Steam is pretty cool by Thom McGrath
Steam is Valve's community and game distribution service. I was introduced to Steam some years ago when I started playing Half Life 2. The ability to download complete games was pretty neat, and I did that. The idea of having Steam running all the time bugged me however. I thought "why on Earth should I keep this running just for Half Life?"
Also, digital download services bother me, because I don't physically have a copy of the product. When I want to install a game, I really don't want to wait hours to download it.
I recently started playing Left 4 Dead 2, which requires Steam as well. This time around, however, my impression of it has completely changed. The reason behind the change is Left 4 Dead 2 makes excellent use of Steam and the community features. It is easily compared to Xbox Live, but less awful. Here's a few cool features:
- Steam will automatically download updates for Steam-powered games.
- Steam Cloud keeps my settings synced between computers.
- I can make physical backups of the games I download.
- Steam sells a lot more than just Valve games. In fact, most new games are available on Steam.
- Valve Anti-Cheat is better than PunkBuster.
- By pressing shift-tab, I can bring up an overlay which includes friend information, and even a web browser. I can do this in any game, even non-steam games. The ability to bring up a browser in-game is very handy, especially in games such as Borderlands.
I could keep going. Overall, I think Steam is pretty cool.
[ Permalink | Accepting Comments (2) | Accepting Pings (0) ]
Microsoft continues to threaten web development by Thom McGrath
I just read an article about Internet Explorer 9. Considering that Internet Explorer 7 and 8 have made significant strides towards standards-compliance, I was under the impression that IE9 might begin to support CSS3 and HTML5. Especially since Microsoft has taken an interest in working with the W3C, Apple, Mozilla, and Google on HTML5.
First the good news. IE9 brings significant improvements to JavaScript performance. This is fantastic since IE8 cannot keep up. I've actually disabled some features on the REAL web site when using Internet Explorer because it just is not fast enough.
The bad news is that Microsoft is continuing to threaten standards. Rather than supporting the proposed cross-platform WebGL, Microsoft intends to support their own Windows-only Direct2D. Once again, developers will need to choose which side they're on. It is nothing new either. In the IE6 days, developers needed to choose to do things right and support everything except IE6, or do them simple and wrong to support IE6. This will be even worse, because a developer looking to do 3D will have no choice than two write two sets of code, or choose to support only IE9 or standards browsers.
Does it surprise me? Yes and no. It surprises me because it seemed as if Microsoft was interested in making a good browser. It does not surprise me because Microsoft gets everything else wrong, so why would this have been different.
[ Permalink | Accepting Comments (1) | Accepting Pings (0) ]
