Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

Team,

I have some very sad news to share with all of you. Steve passed away earlier today.

Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.

We are planning a celebration of Steve’s extraordinary life for Apple employees that will take place soon. If you would like to share your thoughts, memories and condolences in the interim, you can simply email rememberingsteve@apple.com.

No words can adequately express our sadness at Steve’s death or our gratitude for the opportunity to work with him. We will honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to continuing the work he loved so much.

Tim

I back up my Mac daily using Time Machine and try to keep it in good working order. That being said things begin to slow down after a while and I don’t have the time right now to do a full re-install.

With Lion just around the corner I was looking for a solution to help me get on top of maintenance tasks with my poor 2 1/2 year old Macbook.

I tried a few demo’s of different programs that each did a few things well, but didn’t have everything I wanted. I don’t mind paying for good software and I think I finally found what I was after.

Enter MacKeeper, I first found it when looking for a solution to help with deleting programs while also deleting all the sundry files that programs create as they do their thing.

Then I found out it does a lot of what I had other apps to do. It’ll find duplicate files, of which I found out I had thousands, taking up a bunch of space. It will also reclaim space used by languages you have no interest in and if you are real keen on finding new space it will also strip out the PPC bits of applications (or I386 if you have an older machine) leaving just what’s needed to run on your hardware.

I’ve been very pleased with it so far and have still to dive right into it to see what else it can do. I can see it has anti-virus and anti-theft which will even take a photo of the scum bag who stole your laptop which is pretty cool.

One pleasant thing I found out after buying it is that you’re license is also good for PCKeeper so you can run the PC equivalent up on your Windows machine and fine tune that mess.

There’s a 15 day trial available and this software goes on my recommend list. You can get it HERE
Cheers,
Shane

Most of you know by now that I’m a big fan of Apple products. I’m also a cross platform developer, mostly using REALStudio. It’s been on my todo list for a while now to pick up iPhone/ iPad development.

When I started out learning to program, I found I learned things better when I was putting the knowledge to work. I spent a lot of time working through game books, putting together small games and seeing how the code fit together.

While I was researching iPhone development, I came across this site. iPhone Game Development

When I get a break in my currently long TODO list I think I’ll pick it up and give it a shot. It’s a pretty cheap course and looks like a lot of fun, small things to get you up to speed on creating iPhone and iPad apps.

If anyone has already bought this, feel free to let me know what you think of it.

Cheers,

Shane

This was a quite irksome when Steam was released for mac and it wouldn’t work on my Macbook, due to running a case sensitive drive. It was quite odd, but I guess the default these days is to let programs do what they will.

I found an excellent walk through below on how to get things up and running. It’s a workaround and has some issues if you are a sysadmin type. I did it, it works and I’m up and running with Steam even if it’s running in it’s own disk image.

Remember to move the Steam.app to the disk image prior to creating the alias and enjoy.

You can see the walkthrough here

It looks like the rumors are true. Valve is bringing Steam to Mac OSX and soon.

How soon? How does next month, April 2010 sound?

Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve’s gaming service, and Source, Valve’s gaming engine, to the Mac.

Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.

“As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. “The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services.”

“Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac,” said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. “Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

*** Update The Beta is coming to a close and Steam for Mac should be available in two days on May 12th 2010. ***

With Mac growing in market share to well over 10% it is becoming a much more viable target for software and entertainment.

I’m sure there are some companies that currently specialize in Mac Ports that won’t be as happy that this is happening.

For the rest of us who have been struggling with Wine, Cross Over and other ways of getting Steam working on our Macs, it is excellent news.

Sounds like the additions to the Source Engine will make Mac development integrated with the PC development.

Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. “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, Portal 2 Project Lead. “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.”

Bring it on!

Ciao,

Shane