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Steam UI Update Beta Drops IE Rendering For WebKit
Citing massive growth in their user base ("25 million users, 1000+ games, 12 billion player minutes per month, and 75 billion Steam client minutes per month"), Valve unveiled a revamped UI for Steam on Tuesday, opening the beta test to anyone who wants to try it out. There are many changes, and an increased focus on social features: "Right from within your own game Library, you can now track which of your friends plays each game or invite them to play one with you. Before you've even bought a game, knowing whether your friends play it is one of the most useful pieces of information to have. So on the store homepage, there's a new listing of what your friends have bought or played lately." Tracking games and achievements have both gotten simpler, and Valve has dropped the Internet Explorer rendering engine in favor of WebKit. An enterprising user also found files that may indicate the existence of an OS X Steam client.
Exactly how many steam games have OSX versions? Does anyone actually game with Macs?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I'm not steam's biggest fan, but I liked how minimal it was. I do like the different game layout views; the icon enlargements are a nice touch. I'm not sure how useful this is to me as I have many non-steam games, so I edit windows 7's crippled game explorer instead of using the steam launcher, so I rarely see the steam interface. The store does seem much faster though.
Why everyone keeps saying that tracking every single move you make on your pc is such a great feature?
Leave me alone, mind your own business and stop collecting my own usage data for your strinky marketing purposes.
When I want to tell all the world that now I'm playing a game I will do it on my own, I don't need some steamy application to make it for me.
And yes, I want to subscribe to an asocial network. You subscribe and no one cares about you. Relax. Enjoy.
The new steam beta window is HUGE. A lot of people used the old compact mode (most of the time), so that steam was just a menu of games, not a "gaming portal" or whatever other buzzwords.
It's not just Battle.Net really, these are features that XBox Live has had for a while and that Microsoft has tried to bring to Windows with Games for Windows Live also, which now has it's own games store too.
I don't think this was so much about bringing new features for the benefit of users in general as much as it was about keeping up with the competition.
If Steam didn't introduce these features it would start to look very dated.
One thing I wish ALL these services would introduce is download scheduling though, over the last few years there's been a shift towards capped peak time downloads in the UK (and many other countries), and I can't afford to have multi-gigabyte game updates and downloads and so forth chewing into my bandwidth allowance. I don't have the option of just loading it up when the off-peak period starts and downloads aren't capped, and turning it off in the morning, because I go to bed a couple of hours before peak time starts, and get up and go to work a couple of hours before it ends.
It may sound trivial but for me, and I imagine others in my position it's actually a big deal- I don't buy games via Steam partly because it's annoying only being able to download said games on weekends when I am up at the right times to be able to get it going and stop it during the off-peak period. For me, it's actually more convenient to just buy games in shops, or order them online. Similarly I don't buy retail games on XBox Live or even bother trying multi-gb demos for this reason- I can't control when they will be downloaded.
Valve, Microsoft, Blizzard et al. seem oblivious to the fact that being too lazy to implement a download scheduler is costing them customers. Sure there are workarounds, and ways to implement these sorts of things themselves, but they're hacks that updates can break and there's nothing less amusing than coming home to find some update has fucked your scheduling hack and you've had 90% your monthly on-peak usage allowance chewed up right at the start of the month because of it.
Of course another option is to go to an ISP that oversells and doesn't have caps like this, but then that's equally useless because those ISPs are the same ones that are utterly hopeless for online gaming.
It's ironic that once again, it's a simple feature that's ignored, but that most popular BitTorrent, or USENET clients provide- yet again, it seems piracy offers the superior distribution mechanism.
Anyway, that's my rant for the day ;)
Finally you get to see how big the update is when one is released. And it only took almost 7 years to code it.
Unfortunatly, steam client is broken in Wine now http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=19444 , but it doesn't seem to be webkits fault!
Hopefully it might eventually wind up being working better than the old Steam client ever was now that the IE dependency is thrown out.
At this rate, WebKit could be the new IE6 - it could become so pervasive that people take it for granted, and develop web sites that only render correctly in WebKit. It's already in Safari, Chrome, Konqueror, iTunes, Steam, Midori, Maemo, Moblin, iPhone and WebOS, and will be coming to Blackberry soon. What does this mean for the interoperable web? (Yes, it's better than IE6 in that it's reasonably standards-compliant, cross-platform and licensed under LGPL2.)
With this beta release of Steam, they fix an interesting issue that cropped up with the release of Windows 7.
For users of that particular OS who have either removed Internet Explorer, or did not have it installed at all when the OS was installed (see: Europe, and the rest of the world that couldn't even stand the browser), Steam was half-broken. One could not see any screenshots for a game before purchasing. Anything that needed a popup window in Steam would NOT default to the main browser installed on the system.
People complained about this, asking Steam to start looking for the default browser on the system so they could at least go back to browsing for games and possibly buying them.
It's good to see them actually address that issue.
Maybe I'll buy Space Giraffe to celebrate.
One of these days, I am going to flip out. When I flip out, I'll be back in five minutes.
Ditto. It's frustrating, since wine is now a pretty solid platform for gaming.
I'd love to give Valve money, but I'm not paying a Microsoft Tax in order to do so. I guess we're far too small a market for them to care about though.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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I add steam as a scheduled task to start up in the off peak times. Before I go to bed, unpause the download, and close steam. Wait for the scheduled task to start it back up for me.
Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game
I just finished my taxes last week, and in one of the last steps after e-filing TurboTax offered to post a "I just finished my taxes with TurboTax and I'm getting a $XXX refund!" message to my Facebook profile.
Sorry, apparently they only changed Steam itself, as the interface used in the games to access a browser is built in with the engine, so it'd require an update and more testing for each game that still uses IE individually. However, apparently you can turn off HTML MOTDs. (Google it)