Disappointing to hear that Steam Cloud data isn't currently (won't be?) portable across all supported platforms.
Doesn't currently affect me as I use Steam games via Wine or on Windows directly, but I'm rather excited about the possibility of a native Linux implementation so I'm watching the Steam for Mac news closely.
I've downloaded two demos so far, and for both of them, once they're downloaded it says 'not available for your platform at this time'. Pretty frustrating.
I went to the developers' pages and downloaded the demos instead. Not only were these downloads faster, but they actually work.
Does it just not work or does it detect that you have a case sensitive file system and not install? Most of Blizzards games work fine on a case-sensitive file system but the installers don't so you have to install on a different machine and then copy the files over. I guess they don't want to have more configurations to test, but it's annoying that they go out of their way to make it not work.
Installer doesn't work and it wants things in your /library directory to be case insensitive as well. This just seems like poor/lazy programming that isn't aware of how a Mac (can) work. Seems like a quick patch, but Blizzard didn't do it for WoW or SC2 beta and its been a known issue for some time.
I was able to make Steam work by putting it on a disk image with a case insensitive file system and symlinking all of the directories it wanted to directories on that image.
I didn't realise the link in the topic would cause a download (I opened it from my RSS reader and was surprised to see a blank tab!). Would you consider adding a [DMG] or similar to the title?
Everybody should go download Braid until they release some more games. It is one of the best games you will ever play! The music is amazing, the artwork is fantastic, and it will melt your mind trying to beat it.
I can't vote this up enough. If you want a game that makes you think, that has an interesting story (which also makes you think), and which then makes you think about both of those in the context of time not necessarily being a linear forward progression, get Braid.
Put another way, if you've ever wanted a platformer where you had to think 'Once I flip this switch, I have five seconds to have been over there', Braid is your game.
It's got a fake Mac interface (doesn't respect the Graphite appearance preference) and normal copy and paste (⌘C ⌘V) don't work in some/all of the text fields.
This isn't just a 'free product'; it's an interface to a service that they make considerable money through.
After years of being derided as a games-less platform, Valve finally brings Steam to the Mac – but does it pretty half-assedly. I know a half-dozen developers who could have done a better interface than this.
I don't mean to sound ungrateful, and it's better to have it than not, but with the effort I'm sure it took to port the whole thing over to the Mac, I'm surprised that the little things (like copy/paste) don't work.
It's great that they're treating the Mac like a respectable platform, but this is going to be a terrible introduction to any Mac users who've never used Steam. My first impression was 'It's slow, it doesn't work properly, it won't download Portal at all, and the demos it downloads don't work.' Not exactly high praise.
Scrolling on my Macbook trackpad is useless. I try to scroll as I would any other Mac app, and it shoots to the top/bottom of the window. WAY too sensitive.
Also, another oddity I've noticed - start dragging the window from the bottom of the title bar, and drag it up against the menu bar. The window stops moving, but the cursor keeps moving as usual. Once you hit the top of the screen, drag downwards again. The Steam window moves immediately, even though the cursor isn't even over the window.
I tried to set my profile picture via drag-and-drop, but it didn't work. Turns out I need to click the small sphere (actually a label-less button I think) to bring up a picker dialog. Once the image is chosen, nothing happens (no indication that you've selected an image) until you click 'upload'. Also, since images can only be 150kb, it would be nice if the app detected that. I know it's WebKit and all, but what's the point in having a native app if it's not going to take advantage of it?
It also causes my Macbook Pro to swap over to discrete graphics from the integrated chip, and sets itself to automatically launch on startup. Significantly reducing the battery life of new macs, by default.
Still, this is a first release, and the automatic graphics switching is still quite new. I trust that the UI / UX issues will be resolved in due course.
Edit: Upon rebooting my Mac, the Steam client did not trigger an integrated to discrete switch. However, according to gfxCardStatus, the "steam" process was keeping the discrete card engaged prior to the reboot.
I'm assuming the parent means that just running the steam client switches over to discrete graphics, which would severely impact battery life for no real performance gain.
Also, some games play fine on the integrated graphics, so switching over to discrete isn't necessarily something you always want.
I think they meant it's triggered by the presence of Steam itself, not a game you might launch from it. Steam takes the liberty of adding itself to your account's Login Items.
Though I'd guess the workings of this auto graphics switching mechanism are really Apple's responsibility.
One of the cool things Steam does is package old DOS games into an individual preconfigured DOSBox environment.
My dream has been for Steam to do the same thing for Win32 games and Wine. Install the game on Steam, click to launch it, and it runs in Wine with all the tweaks needed to run that specific game already done.
Unfortunately it doesn't support case-sensitive drives. I thought (for some stupid reason) since it's a *nix underpinning that it would be best to have case sensitivity last time I formatted.
It seems that someone didn't write their paths in a flexible way (windows-like) and you have to reinstall your entire machine to run this.
Steam isn't the only one effected however. The Starcraft 2 beta and World of Warcraft also don't support case sensitive volumes.
Due to this I'm taking most of my evening and using Carbon Copy Cloner to dupe the drive and restore it as a case insensitive drive. I wish someone could have just done a .to_lower function at the end of their path strings.
Unfortunately it doesn't say this anywhere so lots of UNIX/Linux converts don't know, but case-sensitive boot partitions are a terrible idea. As I'm sure you've found out, there are a great deal of large applications that don't support case-sensitivity (including, I think, Photoshop).
Let this be a warning to anyone who considers it in the future: don't. You can use case-sensitivity on non-boot volumes (e.g. external drives) if you're concerned about case issues (e.g. moving data from another case-sensitive file system).
Also, since the filesystem is case-insensitive (but case-preserving) anyway, you can add this to your ~/.inputrc to have readline completion (e.g. in Bash) ignore case:
Why is this done so well and respected in *nix land, but in Mac-world no programmer takes it into account? Seems to be a massive oversight and easily fixed by companies like Valve, Adobe and Blizzard. Less than 10 lines of code could fix this problem.
It takes more than a few lines of code to make sure everything works. You now have to test on both kinds of filesystems which doubles the amount of testing you have to do.
Tried the Steam client on my Mac, Steam.app itself is a bit buggy and quite a resource consuming. The UI feels sluggish even on my i7 iMac, too. For the game itself, Portal works nicely at native resolution at max settings with lower framerate than Windows equivalent on the same machine. I found it surprising that exposé, dashboard, etc. works even in-game.
While Magic Mouse works nicely with Portal, I'd rather not to try it on Team Fortress 2 when it's released as it cannot handle simultaneous left/right click.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 94.8 ms ] threadGood enough for me though. Installing Torchlight, but Steam Cloud didn't transfer my PC characters over.
Doesn't currently affect me as I use Steam games via Wine or on Windows directly, but I'm rather excited about the possibility of a native Linux implementation so I'm watching the Steam for Mac news closely.
It's coming to Mac, and I imagine that'll come to Linux in time too.
Aren't all these games available for mac?
Update: Nevermind. It's working now. :P
I went to the developers' pages and downloaded the demos instead. Not only were these downloads faster, but they actually work.
edit: No TF2 makes me cry.
Put another way, if you've ever wanted a platformer where you had to think 'Once I flip this switch, I have five seconds to have been over there', Braid is your game.
It's got a fake Mac interface (doesn't respect the Graphite appearance preference) and normal copy and paste (⌘C ⌘V) don't work in some/all of the text fields.
After years of being derided as a games-less platform, Valve finally brings Steam to the Mac – but does it pretty half-assedly. I know a half-dozen developers who could have done a better interface than this.
I don't mean to sound ungrateful, and it's better to have it than not, but with the effort I'm sure it took to port the whole thing over to the Mac, I'm surprised that the little things (like copy/paste) don't work.
It's great that they're treating the Mac like a respectable platform, but this is going to be a terrible introduction to any Mac users who've never used Steam. My first impression was 'It's slow, it doesn't work properly, it won't download Portal at all, and the demos it downloads don't work.' Not exactly high praise.
Also, another oddity I've noticed - start dragging the window from the bottom of the title bar, and drag it up against the menu bar. The window stops moving, but the cursor keeps moving as usual. Once you hit the top of the screen, drag downwards again. The Steam window moves immediately, even though the cursor isn't even over the window.
I tried to set my profile picture via drag-and-drop, but it didn't work. Turns out I need to click the small sphere (actually a label-less button I think) to bring up a picker dialog. Once the image is chosen, nothing happens (no indication that you've selected an image) until you click 'upload'. Also, since images can only be 150kb, it would be nice if the app detected that. I know it's WebKit and all, but what's the point in having a native app if it's not going to take advantage of it?
Still, this is a first release, and the automatic graphics switching is still quite new. I trust that the UI / UX issues will be resolved in due course.
Edit: Upon rebooting my Mac, the Steam client did not trigger an integrated to discrete switch. However, according to gfxCardStatus, the "steam" process was keeping the discrete card engaged prior to the reboot.
Also, some games play fine on the integrated graphics, so switching over to discrete isn't necessarily something you always want.
Though I'd guess the workings of this auto graphics switching mechanism are really Apple's responsibility.
One of the cool things Steam does is package old DOS games into an individual preconfigured DOSBox environment.
My dream has been for Steam to do the same thing for Win32 games and Wine. Install the game on Steam, click to launch it, and it runs in Wine with all the tweaks needed to run that specific game already done.
It seems that someone didn't write their paths in a flexible way (windows-like) and you have to reinstall your entire machine to run this.
Steam isn't the only one effected however. The Starcraft 2 beta and World of Warcraft also don't support case sensitive volumes.
Due to this I'm taking most of my evening and using Carbon Copy Cloner to dupe the drive and restore it as a case insensitive drive. I wish someone could have just done a .to_lower function at the end of their path strings.
Let this be a warning to anyone who considers it in the future: don't. You can use case-sensitivity on non-boot volumes (e.g. external drives) if you're concerned about case issues (e.g. moving data from another case-sensitive file system).
Also, since the filesystem is case-insensitive (but case-preserving) anyway, you can add this to your ~/.inputrc to have readline completion (e.g. in Bash) ignore case:
Makes life much easier.You can even just use a disk image http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200505051847146...
You also may need to symlink some directories.
While Magic Mouse works nicely with Portal, I'd rather not to try it on Team Fortress 2 when it's released as it cannot handle simultaneous left/right click.