Three and half years after Steam was released for Windows, it finally makes its way to a truly worth platform. Although details are still scarce, here is what we know so far.

• Steam’s current line-up of games will available for the Mac upon launch. This means games like Dragon Age: Origins, Battle Field : Bad Company 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Supreme Commander 2, and Star Trek Online.
• Portal 2’s upcoming launch will be the companies first simultaneous release for Mac and PC
• 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
• True cross-platform online play
• Release date – April
  

First up, Sony’s Playstation 3.

MediaLink. Your PlayStation 3 has been craving the media on your Mac. Finally, complete Macintosh and Playstation 3 integration is upon us. MediaLink can stream Music,Video, and Photos to your Mac. It does so by taking advantage of the UPnP technology of your router.

Enjoying your media through the PlayStation 3 has never been this easy, on any platform — and the Mac isn’t just any platform. Its our favorite platform, so we’ve taken great care to create a seamless solution. MediaLink can stream and copy the following formats to your PS3: MP3, AAC, WMA, WAV-MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4-H.264, DIVX, XVID-AVI, WMV, ASF-JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, BMP-RAW, PDF, PS, EPS, TGA.

Microsoft’s XBOX 360.

Connect360. Your Xbox 360 is capable of playing back your music and videos and viewing your digital photos. With Connect360, your Mac’s ready to share.

Connect360 automatically indexes your iTunes and iPhoto libraries and shares them to your Xbox 360. You can then use the Xbox 360 Dashboard to browse and play your media, organized in the exact same way that it is on your Mac. Connect360 can stream the following formats: AAC, Apple Lossless, WMA-MP3, WAV, AIFF-H.264, DIVX, XVID, MOV, AVI, WMV, ASF-JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, RAW

The Nintendo Wii.

Wii Transfer. Wii Transfer can share your movies, music, and pictures directly to your Nintendo Wii using the Internet Channel. Copy Miis from your Wii back to your Mac and save them as images. Browse iTunes playlists and iPhoto albums on your television. Convert your movies to formats the Wii understands, either streaming directly from your Mac or for playback in the Wii’s Photo Channel. Wii Transfer can even manage saved game backups copied to an SD card. Wii Transfer supports the following formats: MOV, AVI, MPEG4, H.264, DivX,-MP3, AAC. Plus a few other stragglers.

No matter which console you own, it’s going to set you back twenty big ones. But in my opinion, It’s more then worth it. Especially if your computer and console have already gone wireless.

Setting up your own personal web server is always more work and less fun then you think. Enter MAMP. MAMP stands for Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP. MAMP is a packaged bundle that automagically installs the aforementioned services on your Mac OS X computer, whether it be a Macbook or a MacPro.

“MAMP is installed in the typical Mac fashion: very easily. MAMP will not compromise any existing Apache installation already running with your OS X.

Furthermore, if MAMP is no longer needed, it is sufficient to delete the MAMP folder and everything returns to its original status (i.e. MAMP does not modify any of the “normal” OS X)” -MAMP.info

MAMP provides 22 programs and libraries available for your use, free of charge. You can grab the .dmg at MAMP’s SourceForge page and if you wanna learn more before you install follow this link to MAMP’s homepage.

As you may or may not know, Foursquare is a very popular iPhone app that gives you and your friends new ways of exploring your city. Earn points & unlock badges for discovering new things. ( Click here to learn more about Foursquare )

FoursquareX is an OS X version of the mobile foursquare app. Developed by Eric Butler and utilizing Snow Leopard’s Core Location service, FoursquareX is a perfect example of a great port. Slightly enhanced features and beautiful OS integration make using this app nothing less than fun and intuitive.

It’s functional and free so why not give it a try today! -

FoursquareX ( Requires OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard )

Adobe’s new iPhone/iPod Touch app allows you to edit and share your photos on the go. A free photoshop.com account is required. However, signing up allows you to store 2GBs of images online to be edited and/or shared.

Editing Features Include:

• Basic: Crop, Rotate, and Flip
• Color: Exposure, Saturation, Tint, Black and White
• Filters: Sketch and Soft Focus
• Effects: Vibrant, Pop, Border, Vignette Blur, Warm Vintage, Rainbow, White Glow, Soft Black and White

Find out more by going to mobile.photoshop.com/iphone/

Via Smoking Apples Blog.

“For night owls like myself, having a super bright display is one curse. We can never use a bright white wallpaper, and turning down the brightness only helps so much. Opening up a web page usually involves some amount of eye tear. Okay maybe I’m exaggerating, but this is a common experience, especially with the larger displays of the iMacs or perhaps even a dual 30” monitor setup.

So far the only app I’ve known to reduce brightness below the point allowed by system hardware, is ScreenShade. But the problem—which wasn’t evident at the time—was that it dims the entire screen, which isn’t the ideal way to go about things. I’ve just stumbled upon this brilliant app Blackout from BravoBug Software, and it brings a unique twist to the tale of night lighting.”

Arranging your apps shouldn’t take all day, at least not if Jeff Stieler has anything to say about it.

Jeff recently released a great new app called Movement.

It’s primary function is to greatly simplify the process of organizing and rearranging your mobile applications. It does this by using a unique OS X app that simulates your iPhone/iPod Touch layout. Once your iPhone/iPod Touch is synced with your Mac the application takes in all the apps you have and allows you to rearrange the simply by dragging and dropping.

You can download the app here. movementapp.com
Requires OS X 10.5 and a Jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch.

For guitar players, live performers, and all musicians who record, edit, and mix their own music, the new Logic Studio is a huge leap forward. Advanced production tools take the work out of editing timing and tempo. An expansive collection of vintage and modern amps, cabinets, and stompboxes make you sound like you’re playing through legendary gear. And new live performance plug-ins let you record loops and trigger backing tracks when you’re on stage.

New features:

• Amp Designer – Build your dream rig by mixing and matching 25 amps, 25 speaker cabinets, and 3 mics
• Flex Tool - Push audio around with your mouse by clicking and dragging anywhere on the waveform — forget all that tedious splicing and editing
• Move your music – Logic Studio can import your GarageBand files so you can pick up where you left off, this time with more power and freedom.
• Pedal Board – Fire up 30 stompboxes that deliver lush effects like Overdrive, Distortion, Fuzz, Delay, Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Tremolo, Treble Boost, and Wah.

System Requirements:

• Mac computer with an Intel processor
• 1GB of RAM (2GB or more highly recommended)
• Mac OS X v10.5.7 or later
• 9GBs of free disc space / 38GBs free disc space for all loops, samples, etc.

Not to long ago I was in search of a system monitor that was able to monitor the temperature of my graphics card. I would have settled for an app that did only that but I was fortunate enough to stumble upon atMonitor. atMonitor, Developed by atPurpose, is a full featured system monitor.

atMonitor has the following features:

• CPU Monitoring [Load and Temp]
• GPU Monitoring [Load and Temp]
• VRAM and FPS Monitoring
  
• Hard Drive I/O
  
• Network I/O
  
• Monitoring of the top 3 resource  hungry apps.
• Logging and saving of all data to XML files.

One of the key features of atMonitor is high level of customization allowed. Layout options include horizontal and vertical layouts, different font sizes, transparency and more. In addition, you can choose to utilize atMonitor’s Dock icon to display one resource of your choice. If you prefer, you can choose to have atMonitor display its “activity viewer” in the menu bar to save screen real estate.

Some features require a newer graphics card and atMonitor currently requires OS X 10.5

You download and learn more about atMonitor here.

Camino, Defined as Mozilla Power, Mac Style. It brings together the best of both worlds. This recent release brings a few new and exciting features to the table.

• Toolbar Search – Sites with OpenSearch plug-ins are discovered automatically and are easy to add to the toolbar search box
• Find Bar – The new Find Bar allows for incremental find and puts previous and next buttons right at your finger tips
• Improved Tabs – The new scrolling tab bars provides easy access to your tabs
• Auto-Update – When a new release is available, Camino will offer you the option of automatically downloading and installing it

Other new features include enhanced AppleScript support, automatic feed detection, and session saving.

To check out all of the new features that Camino has to offer by going to caminobrowser.org/features

You can download version 1.6.8 of Camino Here.