Software
Why we should all be excited about Steam coming to the Mac
Written by Russ Crandall   
Tuesday, 09 March 2010 21:35


It's a little-known fact that four-fifths of theeasymode.com staff (or 80%….MATH!) uses Apple products as our primary computers. It's also a little-known fact that all five-fiths of us like to play these things called video games. Personally, I've loaded Windows onto my beautiful, shiny 27" iMac just so I can play PC games from time to time. But when it comes down to it, I'd much rather play games on my iMac natively rather than boot up Windows. This is why Valve's announcement yesterday that Steam is coming to Macs is so exciting to me. And it should be exciting to you too (if you own a Mac), and here's why:

1. Backwards compatibility: Valve has already announced that they're bringing their Source engine to the Mac Steam. They mentioned that these specific games will be available in April: Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series. That's a great start.

2. "Steam Play": Basically, this feature means that if you bought a game on Steam for Windows, you can play it on Steam for Mac, for free. Not only that, but they touted a feature called "Steam Cloud" which would allow you to play a game on one PC and jump to that same spot on a Mac.

3. Future investment: Steam has promised that all future Valve games will launch simultaneously on Mac, Windows, and the Xbox 360 from here on out. I hope a lot of developers follow suit, now that Steam will give them a wide exposure to Mac gamers.

4. Valve's first Mac-friendly release will be Portal 2. Oh yes.
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My Faves: The Best (and Free) Mac OSX Zip and Unzip Apps
Written by Russ Crandall   
Friday, 05 February 2010 13:21
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As a Mac owner for over three years now (my how the time flew by), I was never happy with my unzipping and zipping. For the longest time I simply used the default unzipping app for OSX, Archive Utility, or the Mac-approved StuffIt Expander. Problem is, I've found both apps to be buggy, and many times I would have to unzip a folder with the one app simply because it wouldn't work in the other. After getting frustrated enough with this two-punch combo, I decided to seek out something else, and I then found Unarchiver.

Unarchiver has two features that make it my favorite unzipper. First of all, it's free and unzips everything under the sun. Secondly, you can set it to send the zipped folder into the trash after you unzip it. Doesn't sound like much, but this one little feature has saved me all sorts of clicks and drags to the trashcan.

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On the zipping side of the house, I use YemuZip. It's a barebones app that works just like you want it to - you drag a file, group of files, or a folder into the app, tell it what you want to call the zipped folder, and bam. There's not much else to it, but do you really need anything more than that?
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