Doesn't mean even slightly that Steam is a better alternative. It's a horrible launcher and a terrible Mac OS X app. It's a great service and games store and I use it all the time, but as an OS X app it's awful.
It requires you to have "enable access for assistive devices" on just to render its interface. Valve knows absolutely nothing about the platform except what it needs to to make basic ports.
Mark my words, they will not become a viable distribution system in OS X without completely and radically overhauling Steam from the ground up. Just "adding apps" isn't going to do anything.
>Doesn't mean even slightly that Steam is a better alternative. It's a horrible launcher and a terrible Mac OS X app. It's a great service and games store and I use it all the time, but as an OS X app it's awful.
I agree. I'm hoping competition will spur one or both of them to actually make a kickass service.
You only have to "Enable access for assistive devices" for the in-game interface, because it requires directly controlling the hardware. In Windows this is done by dll injection, of which even a similar process isn't possible in any *NIX operating systems.
Linux's LD_PRELOAD system lets you replace some executable's dynamically-loaded symbols with your own implementations, and the OS X "dyld" manpage mentions "DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES" which seems to be similar. Is that close enough to "DLL injection"?
Fair enough, that wasn't a great example. However the Steam UI becoming randomly invisible when docked and then undocked, in-app browser constantly breaking, and using their own notifications UI that gets stuck on screen and doesn't offer Growl support are better examples.
Doesn't mean even slightly that Steam is a better alternative. It's a horrible launcher and a terrible Mac OS X app. It's a great service and games store and I use it all the time, but as an OS X app it's awful.
It requires you to have "enable access for assistive devices" on just to render its interface. Valve knows absolutely nothing about the platform except what it needs to to make basic ports.
Mark my words, they will not become a viable distribution system in OS X without completely and radically overhauling Steam from the ground up. Just "adding apps" isn't going to do anything.