Valve’s announcement that their Steam service would soon be available to Mac users is huge news to the Mac gaming community. While the iPhone and iPod touch have taken off as gaming platform, the Mac has languished in a sort of gaming limbo. Sure we get games, but they’re usually a few months–or even years–behind the Windows version and some games are announced and never materialize. With today’s announcement, The Mac has taken another step to becoming a real gaming gaming platform. We had a chance to talk Steam’s Project Manager, John Cook about their move to the Mac platform, the future of Steam and Valve on the Mac, third-party developers and native- versus Cider-ported games on the Mac.    What convinced Valve to create a Mac version of Steam? John Cook: We recently announced Portal 2 in cooperation with the Steam community, and that’s an example of the transition we’re going through between entertainment as a product and entertainment as a service.  Another example of entertainment as service would be the 100+ updates to Team Fortress 2 that we’ve released since it launched in 2007.  As a result of that on-going service of Team Fortress 2, our highest sales for the product actually occurred 18 months after we launched.  In general, service businesses need to be as close to and as connected to their customers as possible. In order to support entertainment as a service, you need open, high performance Internet clients, and the Mac does a great job at that. What were some of the technological hurdles you encountered while porting Steam?

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iPhone applications and games range from mildly amusing the outright mandatory for anyone with an iPhone.  Here are mini reviews for a game that makes you manage a lawn, one that helps you give a stay of execution for a stick figure, and one that gives you a world of music at your fingertips. Sunday Lawn In gaming it seems that almost every concept has already been co-opted, which has sent developers reaching.   Over the last few years it has seemed that activities normally seen as chores have become the source of gaming premises.   Donut Games’ Sunday Lawn is a, ahem, lawn mowing game.   The basic framework is to mow a lawn in the most efficient way possible.   To do this you set the direction for where you little animated worker will go with his lawnmower, and to get the largest number of points you want to plan for the largest strips of mowing at a time.   This means that you want to get the biggest patches of sod covered in the fewest number of moves. This is a basic principle behind a number of classic puzzle games, which Sunday Lawn is with a more colorful palette.   There is a lot of depth in Sunday Lawn as the gameplay options are numerous.   Even amongst these different gameplay types you have a graduated level system that will actually keep you playing for quite a while.   You can complete the level adequately enough to progress on, and then you can also go back to try and complete it according to even more rigorous standards.   These all add to the overall package with Sunday Lawn, but if the basic premise does not work for you it will not matter much in the end.   The gameplay is fun, to a point, but there is not really enough here to legitimize enough gameplay time to get through all the features.

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By all estimates, today some music-hungry doofus is going to be the person to download the ten billionth song from iTunes .  That’s 50% more songs than there are people on Planet Earth.  Unless you’re Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, how do you wrap your head around a figure that big? Use the graphic above: that’s ten billion pennies (10,000,023,552 to be exact) on a football field in schoolbus-sized stacks (50 of ‘em).  205 feet long, 90 feet wide, 11 feet high, over 31,000 tons in weight.  Stack ‘em one on top of another, they’d go 9,800 miles up; spread out, we’re talking just under 900 acres of copper coinage. Any way you count it, that’s a &$%#load of pennies.  Or songs.  And if it seems sometimes that Uncle Steve acts like he’s the Emperor of the Known Universe, these numbers suggest that he just  might be… [Penny statistics courtesy The Megapenny Project ]  

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Filed under: Hardware , Humor , Multimedia , Apple , Macbook Pro One of the things I missed in the news last week due to being so busy at Macworld (along with most of the Olympics, though we did get to watch the opening ceremony at a post-show dinner) was the brand new Toy Story 3 trailer — Pixar’s latest movie has Buzz and Woody in a third adventure, and while I won’t spoil the details, it does appear that Apple plays a big part in the movie. Macenstein has a quick breakdown of all of the places that Macs appear in the new trailer, with cameos by both Safari and iTunes, and director Lee Unkrich actually tweeted a picture of his editing session for the movie on a MacBook Pro (in Avid Media Composer ) at 36,000 feet! Of course, Steve Jobs was the owner and CEO of Pixar for twenty years, and he now is the largest individual Disney shareholder with a seat on the company’s board of directors. Pixar always produces excellent films — Toy Story was the studio’s first big feature as a studio, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens with the franchise after moving on to more mature pictures like Finding Nemo and Up. As always, when the movie comes out on June 18th, we’ll have to keep an eye out for nods in Apple’s direction. Toy Story 3 and the Mac originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Toy Story 3 and the Mac originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

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The news was hot over at 9to5Mac.com as well as on their Twitter page where they reported prices for the standard unibody MacBook at Apple’s Education Store as low as $728 (with screenshots to prove it). This, to put it mildly, was pretty exciting news, only commenters were reporting the rather higher price of $899. A tour through various other Apple-product- related blogs reporting on cuts to the MacBook price only confirmed the higher end figure. So what gives? Having walked through the order process online ourselves, we too were met with the $170 greater price. Now, while $899 is fifty bucks more off the Education discount, and while it’s not at all a bad price for your basic MacBook with 2.26GHz duo processor, a 250GB hard drive and 2 gigs of RAM, it’s certainly not $728. Apple’s known for a little discount here and there, what was so off about this one? Well, it turns out all that was needed was a call on the phone. We rang up the Help Desk at 1-800-MY-APPLE and had a conversation with Chad to get the scoop. According to our source, the deal in question was being offered by the University of Maryland to its students. That killer $728 price tag is only for this specific university, the additional discounts below the regular $899 deal provided by the university itself. As it turned out, someone got hold of the store link, posted it online at dealnews.com , a discount clearing house of links, and the story spread from there. As of this writing, the "deal" on dealnews.com is listed as " expired ," though Chad was sure to inform us that both Apple and the University of Maryland were aware of the situation, that the college was "monitoring" it and that there would be repercussions

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Section: iPhone , iPhone Students at the University of Michigan Electrical and Computer Science division will be part of the very first live iPhone orchestra performance on December 9th, 2009. This concert will be both free and open to the public. Each of the students will be using one of Apple’s iPhones to create the music as part of a class at the college known as “Building a Mobile Phone Ensemble.” As part of this orchestra, students can create sounds using all sorts of different inputs on the device. For instance, blowing into the microphone, tapping the screen, or tilting the device can all create different noises to make up the overall experience. Being that the students in the class must know about both music and technology, this class certainly involves some pretty bright kids. However, I’m sure they’ve had plenty of practice before this live event. You can actually watch a video of what the performance is like, and join their Facebook page to find out more about what they’ve been doing. With this and applications such as the Ocarina now in the eye of the public for the iPhone, it really has been fascinating to watch what some people were able to do with Apple’s device. In the future, I’m sure we’ll only be seeing more and more of this sort of intriguing usage. Via [ 9to5Mac ] Full Story » | Written by Josh Holat for Appletell . | Comment on this Article »

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Proving that iPhone users haven’t run out of original things to do with their devices, a group of students at the University of Michigan will be performing live on December 9 with an orchestra made up entirely of iPhones. The experiment — billed as a “world’s first” by 9to5Mac — is part of a college course called “Building a Mobile Phone Ensemble,” taught by computer scientist and musician Georg Essl. The class merges engineering practices, mobile phone programming and sound synthesis with new music performance, composition and interactive media arts. Essl has a background in developing mobile phones and musical instruments, and a number of years ago he and his colleagues were the first to use microphones as a wind sensor — technology used today that made the popular iPhone app Ocarina possible, which turns the iPhone into an ancient type of flute. “The mobile phone is a very nice platform for exploring new forms of musical performance,” Essl explains. “We’re not tethered to the physics of traditional instruments. We can do interesting, weird, unusual things.” Indeed, the iPhone makes a perfect companion for such uses. With a touchscreen, microphone, GPS, compass, wireless sensors and accelerometers, the iPhone can be transformed in different ways based on how the performer uses it. Running your finger across the display, blowing air into the mic or even shaking the phone all can create unique sounds. “This kind of technology is in its infancy,” Essl concludes, “but it’s a hot and growing area to use iPhones for artistic expression.” If you’re not in Michigan for the December 9 performance, fear not — the ensemble has a Facebook page and you can even watch it on video.

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Proving that iPhone users haven’t run out of original things to do with their devices, a group of students at the University of Michigan will be performing live on December 9 with an orchestra made up entirely of iPhones. The experiment — billed as a “world’s first” by 9to5Mac — is part of a college course called “Building a Mobile Phone Ensemble,” taught by computer scientist and musician Georg Essl. The class merges engineering practices, mobile phone programming and sound synthesis with new music performance, composition and interactive media arts. Essl has a background in developing mobile phones and musical instruments, and a number of years ago he and his colleagues were the first to use microphones as a wind sensor — technology used today that made the popular iPhone app Ocarina possible, which turns the iPhone into an ancient type of flute. “The mobile phone is a very nice platform for exploring new forms of musical performance,” Essl explains. “We’re not tethered to the physics of traditional instruments. We can do interesting, weird, unusual things.” Indeed, the iPhone makes a perfect companion for such uses. With a touchscreen, microphone, GPS, compass, wireless sensors and accelerometers, the iPhone can be transformed in different ways based on how the performer uses it. Running your finger across the display, blowing air into the mic or even shaking the phone all can create unique sounds. “This kind of technology is in its infancy,” Essl concludes, “but it’s a hot and growing area to use iPhones for artistic expression.” If you’re not in Michigan for the December 9 performance, fear not — the ensemble has a Facebook page and you can even watch it on video

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Section: iPod + iTunes , iPod touch , iPhone , iPhone , iPhone SDK & Apps , Reviews Category: Social Media Developer: FourSquare Requirements: iPhone 3.0 software, locations only available in certain cities Compatibility: iPhone and iPod touch File Size: 0.4 MB Version Reviewed: 1.4.2 Price: Free “Social Media” software, strangely enough, is most often used to communicate and organize people who can’t meet face to face. I have people I knew in college, theater colleagues, and friends who live all over the world, and thanks to things like Facebook and Twitter, I’m able to keep up with their lives on a casual basis. It’s like an ongoing Christmas card newsletter, except that I actually look forward to reading it (and therefore nothing like a Christmas card newsletter). FourSquare, though, is something different; it’s a social media application designed to bring people together in the real world, using geolocation and other social media apps. After you register (for free), you can “sign in” to locations around town and it’ll notify your friends (and other FourSquare users) where you are. If you register your Twitter or Facebook account, you can broadcast your location using those as well (it will also scan your list of friends to find out if any of them are on FourSquare). One of the interesting social engineering aspects of FourSquare is the points system that’s built in. You get (completely meaningless) points for going to new locations, bringing your friends along with you, visiting multiple locations in one night, and visiting the same location multiple times. If you’re the most frequent visitor to a location, you become “The Mayor” of that site until someone else visits more than you, making like an electronic version of King Of The Hill. The points system favors a crowd that goes out at night rather than a work lunch: while you always get points for checking in at a new location, you only get the other points for check-ins after 4 pm on weekdays, and all day on weekends.

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  Gutiar Hero and Rockband revolutionized social gaming and cluttered college dorm rooms with plastic musical instruments for a damn good reason: both games are incredibly fun to play. Which is why I couldn't be more ecstatic for the upcoming Rock Band for the iPhone. The iPhone version translates the plastic guitar and drum set to the taps of your finger tips, leaving the game's dynamic of hitting notes as they zoom by unchanged. What is incredibly cool, however, is that you'll be able to play multi-player over Bluetooth and even invite friends over Facebook to join a jam session. I am curious to see how the difficulty level carries over to the iPhone, as playing Expert on Guitar Hero or Rockband can be taxing on the fingers as well as the sanity. Bring the hosue down with this new app when it's released in a few weeks. [ Mashable ]

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