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!

Disabling the notifications isn’t obvious either. I expected the setting to be under the ‘Notifications’ area in the Skype options or preferences window – where it intuitively should be. But it isn’t.

To turn off these notifications on a Mac, double-click on the mood messages listing to open it up as a chat window. You can do this the next time it pops up as a notification, or find it in your chat history.

Make sure the drawer is open on the chat window (⌘T if it isn’t) and then right click on ‘Mood Messages’ in the drawer.

In the drop-down menu click on ‘Chat Notification Settings…’ and select the ‘Do not notify me’ radio button.

The rest should be self-explanatory. I’m not sure how this is done on a PC, but perhaps someone who does will add it to the comments…

The following is a guide for setting up a Huawei cellular USB modem on a Mac. It will work with any cellular network, any APN and does not require any third-party connection software. Just your Mac, OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard (10.5+ or 10.6+), and a Huawei modem with an active SIM card for the network you are connecting to.

Huawei provides a range of modems allowing users to connect to cellular networks and the Internet using GPRS, EDGE, 3G and HSPA technologies. I use the Huawei E220, but this setup should work with any Huawei USB modem.

The network I use most regularly is Vodacom in South Africa that provides special software, provided by parent company Vodafone, that facilitates connecting with the modem on a Mac.

However, being a tech journalist and someone who travels a lot, I have a container full of SIM cards for international networks and other service providers I am testing out including MTN, Internet Solutions and Wireless-G’s GConnect service.

The basic settings for all the networks I have tried are the same, but they often use different access point names (APNs) which require specific software for specification. Apple OS X Leopard has drivers and all the required settings built-in. They’re just buried.

The following are the steps I have used to set up the modem with my Mac. This will only work with OS X Leopard – earlier versions, such as Tiger, will not work.

1. Remove the SIM PIN. This requires putting your SIM card in a phone and finding the setting to remove the PIN. If you are using an iPhone this setting is under Phone -> SIM PIN. This step is required as there is no way for OS X to send a PIN to your modem. If you are worried about security and don’t want to remove the PIN then stop here. You’ll need special software for your modem and this guide is not for you. Once you have removed the PIN, put the SIM card back in your Huawei.
2. Uninstall third-party software. This may not be necessary, but some software will force settings for your modem and interfere with your setup. Uninstalling it makes sure your settings will stick.
3. Install drivers for Snow Leopard. This is only necessary if you use OS X 10.6 or later – Leopard (10.5) users should ignore this step. Download these drivers from Huawei and install them.
4. Plug in your Huawei modem. It goes in the USB port
5. Open System Preferences and go to ‘Network’.
6. Your Huawei modem should be listed in the pane on the left of the window. If it isn’t, click on the + and select your modem from the ‘Interface’ drop down menu. Then click on ‘Create’.
7. Highlight the Huawei modem in the pane on the left and select ‘Advanced’.
8. Change vendor to ‘Generic’. In the drop down menu, select ‘generic’ as the vendor and set ‘Model’ to ‘GPRS (GSM/3G)’. Now ‘APN’ will appear and you can specify whatever your network needs it to be. For most this will just be ‘Internet’ but it varies, especially with network partners like Wireless-G or Internet Solutions. After entering your APN (and other network settings should they be required) click on ‘OK’.
9. Set telephone number and credentials. This step might require some experimenting. Click on ‘Apply’ and then enter the Telephone Number. This will be *99# for most cellular networks, but could also be *99***1# depending on your location. For Vodacom I find that *99***1# works in most areas. But there are other numbers available, up to 4 (*99***4#) so try them all to find the one that works best for you. Usernames and passwords are not required on Vodacom or MTN, but are required for other networks, so make sure you have the right details.
10. Show modem in status bar. This is just a preference I have, so that I can easily connect without having to go into System Preferences.

And you’re done. If all went according to plan then you should now be able to just plug in your modem, wait for it to initiate and then connect without any extra software required.

You might also want to grab an awesome little app called CheetahWatch that shows signal strength, provides usage tracking and a bunch of other useful features for Huawei modems on Mac.

This functionality is made even radder by the fact that the 360 supports external storage devices or can be used as a media extender for any computer running Windows Media Center. You can even share media stored on a Mac in iTunes using connector software called Connect 360.

Of all the options available storing media on an external hard drive seems most logical to me, but this is easier said than done given the Xbox 360′s limited support for filesystems.

You basically have two options in terms of filesystems when formatting an external drive for use with your 360: FAT or HFS+. Weirdly, the Xbox 360 does not support Microsoft’s NTFS filesystem, but does support Apple’s HFS+. This is a side-effect of the Xbox being designed to work flawlessly with the iPod.

While it is the most compatible across the board, FAT is a useless filesystem for storing media. For one, it doesn’t support the storage of files larger than four gigabytes – so storing any high definition video is pretty much out of the question. That should be enough reason for us to move on to the more competent HFS+ filesystem.

And this is where we find an interesting anomaly; the Xbox 360 will not recognise external hard drives formatted for HFS+ under Apple’s Leopard version of the OS X operating system. Which sucks for people like me, who solely use said operating system.

But there is a solution. One that involves using a Windows PC, or a Mac running Windows using Boot Camp or virtualisation software.

The steps are as follows:

• Download a piece of trial software for Windows called MacDrive.
• Install MacDrive on Windows.
• Use MacDrive to format your drive as ‘HFS Extended’ and DO NOT use a case-sensitive form of the filesystem.

Et voila – you now have an external drive rocking the superior HFS+ filesystem and fully compatible with your Xbox 360. Skop some media on it and plug it in. The drive will also be compatible with your Mac for file transfers and if you want to use it with Windows, pay for MacDrive and enjoy unlimited support for the filesystem.

• 13.3-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen display with 1280×800 resolution
• 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB L2 cache
• 800 MHz front-side bus
• 2GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
• 80GB hard disk drive with Sudden Motion Sensor
• Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
• Micro-DVI port (includes Micro-DVI to VGA and Micro-DVI to DVI Adapters)
• Built-in iSight video camera
• Built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n wireless networking and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
• One USB 2.0 port
• One headphone port
• Multi-touch TrackPad with support for advanced multi-touch gestures including tap, scroll, pinch, rotate and swipe
• 45 Watt MagSafe Power Adapter.

The Macbook Air will retail for $1799 (around 12300 South African rand) and boasts an impressive five hours of battery life.

This was one of several announcements made by Jobs during his 2008 Macbook keynote, which enjoyed record attendance and a huge audience of online viewers tracking feeds at popular rumor sites.

Other announcements included new updates for the iPhone and iPod Touch, a new product called Time Capsule; a network-attached storage device designed for use with Apple’s Time Machine software, movie rentals from the iTunes movie store and an update to the Apple TV that adds support for renting HD or DVD quality movies with 5.1 surround sound and removing the requirement for using a computer to get media to the Apple TV. Of course, movie rentals via iTunes are exclusively being launched for the American market and will only be introduced to regions where the iTunes Music Store is available – so you can forget about seeing it in South Africa any time soon.

I was personally hoping for the announcement of an HSDPA iPhone which would have precipitated my purchase of one. Nonetheless, the free update to the existing iPhone is awesome as are the new features being introduced to the iPod Touch, including Apple’s Mail.app email application. Existing Touch owners will have to fork out $20 (R140) for the update, however.

The announcement of the Macbook Air overshadowed all others and this product is set to raise the bar on the small-form-factor notebook market. Apple is giving Sony a hard run for their money in this department and has introduced some tough-to-beat features in the Macbook Air, such as multi-touch technology integrated into the Air’s trackpad.

But Apple has also built some humor into the new operating system. The Finder application in Leopard is just amazing. It has been updated with a new sidebar that makes browsing around your computer and attached resources really easy, as well as the ability to flip through your files with Cover Flow – a visual navigation tool that you really have to see to appreciate. If you aren’t sure of the contents of a file, in Cover Flow mode you can actually see its contents in an icon, or hold down space in any view and a window will jump up displaying the contents of the file.

In network mode with Cover Flow activated you can flip through the computers and their shared resources attached the network. Leopard will even show an actual image, in icon form, of the other Mac computers attached that are running Leopard. But, and here is the funny part, any non-OS X PCs on the network will be displayed using an icon of a computer monitor with the blue screen of death displayed. Nice.

We like a good dose of irreverence round these parts and I think that little jab at Microsoft is good icing on the wholesome cake that is Leopard. The operating system has raised the bar on the industry and makes Vista look like a prehistoric monkey with no teeth and unpleasant disposition in comparison.