Hell freezes over: Valve announced that they’re finished porting their Steam and Source technologies to the Mac and are going to release it next month.
I still vividly remember me spending my nights playing the first part of the Half-Life series about 12 years ago, but haven’t touched the series since after switching to a Mac.
It’s not that the initial release of Steam wasn’t accompanied by several complaints, especially by preventing any reselling of purchased titles as they are tied to a certain account. But the idea of having a single storefront and checkout system for purchasing various titles from one place that don’t need me to handle physical media always sounded very appealing to me. I’m really looking forward to it.
“Well, looks like I was right, again. The netbook forums are now blowing up with problems of 10.6.2 instant rebooting their Atom based netbooks. My sources tell me that everytime a netbook user installs 10.6.2 an Apple employee gets their wings.
Just an FYI, this is OSx86 after all and none of the scenes hackers really let down on support. The latest kernel may not be “officially” supported but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a modded kernel around the corner.”
“In the user’s terms, it used to be that the window was the document. The two were equivalent. Now, in a trend that started with the World Wide Web and has now moved into the rest of the operating system, a window is merely a container for one or more documents. That’s a fundamental change in the user’s concept of what a window is.”
I must have been asleep in the last few years: the Dictionary.app in OSX is able to search Wikipedia entries directly. At first I thought it was a Snow Leopard feature but is has been there since 10.5. In 10.6 it gained the ability to open links in articles in Dictionary, too instead of opening them in the browser.
As looking up Wikipedia articles is a pretty common task for me, I sometimes spend hours browsing referencing articles, this is a nice shortcut.
Shame om me for not realizing this for earlier.
One bug that annoys me since I upgraded to Snow Leopard: After waking my computer from sleep the screensaver login dialog doesn’t accept my password. At the beginning it happened just occasional but today it won’t get accepted at all. I have to use the credentials of my second admin account to log back in (which feels a little weird …).
I’m going to do a little debugging. I hope I’m getting around a clean reinstallation.
Update: It seems that the uninstallation of Crashplan (which I never used and was still installed after the upgrade to 10.6) fixed my problem. I still get the kerberos-error in my logs sometimes, but I was always able to log back in.
One nice little utility that I used to use but left it, as i thought it was abandoned is back: Notational Velocity. Its a very small an unobtrusive note-taking application that, because of its cool interface design doesn’t need features like tags, folders or categories, which is pretty remarkable.
The current version was brought up to date to support Snow-Leopard and has become open source.
Just one feature would be nice: the option to put it in the Menubar instead of the Dock as it feels more natural for an Application that is almost always running in the background (like ShoveBox does). But that doesn’t stop me from using it for now. Nice.
