Mac SteamPowered Client (dmg)
store.steampowered.com
store.steampowered.com
It's got a fake Mac interface (doesn't respect the Graphite appearance preference) and normal copy and paste (⌘C ⌘V) don't work in some/all of the text fields.
After years of being derided as a games-less platform, Valve finally brings Steam to the Mac – but does it pretty half-assedly. I know a half-dozen developers who could have done a better interface than this.
I don't mean to sound ungrateful, and it's better to have it than not, but with the effort I'm sure it took to port the whole thing over to the Mac, I'm surprised that the little things (like copy/paste) don't work.
It's great that they're treating the Mac like a respectable platform, but this is going to be a terrible introduction to any Mac users who've never used Steam. My first impression was 'It's slow, it doesn't work properly, it won't download Portal at all, and the demos it downloads don't work.' Not exactly high praise.
Also, another oddity I've noticed - start dragging the window from the bottom of the title bar, and drag it up against the menu bar. The window stops moving, but the cursor keeps moving as usual. Once you hit the top of the screen, drag downwards again. The Steam window moves immediately, even though the cursor isn't even over the window.
I tried to set my profile picture via drag-and-drop, but it didn't work. Turns out I need to click the small sphere (actually a label-less button I think) to bring up a picker dialog. Once the image is chosen, nothing happens (no indication that you've selected an image) until you click 'upload'. Also, since images can only be 150kb, it would be nice if the app detected that. I know it's WebKit and all, but what's the point in having a native app if it's not going to take advantage of it?
Still, this is a first release, and the automatic graphics switching is still quite new. I trust that the UI / UX issues will be resolved in due course.
Edit: Upon rebooting my Mac, the Steam client did not trigger an integrated to discrete switch. However, according to gfxCardStatus, the "steam" process was keeping the discrete card engaged prior to the reboot.
Also, some games play fine on the integrated graphics, so switching over to discrete isn't necessarily something you always want.
Though I'd guess the workings of this auto graphics switching mechanism are really Apple's responsibility.
Put another way, if you've ever wanted a platformer where you had to think 'Once I flip this switch, I have five seconds to have been over there', Braid is your game.
It seems that someone didn't write their paths in a flexible way (windows-like) and you have to reinstall your entire machine to run this.
Steam isn't the only one effected however. The Starcraft 2 beta and World of Warcraft also don't support case sensitive volumes.
Due to this I'm taking most of my evening and using Carbon Copy Cloner to dupe the drive and restore it as a case insensitive drive. I wish someone could have just done a .to_lower function at the end of their path strings.
Let this be a warning to anyone who considers it in the future: don't. You can use case-sensitivity on non-boot volumes (e.g. external drives) if you're concerned about case issues (e.g. moving data from another case-sensitive file system).
Also, since the filesystem is case-insensitive (but case-preserving) anyway, you can add this to your ~/.inputrc to have readline completion (e.g. in Bash) ignore case:
set completion-ignore-case on
You can even just use a disk image http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200505051847146...
You also may need to symlink some directories.
While Magic Mouse works nicely with Portal, I'd rather not to try it on Team Fortress 2 when it's released as it cannot handle simultaneous left/right click.
One of the cool things Steam does is package old DOS games into an individual preconfigured DOSBox environment.
My dream has been for Steam to do the same thing for Win32 games and Wine. Install the game on Steam, click to launch it, and it runs in Wine with all the tweaks needed to run that specific game already done.
Good enough for me though. Installing Torchlight, but Steam Cloud didn't transfer my PC characters over.
Doesn't currently affect me as I use Steam games via Wine or on Windows directly, but I'm rather excited about the possibility of a native Linux implementation so I'm watching the Steam for Mac news closely.
It's coming to Mac, and I imagine that'll come to Linux in time too.
Aren't all these games available for mac?
Update: Nevermind. It's working now. :P
I went to the developers' pages and downloaded the demos instead. Not only were these downloads faster, but they actually work.
edit: No TF2 makes me cry.