Today I went to Meadow Hall Centre which is shopping centre based in Sheffield and I spotted they had one of these so called “Apple Stores” – so I ventured in. The Store reminded me of a mobile phone store with products laid out on tables, chained to the desk and people playing with them with the odd person walking around asking if you wanted any help. This would be a good time for me to have a play with all the apple products and see them in the flesh. Would I pull my wallet out and by something or would I walk away laughing to myself that people pay so much for these things?

The iPad

First on my list (and closest to the door – so they know what sells) was the iPad. It was a lot smaller than I expected and of course as a lot of poeple have rubbed there hands across these things, they were very dirty indeed. They had various demo apps installed to let you see what it could do and I shall be honest here, had I thought “I could use this” I may have bought one at some stage but no people, it was nothing more than a gimmick to me – a rather large iPod if you like. Had it been say £300 – I may have been tempted but starting at £429 is not my idea of a impulse buy item.

iMac 27″

I had someone expected the screen to look bigger than it was, after all it was 27″ right? Maybe as the OS has large icons and lack of items on the desktop (bar the dock) – I never got the sense of “wow – this is big”. If I remember rightly – the Core i7 model was a staggering £1794 and once again, it was not something I pressed and messed about with and said “WoW – this is quick”. I agree though that the short time spent shopping was not a length of time to test and assess the speed of the said apple but whatever – the price people is just too much for what you get – seriously.

Various Apple goods

The router, the mouse, the keyboard, the cases and other things – one point here, they cost money, a lot more than the same products from other people. There was fair few people in the store but not a single person at the till buying anything that I could see. My Guess is people seen the flashy store and wanted to play with the iPad, I even seen various Mac computers with nobody on them. I left and headed off to look for some proper hardware at normal prices and sensible priced software

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.”

Steam is the pre-eminent digital distribution platform for PCs. With more than 1,000 games and 25 million user accounts, Steam is by one estimate responsible for more than 70 percent of digital game purchases. Bringing the service to Macs means wider selection, quicker updates and more episodic content for Apple’s traditionally game-deprived computers.

Valve wants to position its games not as static products but as part of an ongoing, constantly updated, ubiquitous service, company co-founder Gabe Newell told Wired.com in advance of Monday’s announcement.

“The traditional model has always been that you have these really extended development times … where you do nothing for customers for several years and then you try to drive everybody into the theaters or into the stores on a given date,” Newell said. “It makes it hard to steer your decisions based on customer feedback, and customers don’t particularly like that. They would like to have the experience of being part of an entertainment community where they’re getting something on a daily or more frequent basis.

“The Mac represents a great opportunity to deliver these things.”

Bringing Steam to Mac will give gamers several cross-platform benefits, Newell said.

• If players already own the PC versions of Valve games, they’ll get Mac versions at no extra charge through a feature called Steam Play.
• By using the Steam Cloud feature that the company introduced in 2008, players can save in-progress games online, then call up those saved games no matter which version they’re playing. If you’re playing Half-Life 2 on your home PC but then head out on the road with your MacBook, you can continue your game-in-progress.

“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” said John Cook, director of Steam development, in Monday’s press release.

“We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac and the Xbox 360,” Cook said. “Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.”

Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows, the company said.

“Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step,” said Josh Weier, said Portal 2 project lead in the press release. “We’re always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.”

Bringing Valve’s gaming engine Source, and the company’s Steamworks development and publishing suite, to the Mac will make it easier for developers to bring games to OS X.

“Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs,” said Jason Holtman, Valve’s director of business development, in the press release. “We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

Easy updates

Steam lets the company take full advantage of the freedom that the PC and Mac platforms give it to constantly update and tweak its games. For instance, the developer has updated its 2007 game Team Fortress 2 more than 100 times, Newell said.

This wouldn’t be possible on a closed system like Microsoft’s Xbox Live, he said: “Microsoft’s QA fees … would be several hundred thousand dollars to do the updates that we did to Team Fortress 2. And that ignores the fact that the cycle on these closed platforms would have taken years to get all these updates through.”

Most recently, Valve leveraged its ability to push updates through Steam and engage its fan base by dropping hints into its 2007 cult hit Portal about the game’s upcoming sequel, letting the fans be an active part of the game’s announcement.

“We want to bring content creators and consumers closer together to minimize the latency between what somebody on the team does versus a fan’s ability to participate in that experience, not put more barriers between them,” Newell said.

Valve isn’t the only PC developer with a strong, engaged fan base looking to Mac. Telltale Games, creator of the episodic Sam and Max games, announced last month that it would be moving to Mac, even inviting fans to vote on which of its games should be ported over first.

While Telltale has not confirmed any of its games will be on the Mac version of Steam, Connors called getting his companies titles on Valve’s digital-distribution platform “a no-brainer.”

“We have games that run on the Mac and we have games that run on Steam, so our goal is to be there,” Connors said. “We think they’re going to do a great job with getting the Steam client over there and we want to continue to be a part of it.”

Asked to name other developers that we’d see on Steam, Valve’s Newell demurred. But Steam’s popularity means that as Valve goes, so go other gamemakers. Steam on Mac means many more games on Mac.

“(Mac) has all of the right pieces, and we know other developers see that as well,” Newell said.

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.

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

This application is for Mac OSX and allows you to record one frame at a time (12 frames = 1 Second of Animation) to make a movie such as Wallace and Gromit type – but remember that it will be very time consuming process to make a movie of any length.

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.

If you use “connect to server” and put in there smb://<name of machine> then indeed it brings up that machine, the icon that comes up for the computer though is the lighter of the two – not the dark blue – a picture will explain better:

I noticed for example that Windows XP machines came up no problem most of the time, if I changed the Workgroup or computer name, the machine came up but after a few reboots – once again it was lost and had to be connected by hand. I tested across Windows and it could see all machines including the Linux Box and even the mac, the same can be said of Linux, it had no trouble. After talking to people and looking around, it was one of those classic mac issues were som said “never had that problem on mine ever” to others saying the same as me or results in-between.

I am sure 100% it is the SMB inside the OS X that is at fault – how can an update make it work 100% of the time and the next update comes along and it is broken again? I had many SMB type problems such as me fixing the IP on all the computers and the copy speed going down to the lowest number ever, resorting back to DHCP and the problem went away but been a Mac, you cannot delve deep into the inner workings.

If anybody has any views on this – feel free to comment – I am the only one with this issue?

REPLACE FILES

Let us imagine that I am moving some files around from drive to drive and a make a directory called Home_Movies. I start by moving some files but later choose the much quicker method of dragging the original “Home_Movies” onto the new drive. OS X at this point explains that there is already files in there as follows:

If you click STOP – nothing happens but if you click Replace – that is 100% what it does – it replaces whatever whatever was in there with the folder you are moving and the stuff that was already in there? Well that is gone for good, it is not in the recycle bin. Windows / Linux by default MERGES the files which makes more sense to me. B very careful of this feature otherwise you will loose a lot of files in the process.

IMPORT = REPLACE?

One of the programs I use is Wallet – it stores all your Serial numbers, login details and basically allows you to manage all your stuff in one place. I had another Wallet database file and silly me IMPORTED this into mine which resulted in mine been 100% replaced. Did the programmers not see fit to merge more than one database together? I can tell you now the windows version does import and merges the two – is this a new feature of the Mac?

iWeb – No Save, open or anything

iWeb is easy for the beginner to design web sites but did they not feel to Import, Open or whatever existing sites? What happens if you loose the file – if it goes from the side bar – that is your web site gone for good. Even Frontpage has all of these features and I see that as a very low level beginners program. This is a case of “My way or bust” attitude from the Mac programmers – very sloppy and very bad.

• iPhoto
• iMovie
• Garageband
• iWeb
• iDVD

iPhoto

They have introduced “faces” and “Places” – they already had events which ’08 brought in, allowing you to group photographs by event such as Birthday party, holiday and so forth. Faces recognises (or attempts to) peoplw in the photograph and once competed, this allows you to go through an entire selection of a person. Places are much the same and is handy if you take photographcs from various locations. A lot of new Camera’s have Geo Tagging and if it does – this process is automatic but if not – you can manually tell it were the photo was taken.

I spent ages going through and it got a hell of a lot wrong – mostly people from the same family all been seen as one person which makes some sense and I had no way of knowing what had been done for example. I guess doing one Event at a time might be the best idea and also to make sure you do each one as imported.

iWeb

I have never been a fan of iWeb, no import, no saving of files in a normal html format and so forth. The yhave added more widgets on the right hand side I see now and this may be great for people who have no idea about web sites but for anyone else – there is better stuff out there.

Garageband

I have always loved this program and it has just got better – now it can teach you how to play piano or guitar. You have to download the rest of the tutorials should you need them and this is a good idea as it saves on initial size of the application and only those who need it can get it. Not really had a good chance to go through this properly but once I do – I will write a proper review.

iMovie

They have started to add more professional type stuf into this product now and slowly moving back towards iMovie 06 HD which was better then all of the programs so far. If you are buying iLife purely for iMovie – maybe think about buying better programs made by apple.

Conclusion

While all the programs are great, unless there is a feature you must have – you can get along well enough with iLife 08 to be honest. It probably won’t take that long for the features to trickle into the other free PC Programs and it will be considered normal.

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.

CatEye

You can download these effects (Free) from:

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

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.