Safari 4 Public Beta

Yesterday Apple released the public beta for Safari 4 (Mac + PC). There come some interesting new features which should draw a new crowd users to the popular web browser.

Tabs on top:

Taking a seriously large leaf out of Google Chrome's book, the tabs in Safari now appear in the titlebar of the window(s). I personally quite like this interface - the tabs are out of the way, using up unnecessary space. They also slide nice and smooth and can be broken off to form new windows, or added to other ones.

As you can see, now Safari on windows runs with the natural windows borders, making it feel more like an individual program, not just a port from Mac OSX.

Cover flow:

Now you can browse your history/bookmarks in the iTunes/Mac Cover Flow style, as is saves snapshots of all recent windows.

Top Sites:

In another nod to Google Chrome, and also IE7/8, now when you open a new tab you get a fancy 'Top Sites' display.

Speed:

Apple tells us that Safari 4 is up to 30x faster than IE7. That's pretty darn fast.

Safari is now my browser of choice. In the past I used Mozilla Firefox, but then ditched it for Chrome in favor of the whole tab interface and general smoothness (tab sliding and the loading indicators). Also, it started up DAMN fast. Safari has yet to live up to my speed needs from Chrome, but hopefully this will improve, as this is only a beta.

Team Fortress 2 - The Scout Update

The Scout update for the popular online FPS Team Fortress 2 has been released. As per the previous packs, the update adds 3 new weapons for the scout:

• The Sandman, a heavier baseball bat that can hit baseballs to stun enemies, while disabling double-jump when equipped. Not just when it's out.
  
• Bonk! Energy Drink, a power up which makes you much more likely to be missed by bullets and makes you runs crazy-fast, but with a slowed speed cooldown effect
  
• The Force-A-Nature, a double barreled shotgun which adds a knockback effect to both the player and the target(s!) while reducing the reload time and ammo capacity.
  

There are also some new community maps: cp_egypt, arena_watchtower, and cp_junction as well as the new Scout Achievment pack, of which those achievments are required to have been completed to obtain the new items.

Also, to celebrate the release, TF2 is now half-price till Friday. Thats 10 fracking US Dollars!!!

The update also introduces some very interesting changes, some of which people may have missed:

From http://store.steampowered.com/news/2288/

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

New features

Added The Force-A-Nature, The Sandman, and Bonk!

Added 35 new Scout achievements

Added crit boosted on/off sound effects

Added new sounds for upgraded teleporters

Added new sound for a fully charged medic dying

Add bonus points section to scores

Scouts earn a bonus point for killing Medics who are actively healing a target

Added several new speech concepts, mostly hooked up to new Scout lines

Added new "Remember last weapon between lives" option to the Multiplayer Advanced dialog

Spies can now control which weapon the enemy team sees them holding. Hitting the "last disguise" key while disguised updates the disguise to show the Spy's currently held weapon

Added several new Arena mode announcer speech events.

Added "First Blood" to Arena mode

Removed 2x item respawn times in arena

Changed backstab handling to fix facestabs

Spies disguised as enemy team can now see player IDs for enemies

New maps

Added community maps: cp_egypt, arena_watchtower, and cp_junction

Updated cp_fastlane with Arttu's new version

Mapmaker requests

Added new input for forward speed modifier to FuncTrainTrain

Added TeleportToPathTrack input to func_tracktrain

Bugfixes

Fixed a bug where players would sometimes gib from non-gib damage kills

Fixed stat screen showing an entry for a class called "map."

Fixed item model panels not using team skins

Fixed obscure bug where spectators were able to carry the flag

The Bold items caught my attention, but the one outlined in red is the best one, I think.

Spies can now change the weapon that they are displaying to the enemy while disguised. This makes it easier to blend in with the enemy activity and should make the Spy even more fun to play.

More info can be found at http://www.teamfortress.com/scoutupdate/

Unreal Tournament 3 Retail on Steam

Retail copies of Unreal Tournament III can now be activated on Steam, a popular online content-delivery service by Half-Life makers Valve, that now houses an impressive range of games (Fallout 3, Bioshock, The Orange Box to give a few).

This attracted my attention, as I have a copy of UT3 Special Edition (that I got from England about $80 less than retail in Australia). Why am I interested in this, you ask? Well, it means that one more game I own is integrated into the steam service (i.e. all my games are in the one place) and also, if my game discs are damaged and/or my PC screws up, I can just download the entire game through Steam again - the ultimate backup strategy. Also, this is apparently in preparation for a new update that will incorporate Steamworks, the framework that Left4Dead and TF2 use for achievements and integration into the Steam Community.

I pulled up Steam and entered my CD Key. I activated fine, but I was concerned that I would have to download the entire game again, and also possibly lose my settings/saves. It turns out you can't install UT3 into Steam from the CD, at least not directly. Not contempt with waiting 3-4 days to download 8GB, I decided to try to copy my UT3 Installation into Steam.

Steam stores all 3rd party games (i.e. not source/GoldSrc) in the Steam\SteamApps\common folder (for some reason Left4Dead was also installed this way). First I started to download UT3 from Steam. I stopped the download as soon as it started: I just needed the folder hierachy to be set up. Once that was done, I copied all 8GB of data from my retail copy. This took about 5 minutes, and when done I resumed the steam installation. The download percentage immediately started to skip ahead, perhaps downloading little bits here and there, and finally slowed down about 80%. I checked the steam UT3 folder to see that it was downloading the Visual C++ and DirectX 9 redistributables. I left it overnight to finish.

The next day I came to see UT3 sitting at '100% - Ready'. I fired it up, but it said that 'This game is currently unavailable.' A quick Google search revealed that I needed to remove Read-Only rights from the UT3 folder. Once done, I launched again, then hit an update, which for some reason would only go while I was waiting to launch the game. Nonetheless, I patiently waited. Once done, I had to install AGEIA PhysX, DirectX, Visual C++ Redistributable, and OpenAl sound system. UT3 Started up, and thankfully all my settings and saves transferred through. Looking forward too that update, Epic!