Here’s the press release:

VALVE TO DELIVER STEAM & SOURCE ON MAC

Leading Gaming Service Expands to Mac Platform

March 8, 2010 – Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve’s gaming service, and Source, Valve’s gaming engine, to the Mac.

Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.

“As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. “The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services.”

“Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac,” said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. “Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, 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. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. “The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.”

Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. “Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step,” said Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. “We’re always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.

Words With Friends Free is in a league of its own. As we’ve said previously, this is easily the absolute best word game available for the iPhone today and the online play earns it the top spot on this list. Don’t let the title deceive you, this should be installed even if you don’t have friends.

Chess With Friends Free comes from the same people who brought us Words With Friends, but instead of a Scrabble-esque game, you get to play chess with friends, random opponents, or I suppose even your enemies. If you’re looking to learn this classic strategy game or just practice your chess skills, this is the app to do it with.

Mancala FS5 Free is a hugely addictive version of Mancala for your iPhone. This classic game of who can get the most beads is hugely addictive and the online play is very competitive. If you liked playing this game as a kid, you’ll loving having it on your phone where you can play against AIM buddies, the computer, or just random players.

Live Poker is pretty self explanatory. Play poker, live, against other people. This ties in with the hugely popular version for Facebook, allowing you to play against your friends. It gives you 1000 free chips a day to play with, so don’t worry about going broke. The interface is clean, easy to use, and makes online free poker a fun time-waster.

Cube is one of the first and arguably the best first person shooter available today for the iPhone platform. It can be both single- or multiplayer and provides fast, fun gameplay. The controls take a bit to get accustomed to, but once you’ve got them down you’ll be fragging with the best of them.

For those of you who consider the glass half full, this could mean the potential future inclusion of a camera, but the realists out there probably realize that this was a once included feature that was cut for one reason or another.

To show all hidden files within your OS, here’s what you do.

1. Open the Terminal.
2. Enter the following command in to the terminal:
   

   defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
   killall Finder

3. Done! Your finder will take a second to reload and then you’ll notice all sorts of hidden files throughout your hard drive.

Done with whatever hidden file you needed to deal with and sick of seeing all the extra crap? Do the exact same thing as above but change “TRUE” to “FALSE” and everything will return to it’s original invisible state.

NOTE: Generally speaking, most hidden files are probably invisible to the average user for a very good reason. Be careful with what you’re editing, moving, or deleting and backup your system beforehand.

Where the program really shines, however, is not the long list of protocols it can use but the visual interface; Just about everything about the way it works and looks can be customized. The look of the contact list can be tweaked to one’s liking in just about every way possible, making it easy to find your online buddies. Message windows can be individual or tabbed in a single window and they way they display the messages also has several options to suit ones needs from a very professional appearance to something more along the lines of iPhone text messages. Even the icon on the dock can be set to various different colors or you can easily import your own.

Did I mention it supports Growl notifications? For those unfamiliar with it, Growl integrates with many programs on your system to show you little pop-up notifications of what is happening in the background without making you Cmd-Tab back and forth. Adium integrates with Growl perfectly and allows you to see when your buddies come online or go offline, when you get a message, when a file transfer is completed, or just about anything else within the program that you might want a notification about.

Just about the only feature that I truly wish Adium had that it does not have integrated is video chat. Many of the chat protocols it has integrated can support this, but the program itself does not (yet?) support it.

Sounds like a great application, right? Well, I’ve got more good news. It’s free.

If you chat online via one of the various popular chat programs out there or even multiples, then this is the application for you. It blows just about any other chat program out of the water and will make your Windows-using friends jealous that they can’t get it.

There’s really no way that I can do it justice, so head on over to Apple’s website to find out more.

• What do I call it?
  There are plenty of names floating around for the rumored Tablet, but here are the likely possibilities: Apple Slate, iSlate, iPad, iTablet, MacTablet, or TabletMac. For some reason, MacSlate hasn’t been mentioned, although that seems to fit well with their laptop line.
• What will it do?
  If the hype is any indicator, this baby will be curing cancer and aids with a single use. In reality, however, it will likely have a multi-touch screen, offer high definition video for a better mobile movie and TV experience, be a fully-featured eReader, possibly allow iPhone/iPod Touch Apps, full web browsing, and likely much more. If the iPod Touch and MacBook were to mate, this would be their lovechild.
• How will it look?
  Rumor has it this tablet will be sporting a shiny new 10.1″ multi-touch screen, similar to that of the iPhone, but bigger. There have also been rumors of a smaller 7″ screened version, but that is about as likely as an iPhone Mini. Chances are, it will have the appearance of a large iPod Touch.
• When can I get my hands on one?
  Analyst Yair Reiner for Oppenheimer predicts that it will be ready to ship in late March or early April of this year, but other analysts have predicted as soon as February, although that seems less likely.
• How much will this set me back?
  Most guesstimates say the price will be somewhere around $1000, but different analysts have said as high as $1500 or even as low as $700. Thankfully, we don’t have much more to wait before we know.

That pretty much covers the important stuff, but by the end of the day tomorrow all will hopefully be clear.