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“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. “The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. 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. Valve to Deliver Steam & Steam on the Mac Thanks to John Gruber of Daring Fireball for the link to the Wired story that includes a great quote from Dan Connors of Telltale Games: “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.” I imagine a lot of other game developers are going to be saying the same thing. Click for high-res photo
“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. “The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. 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.

Valve to Deliver Steam & Steam on the Mac

Thanks to John Gruber of Daring Fireball for the link to the Wired story that includes a great quote from Dan Connors of Telltale Games:

“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.”

I imagine a lot of other game developers are going to be saying the same thing.

Based on the teaser images, it seems likely that all of these titles will also make their way to the Mac. This leads us to believe that Valve has ported their Source game engine over to the Mac, which would allow any future games based on this engine to be easily launched for the Mac. Alternative [sic], Valve could be using Transgaming/Cider for the translation. The Significance of Steam and Valve’s Games for Mac - Mac Rumors This is a big deal for gaming on the Mac. If Valve has indeed ported or rewritten their Source game engine for the Mac, it’s an even bigger deal. Not only would Mac users have access to a great game distribution platform, but game developers would also have access to a game engine that could easily target Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and OS X. It would make the case for developing Source-based games for the Mac a no-duh proposition. Plus, I don’t see how Valve could justify this hype if all they’re doing is using Cider to act as a graphics translation layer. That’s nothing new, and anyway, who would want to base an entire business venture on another company’s inelegant graphics translation product? I hope Valve sees it the same way. Update 3/8/2010: They do. Click for high-res photo
Based on the teaser images, it seems likely that all of these titles will also make their way to the Mac. This leads us to believe that Valve has ported their Source game engine over to the Mac, which would allow any future games based on this engine to be easily launched for the Mac. Alternative [sic], Valve could be using Transgaming/Cider for the translation.

The Significance of Steam and Valve’s Games for Mac - Mac Rumors

This is a big deal for gaming on the Mac. If Valve has indeed ported or rewritten their Source game engine for the Mac, it’s an even bigger deal. Not only would Mac users have access to a great game distribution platform, but game developers would also have access to a game engine that could easily target Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and OS X. It would make the case for developing Source-based games for the Mac a no-duh proposition.

Plus, I don’t see how Valve could justify this hype if all they’re doing is using Cider to act as a graphics translation layer. That’s nothing new, and anyway, who would want to base an entire business venture on another company’s inelegant graphics translation product? I hope Valve sees it the same way.

Update 3/8/2010: They do.

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The newest version of Notational Velocity adds support for Simplenote, a web-based service and iPhone application from Cloud Factory.
Interesting facts about Simplenote support in Notational Velocity - scrodlog - Goodbye Evernote.
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1Password 3, our most significant upgrade ever, is finished and ready for the masses.
1Password 3 is here! - Switchers’ Blog : One of the few applications I consider essential for my Mac. If you’ve ever had trouble remembering your password, or gotten locked out of an account because you tried too many times, this is just the thing. Super handy.

Adobe Launches Flash Player 10.1 Prerelease Build - Mac Rumors

Notable for two reasons. First, H.264 hardware decoding will not be available on OS X. Disappointing, but Adobe claims it’s because Apple doesn’t provide the appropriate APIs. Second, and on a better note, while it doesn’t use hardware decoding, it yet provides significant performance improvements:

Going from roughly 450% down to 190% (or a bit over 10% of total CPU utilization across 16 threads) made full-screen Hulu playable on my machine. In the past I always had to run it in a smaller window, but thanks to Flash 10.1 I don’t have to any longer.

Flash Player 10.1 is scheduled for a release in the first half of next year. Bring it on.

1Password 3 Feature Spotlight: Software Licenses

One of my favorite pieces of software keeps getting more and more awesome.

For the Horde

Note: This post is for WarCraft III-loving, Intel Mac-using friends. The problems here described are specific to our crowd.

If you’re like me, you’ve tried installing your old copy of WarCraft III and/or The Frozen Throne from the CD a dozen times, and every time you attempt to patch it to the latest version, something fails or gets corrupted and it just won’t run. The patch will happily break your WarCraft III.app over and over until you realize the patch is actually completely broken.

If you’re like me, you also didn’t realize that the easiest way to solve this problem is visit Blizzard’s Battle.net site, set yourself up an account if you don’t already have one, and register your CD key with the site so you can download an updated, Intel-ready copy (1.21b) of the game to install. You can then upgrade to the latest patch version without issue. The latest patch notes claim to fix “an issue where some patches could not apply on Intel Macs,” but in my experience the issues persist.

Just for reference.