it seemed to me that this always seemed to be the case. I am now running the latest 10.5.3 Beta to see if this fixes the problem – it is defiantly the OS that’s at fault no matter what the MacHeads say.