Video games rock, but some of us don’t have time to commit hours of our life to playing them thoroughly enough to learn all of the ins and outs, especially with so many to choose from. That’s where the new GamesRadar app comes in, providing you wit…
A Modern Makeover for Today s Would-Be Billionaires! Play America s favorite game as if it were invented TODAY!Move with cool tokens that are iconic to life here & now.Own popular destinations from across the United StatesBuy and sell at values reflecting current market prices.OWN IT ALL TO WIN!2 to 6 playersFormat: MAC 10.3.8 OR [...]
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We were so busy begging for copy and paste, that we forgot all those other features we’d love on our iPhones. Fortunately, the last few days with the iPad and OS 3.2 has given us a bit of inspiration about what we’d like to see when OS 4.0 begins infiltrating our precious iPhones. Read on for our wishlist of what we hope Apple will announce on Thursday at the iPhone OS 4.0 townhall gathering in Cupertino. And make sure to stay tuned, as we’ll be live blogging the event.
Custom iPhone Backgrounds
What is it about the iPad that gives it that glossy, graphically superior look that it has dominating over all other tablet devices? Is it the oleophobic-coated glass and high resolution display? Or is it because its a ease of use? Whatever the reason, we’re definitely impressed with the simple little fact that we can add in our own wallpaper from the Photos app. It seems just a tad ridiculous that we have to jailbreak our iPhones for such a simple function.
Multitasking
We were wondering how the heck we’d get any work done on our iPads if the iPhone isn’t even ready to offer multitasking. Since this is an operating system tweak, we would appreciate Apple utilizing the iPhone’s powerful processor to allow us to run a multitude of applications at the same time. For example, keeping an eye on our Twitter feed while playing our favorite game.
A new user interface
Source Milkham’s weblog
iPhone faithful everywhere are used to the tap and slide interface that the mobile device has had for years now. However, it’s about time that the iPhone OS had a bit of a facelift. For example, we’d love if it Apple could squeeze in a bit of extra room for another app icon in the dock at the bottom of the home screen. It’s incredibly tough to pick and choose just four apps that are of the most use to us. Enabling users to bookmark a fifth app would at least let us dock the Weather Channel app.
Additionally, we’d also love to see some more aesthetically pleasing elements added to our iPhones, like a cover flow flip-through implemented in our Contacts, so we could recognize our buddies and associates with photos.
The ability to remove certain first party apps from the home screen
Honestly, none of us here at Mac|Life headquarters are really into the whole idea of investing your money and losing it dramatically. I mean, if we were really in the mood for that kind of scene, we’d just head over to Netflix and queue up Wall Street. For that reason, we’d really wish that Apple would reconsider locking in Stocks on our iPhone home page–some of us can’t even recall ever firing up that app for sheer curiosity. We feel we would fare so much better in the obsessive relationship we have with our mobile devices if we could just remove unwanted apps from the home screen. And it would add accessibility to third-party apps we truly favor–did we mention the Weather Channel app?
Customize Icons
Via Quality Icons
Our jail-breaking brethren have the ability to do all sorts of customizable stuff with their phones and devices. It might not seem like a really big deal to some, but think about how much more personal our devices could be. For example, we’d love if the iPhone OS had the same drag-and-drop icon changing capabilities as our Macs. That way, we could download icon packs from the internet and install a matching icon theme set for all of our most utilized applications.
Safari update
Our biggest beef with our Safari mobile app is that it is limited in editing features. For starters, iPhone OS 4 should at least include the ability to upload photos into a form of some sort–like a blog post or a comment box on a website. This would help our productivity on-the-go ratio increase exponentially.
Download MP3s and add them into iTunes
We love our Dropbox and Mobile Me apps, but when our friends share music with us we’re unable to save the files onto our iPhones and iPod touches, which means we have to wait until we get home to physically download them from the respective servers and then sync them to the device. This is one too many steps that could be avoided if we could just download MP3 files straight onto our devices from any website. Heck, we aren’t even asking to use 3G! Wi-Fi only capabilities for this function would be just fine with us, as long as this were possible.
A home screen in landscape mode
Summer is fast approaching and you know what that means: ice cream. Well, how are we supposed to eat a Drumstick and control our iPhones if we’re constantly having to flip back and forth from portrait to landscape modewhile switching from app to app? Having a home screen that flips over would help ease the wrist-aches and make more sense in terms of accessibility. After all, what’s the point of having a portrait home screen if most of your apps are landscape now?
Widget home page
This is something we really envy on the Android platform–we love seeing the weather for the day, a picking of our favorite apps, and a nice huge time-teller letting us know that the next day is fast approaching. Our iPhone home screen should also have previews for our Mail app, and the font and icon size could be smaller if it meant we could absorb all of that information in one fell swoop.
Text Message Alerts
We’re going to keep this one short because we know you’ve been waiting for it, too: customizable alert sounds for text messages.
Got a feature you want in iPhone OS 4.0? Drop it in the comments.
First there were the bits of OS X information found in the latest Steam UI beta. Then Valve began sending mysterious images of their game properties to various blogs pointing to their games being available on the Mac. Finally, after teasing the Mac gaming community for weeks, Valve has announced that their social gaming service, Steam is in fact coming to the Mac.
Steam for Mac will be available as a public beta beginning sometime in April. The announcement comes with word that all of Valve’s current lineup will be available on the Mac on day one, including the newly announced Portal 2.
If you’re a Mac user who just happens to have a Windows machine with Steam already installed, no worries. You can use the same license for all of your Valve games on your Mac. Just sign in with your account and download your Valve games. Valve is offering this ability to third-party game developers. So keep a look out to see if your favorite game’s developer begins offering the service.
For Mac users unaware of the awesomeness of Steam, we have a quick beginner’ guide to all the features Steam brings to gaming. We also had a chance to ask Steam’s Project Manager, John Cook about porting the service to the Mac.
Here’s all the important info from the Steam team:
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."
"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. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows."
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."
Support for the Mac in Source and Steamworks is available to third parties immediately.
Expect to see a Mac|Life team on Steam as soon as the beta goes live.
