Most important is the fact that Valve is not using emulation to make this all happen, as some suspected it would. Emulation would see the original versions of the games being played on the Mac in a spoofed Windows environment. Instead the developer has created a native version of its gaming engine – built for OS X.

This is an astute move by Valve, paving the way for native Mac games in the future and opening the system up to the growing market of Mac users.

Valve has been at the forefront of digital distribution in gaming, allowing gamers to buy and download games and other content, interact with a social network of other users and find servers to play multiplayer games on, all from the Steam software.

Said Gabe Newell, president of Valve, in a statement on his company’s website, ”As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients.”

“The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services,” he added.

Valve said that it currently provides over 1000 games on the Steam platform to over 25 million gamers. It also confirmed that licenses for its games would be usable on either PC or Mac versions of those games.

So, for example, The Orange Box compilation that I bought in 2008, with licenses for Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and some other games can now be used to play those titles on the Mac when the Steam client for Mac launches in April.

Steam also offers internet distribution of gaming software – so I will be able to download the Mac versions of those games without having to go out and find disks.

And one could, for example, play Half Life 2 on a Mac and then switch to a PC and carry on where they left off.

This places Valve way ahead of the pack when it comes to next-generation gaming, and also highlights the growth in market share of the Mac platform. At this point I should probably add that Blizzard – the company behind the Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft franchises, including the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft, has been developing its games for both Windows and Mac for over a decade.

The upcoming Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows and, thanks to the Source engine, the Steam system will bring a bunch of games over to the Mac at launch, and many more in future.

Now my only problem is that the Magic Mouse is crap for first-person shooters. Time to dust off the Microsoft mouse!

The service is called iGame Unlimited and is being offered as part of iBurst’s iDSL service that is being launched this month and offers ADSL bandwidth from R49 per gigabyte. If you have an iDSL account with iGame Unlimited bolted on then any gaming traffic isolated to the iBurst network and servers will not be deducted from your quota.

iBurst says it already has servers running for Left 4 Dead 2, Call of Duty 4 and a range of other games and will take its lead from subscribers when deciding on what servers to add. A list of servers currently online can be found over here. iBurst also claims to be in talks with Activision and Blizzard to get a local World of Warcraft server on the network.

It is uncertain as to whether the service will be extended to console gamers – iGame Unlimited is currently limited to PC games.

iBurst has also launched a community site called iGame Online where its community of subscribers can interact.

There’s a new cult in town. You might’ve heard about it already. You may even be a member. If you haven’t, and you’d like to preserve the precious little time you have, stay away from PopCap’s new insanely addictive game – Plants vs. Zombies.

I started playing this tower-defence-type title on my Macbook and now it’s spread onto my iPhone. I can’t get enough. I may need help.

The premise of this game is, in a word, awesome. You have a house. Zombies are invading. You must collect sunshine and plant flowers that kill the undead ghouls deader than they already are. Were. Whatever.

Plants vs. Zombies has everything I want in a game – violence, humour, hordes of things to kill… and plants.

The first few levels of the game are set in your front yard where a small variety of zombies need to get smacked apart by a range of angry plants. As the game progresses, and moves from your front to backyard, into the swimming pool and onto the roof, more types of zombies are added, with a variety of resistances, and your collection of plants to tackle them with grows accordingly.

You’ll also get to tackle Zombies in the dark where you must rely on mushrooms and other, more nocturnal undead-killing flora. There’s also money to be collected from dead zombies, and which can be used to buy slaughtering accessories from your crazy virtual neighbour.

The game is available for PC, Mac, iPhone or you can play it online as a flash game. The desktop version costs R185 to register, but you can play for 60 minutes for free, while the iPhone version goes for $2.99 (at time of writing) and requires a US iTunes account.

This title is worth every cent. It’s addictive as hell and, if you have it on your phone, is the perfect diversion while waiting in queues. It steps up to precocious, big-budget titles like Heavy Rain and smacks them in the face with pure awesomeness. It also makes the point, again, that good gameplay trumps sophisticated graphics and physics engines every time. Go get it. Now.

I like it so much I made it my ‘pick of the week’ on the latest episode of the ZA Tech Show.

Sitting back and reflecting over the past two years makes me realise how lucky we are to have enjoyed the support that we have from our families, friends and fans. The show owes its survival to the support of a group of the most awesome people I’ve met – but more about them later.

Since we intend to broadcast every one of our shows live from now on we are committed to starting on time at our usual 4pm (UTC+2) slot every Friday. This is not an ideal time, but is the only point at which we can get most of our regular panel together. We are looking at other potential broadcast slots and might announce a scheduling change soon.

On the technical side we had to work on a shoestring budget as the podcast is yet to make any profit. We’re planning to change that soon, and the intention was always to grow this slowly and make it scalable for when the economies of the local market align with our vision for broadcasting online in it.

That in mind, we chose to broadcast the audio-only version of the show using an Icecast server that runs out of the data centre of our bandwidth sponsors, Internet Solutions.

Icecast is an awesome piece of software and ideal for our needs, providing a standardised stream that is widely supported and enables us to cater for thousands of concurrent listeners while providing the audio on local (South African) bandwidth.

To get the audio from our “studio” to the Icecast server we use an excellent piece of software from Rogue Amoeba called Nicecast. I’m a big fan of Rogue Amoeba’s software in general, and we use Audio Hijack Pro to do complex recordings of the show that require Skype calls to be supported.

Using Nicecast in conjunction with Audio Hijack Pro also has the advantage of us being able to stream and record audio on the same computer. And by now you would probably have realised that we run Macs end-to-end in our makeshift studio, although we will likely use a PC to drive our video setup in the future and we are experimenting with software solutions for live video mixing since we can’t afford to get something like a Tricaster just yet.

The rest of our setup is standard stuff. We use Shure microphones and a simple 8-channel Behringer mixer. Our live video is streamed using Ustream and the built-in webcam on a Mabook Pro. This suffices given the limit on bandwidth that we face, both for our upstream and the average downstream of our viewers. The audio for the video stream is provided from our main mixer, allowing us to bring in Skype callers.

So video is on international bandwidth and audio on local, which we feel is a good enough solution for now.

The first broadcast went relatively well and raised some good ideas for how we could make it better in the future.

We also have some new office and studio space, thanks to the awesomeness of Don Packett and Richard Mulholland at Thunk! Perspective Lab, and we will be kitting this out over the next few weeks using clever tech to get around our tiny budget.

We made fun of that fact that we don’t have a studio at the moment by packing heaps of boxes around an old coffee table that we broadcast from last Friday, pretending that we were at Brett’s mom’s house, in her storeroom. Apparently some of live viewers took us seriously on that.

The ZA Tech Show started as a group of technology journalists drinking beer and talking about technology on a Friday afternoon and we plan to keep it that way, preserving the camaraderie and raw, honest discussion that has made the show as popular as it is.

We believe that the future holds big things for the show and we look forward to sharing that with our listeners, and now viewers, live =)

Brett Haggard, Ben Kelly, Duncan McLeod and Jon Tullett are the crazy f*#kers that started this thing with me and it was great to have them all back on the show for episode 100. Since then Toby Shapshak has become a regular on the show and deserves a special mention.

Since starting the show we’ve also added Candice Jones, Samantha Perry and Aki Anastasiou to our list of occasional guests, along with Will Hahn who dials in from the USA every now and then and who has offered us amazing support.

Mark Shuttleworth, Stafford Masie, Mike Stopforth, Dwayne Bailey, Saul Kropman and other guests have appeared on the show over the last two years and added massive value for our listeners. And, away from the mic, we’ve been blown away by the awesomeness of the guys at Thunk! (mentioned above), Emerging Media Communications, Lenovo, Tribeca, Puruma, Text 100, Microsoft, Nokia and other companies that have come out in support of the podcast in various ways.

We also owe a serious debt of gratitude to the guys at Internet Solutions who have offered amazing support and who sponsor our local bandwidth. Jason Bronkhorst and Charl Malherbe at Infiltrate Media have also been legendary and designed both the ZA Tech Show and ZA Car Show logos.

I’d also like to thank our friends at the TWiT Network in Petaluma CA, especially Dane Golden and Leo Laporte who I consider mentors in the game of online broadcasting. Without knowing it they’ve provided inspiration and know-how for our show via their online knowledge-base and, more recently, they allowed us to broadcast over their wildly popular channel from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Finally, I must thank my business partner and friend Craig Rodney who glues this whole thing together from a business perspective.

It’s been a wild ride and it ain’t over yet. Here’s to the next 100!

And now a new Australian company called Misa Digital has put Linux to work in a digital guitar it has developed. The instrument is powered by Gentoo Linux and uses a touchpad and buttons instead of strings. The result is pretty amazing, as you can see from the video below.

Misa isn’t shipping the guitar just yet, but pre-orders are available from the Misa Digital website. Rocking.

When Apple announced the iPad in January I watched live coverage of the event on my favourite online channel – TWiT. Presenter Leo Laporte and a group of US-based journalists did a better job of covering the occasion via online streaming video than any of the conventional news channels. It was raw, on-demand journalism and a clear indication of things to come.

Watching the stream in South Africa was painful at first. The standard quality stream from TWiT requires 1000Kbps for smooth viewing, and while my Telkom 4Mpbs ADSL line is capable of four times the minimum requirement I still had to switch to a 400Kbps stream to avoid buffering delays.

My ADSL line is also not the norm in South Africa where most people have to contend with choppy wireless connectivity or slower DSL speeds starting at 384kbps. At those speeds, and with the latency and packet loss of wireless, accessing Youtube is a challenge, never mind streaming live video. Whereas in most of the developed world a 1000kbps stream is peanuts – you could watch it smoothly while running bitorrent and speaking to your mother on Skype.

So while South Africa sits in the dark ages, so to speak, the rest of the world forges ahead, binging on online video. In the USA users stream movies via Netflix on their Xboxes and other devices, or watch television on online services like Hulu. Youtube now accommodates high definition video, and if you live in South Korea or Sweden you’ll be able to watch those massive, high resolution files without any buffering.

For most South Africans even a short, low resolution video file requires minutes of buffering before it can be enjoyed without hiccups.

Local video services like Zoopy have gone someway to bringing us video services on local bandwidth – which does make a positive difference. What we need is more local content producers and aggregators to make services available domestically, and to fill the gap until our bandwidth catches up with the rest of the world. But even if we did have the equivalent of a local Netflix, it would still be challenging to watch a feature film over local bandwidth, because our domestic networks are an even bigger problem than the lack of international pipes.

In January I watched high definition video streaming wirelessly to a car connected via LTE in Paris – something I can’t do with my desktop computer at home. When you experience online video or IPTV in a developed country it makes you realise just how far behind the curve we are in South Africa.

This is especially sad given the possibilities that video holds for developing countries. Video bridges the gaps created by literacy and travel constraints, allowing teachers to show pupils things without the latter having to read. The teacher can also be anywhere in the world and the content can be prepared ahead of time. It isn’t the solution to the puzzle of education in Africa, but it could be a prominent part of it.

The light at the end of the tunnel is that we are making progress in the race to catch up with the globe when it comes to broadband – and perhaps even leapfrog most of the developed world when we get there.

At the moment, however, we are falling behind even our African counterparts, like Nigeria and Kenya where domestic networks and regulations are fast progressing to unlock international bandwidth in a meaningful way.

In South Africa we still face regulatory hurdles and a hybrid industry where old meets new in a unique way, and within a chaotic, deregulated market.

It’s going to take time for the dust to settle, the regulator to process the likes of local loop unbundling and spectrum allocation, and older networks to be consolidated with up-and-coming competitors. We also need the additional international capacity, and accompanying economies of scale that will come from undersea cables like WACS and Eassy, to bolster what has begun with Seacom.

It’s happening, but not fast enough for impatient geeks like me. In the meantime I’ll have to stick to more conventional means of obtaining video, and be thankful for my 4Mbps DSL connection, limited as it is.

I have some great new ideas for talks in technology, productivity and business, and some tried and tested material that I’ve been refining. I’d love to hear what you think about them and the best way to do that is to offer you my professional speaking services for gratis.

So if you have an event coming up, or even if you don’t, check out my speaking page and contact me.

You could even get a group of friends together and book me to come and speak – or get some colleagues together in the boardroom – I don’t mind what the occasion is, I’ll do it if I’m available.

Anyone who places a booking before 20 February for an event taking place before the end of June will get my services for free, including up to 500km of travel, as required.

If you’d like to make a booking please visit my contact page and get in touch. If you’d like to learn more about me as a speaker, check out my biography or my speaking page.

On Wednesday Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced his company’s latest creation to the world – the iPad. With a 9.7″ capacitive touchscreen and an operating system similar to the iPhone, the iPad has been designed to fill the gap between smartphones and laptops. On a technological level the device is amazing. Equally amazing is the deal Apple has struck with AT&T in the USA to offer 3G data at $14.99 per month for 250MB and $29.99 for unlimited bandwidth. But I’m not convinced that the gap the iPad fills exists for all but a small niche of computer users at this stage.

Steve Jobs pointed out that in order to fill this gap a device would have to be better at things like browsing the web and consuming digital media than a smartphone or a laptop. He added that, in this regard, netbooks had fallen short. And I agree with him.

The iPad apparently does all of these, and then some, better than any laptop or smartphone. But there are also a number of things it doesn’t do at all. And, for this reason, I don’t think the iPad will often leave the house with many of its early adopters.

I use myself as example; I have a 13″ Macbook, an iPhone 3GS and a menagerie of iPods that I have accumulated. When I travel I take my Macbook and iPhone with me. I use the laptop to write articles, browse the web, record and edit audio, produce video – the list goes on. The more demanding of these tasks, especially in audio and video, the iPad will not handle.

The iPhone I use as a phone, navigation device and pocket computer. It Geotags the photos I take with my Nikon D90 and I use it to watch television series and movies. It’s also an iPod, email client, Skype phone and other things. But it must fit into my pocket and it must be a phone. The iPad does neither.

If I was to buy an iPad it would stay at home. I couldn’t justify taking it with me on a trip instead of my Macbook, or my iPhone, because it doesn’t cover all of the bases. And I sure as hell am not going to lug around a third device – it may be better than anything else at browsing the web and watching videos, but not so good that I’d have it in my backpack along with my Macbook, which does a perfectly decent job of web browsing and video.

iBooks, the book store that Apple has added to its digital content offering, looks amazing – but I’m sure it’ll be available, and perfectly usable, on the iPhone too.

I can imagine someone with less demanding computing needs replacing their laptop with the iPad, especially considering the add-on keyboard accessory, and out-of-the-box compatibility with Bluetooth keyboards. I also foresee mobile processors becoming powerful enough in the future to enable tablet devices to replace laptops completely – but we aren’t there yet.

The 10 hour battery life will be a major advantage to people who can justify carrying around the iPad instead of a laptop – and for someone who has to endure long-haul flights fairly regularly, this is the only feature that would convince me to chuck the iPad in my bag.

There is a bigger picture to consider, however. The iPad is the beginning of a new chapter in computing. The tablet form-factor is going to have a big impact on everything from television to education. But it’s early days. Apple deserves credit for developing a technological marvel – and the price, starting at $499 in the US, will make it irresistible for tech enthusiasts and fans of the brand.

I foresee initial sales predominantly focused on the entry-level, WiFi device. It’ll hit the shelves a month before the 3G version and because most early adopters will be technology enthusiasts, will be home-bound while its owners favour beefier devices on the go.

In South Africa I expect we’ll see the device along with the rest of the world in 60 days – but it remains uncertain who its distributor will be. Core is the company that distributes all of Apple’s products in South Africa, except for the iPhone which is handled by cellular company Vodacom.

Then there’s the question of price – and the iPad will be subject to the same taxes and margins that the iPod Touch is, being a similarly classed device. The entry-level model should go for about R5000 in South Africa – anything more would be criminal.

Nokia Maps was an early play from the Finnish mobile giant that has put it ahead of the pack when it comes to affordable mapping and navigation on your phone.

The service has been mostly free for some time, offering maps of the world and their updates to Nokia users for gratis. Voice navigation and a few other bits and pieces were levied via subscription, however – but these are now free as part of the re-branded Ovi Maps product announced by Nokia this week.

Lonely Planet and Michelin guides, which are solid gold to travelers, are part of the deal.

It’s an unbeatable proposition, especially for someone who travels perpetually like I do. For one you get the navigation, which includes walking and driving, plus the guides and other features. But, and perhaps more importantly for international travelers, the Nokia map data is actually stored on your mobile, whereas Google Maps streams map data to your device which can be really expensive if you’re roaming.

The zero-rating of the entire service is going to be an expensive step for Nokia, but it won’t be the last drastic move we see from the company as it fights to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive smartphone market.

Nokia knows that battles in the war for mobile domination are fought and won on services; having solid devices is one thing, but it’s services that convert users. Ovi Lifecasting is another project Nokia will soon launch as part of a group of new services that are going to add weight to the company’s proposition.

Ovi Maps is available in the Ovi Store for a number of Nokia models, but isn’t available for all GPS-fitted Nokias yet. The N900, for example, is not yet supported.