Category: News

If you’re into PC gaming, Valve Software’s Steam client is an almost essential application. Managing game purchases and libraries, while offering game community services, it’s an excellent program that has come a long way since its release almost seven years ago.

Now out of beta testing, we have a new version of Steam, 009 – and it’s much improved. The interface is cleaner, bolder and much nicer to navigate. There’s a new wishlist, so you can keep track of games you want, and your friends are shown more prominently too. Now you can see which games your friends play, and what’s on their wish list too. The community element of Steam is integral to why people use it, and this new version makes it a much more central feature.

There’s a more powerful library in the new Steam, allowing you to create your own categories and the search is now real time, making big game libraries much faster to navigate. Overall, it’s a great update, though I hope Valve can reduce the number of client updates they release for this one, as I find them pretty intrusive. Check out our review here.

After having to temporarily suspend the desktop client last month, yesterday Voddler’s web client went live bringing free movies to a much wider audience and moved it a little closer to what Hulu offers in the USA. However, to watch the films, I think you still need a desktop client to stream them and an invite.

At the moment, even those that are lucky enough to have beta invites to the desktop client still have to wait. When you click on a movie to watch and try to login, you receive the following message:

So hopefully, at some stage later this week I’ll be able to test the web client properly to see how it performs although after waiting so long for a beta invite, it’s clear that Voddler aren’t in a hurry when it comes to these sorts of things.

It is still possible to navigate around the site and browse the Voddler movie catalog though. First impressions are the same as before – more recent films will have to be added for Voddler to become really popular but these are early days so hopefully that will improve. The web client doesn’t differ massively from the desktop client but the huge bonus of course is that it works within your browser and with your mouse unlike the awkward keyboard based desktop version. They’ve also added TV shows although being a Swedish based project, these are all in Swedish.

Voddler Homepage:

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If your main problem with real time strategy is that the games don’t have enough scale, Supreme Commander 2 looks like solving that problem. This futuristic game puts you in the position of Supreme Commander, controlling an army from a giant robot. Square Enix have just released a demo through Steam, and if your PC is up to it, I’d recommend having a go.

The gameplay is fairly standard, as you have to build factories, armies, manage resources and so on while defending or attacking enemies. It’s good, but doesn’t reinvent the wheel. However, the size of Supreme Commander is impressive, with huge armies and vast play areas. Personally, I find the scale a bit overwhelming, but if you love multitasking, this is definitely the game for you. My only complaint is that the dialogue is pretty cheesy and hammy which detracts from the overall feeling of the game.

Supreme Commander 2 requires the Steam client which can be downloaded here, though you’ll need at least a 2.6 GHz processor to run it!

Over 10 years after its original release on Windows, Microsoft have finally decided that they’re going to release Outlook for Mac in Office 2010 next year.

Entourage will be ditched in favor of Microsoft’s flagship e-mail client which could prove a real headache for current users although the company have promised to maintain all the functionality – including public folders, managed folders and category syncing – of Entourage Web Services Edition.

However, there is some hope that Outlook for Mac might not be just another ugly awkward Windows implementation on OS X. For a start, it’s going to be developed completely in Cocoa says Microsoft Mac Business Unit general manager Eric Wilfrid:

We’re building on the most modern OS X frameworks to make Outlook beautiful, to make it high performance, and to make it well integrated with the OS.

It’s also going to have a much faster database than Entourage that will integrate with Time Machine backups and Spotlight searches. However, typically, Microsoft have said that Outlook for Mac won’t feature exactly the same functionality as Outlook for Windows. I can imagine it could be a similar frustrating experience as using Outlook Webmail in Firefox compared to Microsoft Internet Explorer as I railed against a while back.

Obviously, Microsoft are targeting this at business users and as Mac usage increases and businesses stay put using Outlook, it could be a smart move. It’s certainly well overdue. However, the fact that it won’t be out until late 2010 and that Apple are already going to make Mail, iCal and Address Book compatible with Exchange servers may make it yet another case of too little too late for Microsoft.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the best way forward for newspapers in the digital age. Rupert Murdoch thinks the best way is to charge for content, Charlie Brooker thinks a virtual coin is the solution while those at the New York Times think a dedicated subscriber funded reader app is the future.

Murdoch’s idea I feel is, excuse the pun, behind the times. Brooker’s is slightly less mad and so it’s the NYT Reader that gets my vote as something that can realistically sustain newspaper profitability. Which is why I was impressed by the simply named Times RSS reader.

Times features all the benefits of a solid RSS reader but with the elegance of a newspaper style interface. It’s organized just like a newspaper with the page sections along the top such as Technology, Science, Sport and News. You can create your own pages simply by going to “Edit” and “Create Page”. To add an RSS feed, click on the pen in the top right hand corner.

Your feeds panel then opens showing all the feeds you have assigned to various pages. Enter a website address for the feed, Times will do a quick check to see if it is has an RSS feed and when the green tick appears, simply enter a name for it. Then you can drag and drop the feeds into position on the blank page in front of you thus creating your own personalized page.

One slick little bonus of Times is “The Shelf” which works on the same principle as Stacks on Leopard. You can drag items of interest onto your shelf for reading later and when you click on the shelf symbol in the top right corner, the shelf appears with the articles expanded Stacks style so you can see exactly what you’d like to read.

The overall look and feel of Times is a refreshing change from your average RSS reader. However, navigation can be a little frustrating. Hiding the feeds requires you to access the “View” menu when you should be apple to drag or pop the panel back up when you’re done adding a new feed. It’s also a little annoying how you can’t access the comments on blog posts using Times – you have to go directly to the page itself which will open in your default browser if you just click on the title. You can however share feeds extremely easily on Digg, Facebook and Twitter thanks to integration with all three.

Times is definitely worth trying for those RSS addicts who are nostalgic for newspapers and may even give the newspaper industry itself a thing or two to think about when considering future formats.