Thanks to a great new discovery by 9to5Mac, there is news of two new types of gestures that have popped up in the iPad SDK 3.2b4. As seen in the picture below, the devices will presumably now include an option for developers to use a “3 Tap” and a “Long Press”. The long press is currently used exclusively by the OS itself for the pop-up copy menu; The 3 tap is used to toggle the display on or off while using VoiceOver. Both of these however, will now be available for developers to include within their applications to perform other functions. Although there is no official word yet that these will be also available to developers for the iPod Touch and iPhone, it is probably safe to assume that they will be.

They’ve been teasing us about this for quite some time, but now it’s official. Valve’s digital distribution service Steam is coming to Mac in April, and it is bringing it’s most popular titles with it. Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and, of course, the Half-Life series (along with Source) will all be available for Mac users everywhere. Not only that, but you will be able to play the games cross platform – starting on a Mac and continuing the game on a PC, or visa versa. Still not awesome enough? Mac and PC versions will be bundled together for a single price, so you don’t have to buy one copy for your PC and another for your Mac.

Here’s the press release:

VALVE TO DELIVER STEAM & SOURCE ON MAC

Leading Gaming Service Expands to Mac Platform

March 8, 2010 – Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve’s gaming service, and Source, Valve’s gaming engine, to the Mac.

Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.

“As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. “The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services.”

“Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac,” said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. “Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. “The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.”

Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. “Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step,” said Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. “We’re always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.

Apple announced today that they are delaying the release of the iPad until April. When initially unveiled on January 27th, the release date was loosely set for “late March”. Don’t panic, however, if you’ve preordered one or were planning on heading to your local Apple store to pick one up the second they’re available, you don’t have to wait long. The officially set release date when you’ll start seeing the iPad on store shelves is April 3rd, which isn’t too far of a stretch from their original “late March” guesstimates. Apple has not specified what caused the delay in release, so any information you see elsewhere is still speculation at this point.

Anyone who’s ever played multiplayer online games enjoys them and this is no exception when it comes it iPhone and/or iPod Touch (and soon to be iPad) gaming. The following 5 free games are all internet-enabled multiplayer games that any serious iPhone gamer will enjoy.

Words With Friends Free is in a league of its own. As we’ve said previously, this is easily the absolute best word game available for the iPhone today and the online play earns it the top spot on this list. Don’t let the title deceive you, this should be installed even if you don’t have friends.

Chess With Friends Free comes from the same people who brought us Words With Friends, but instead of a Scrabble-esque game, you get to play chess with friends, random opponents, or I suppose even your enemies. If you’re looking to learn this classic strategy game or just practice your chess skills, this is the app to do it with.

Mancala FS5 Free is a hugely addictive version of Mancala for your iPhone. This classic game of who can get the most beads is hugely addictive and the online play is very competitive. If you liked playing this game as a kid, you’ll loving having it on your phone where you can play against AIM buddies, the computer, or just random players.

Live Poker is pretty self explanatory. Play poker, live, against other people. This ties in with the hugely popular version for Facebook, allowing you to play against your friends. It gives you 1000 free chips a day to play with, so don’t worry about going broke. The interface is clean, easy to use, and makes online free poker a fun time-waster.

Cube is one of the first and arguably the best first person shooter available today for the iPhone platform. It can be both single- or multiplayer and provides fast, fun gameplay. The controls take a bit to get accustomed to, but once you’ve got them down you’ll be fragging with the best of them.

Apple briefly released – and then unreleased – the iPad SDK the other day, and much to the surprise of those who got their hands on it, there was camera support. Needless to say it is impossible to know if this was for a once toyed-with feature that was taken out or for the possibility of inclusion in future models, but the software development kid includes support for a front facing camera, camera flash, zoom and even video conferencing.

For those of you who consider the glass half full, this could mean the potential future inclusion of a camera, but the realists out there probably realize that this was a once included feature that was cut for one reason or another.

Certain files within your operating system are hidden and although they exist, there’s no way to see them and no setting in your System Preferences to make them appear. For many web developers, like myself, the .htaccess is a common offender. It is something that you occasionally need to edit, especially when setting up a new website, but Mac OS X keeps it hidden making it extremely hard to edit.

To show all hidden files within your OS, here’s what you do.

1. Open the Terminal.
2. Enter the following command in to the terminal:
   

   defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
   killall Finder

3. Done! Your finder will take a second to reload and then you’ll notice all sorts of hidden files throughout your hard drive.

Done with whatever hidden file you needed to deal with and sick of seeing all the extra crap? Do the exact same thing as above but change “TRUE” to “FALSE” and everything will return to it’s original invisible state.

NOTE: Generally speaking, most hidden files are probably invisible to the average user for a very good reason. Be careful with what you’re editing, moving, or deleting and backup your system beforehand.

For those that use virtually any type of online chat service, Adium is there to serve all of your online chatting needs. There are plenty of Mac applications out there to allow you to chat with your friends, but Adium stand tall above the rest as the best chat client available for Mac OS X. Based on the multi-platform open-source library Libpurple, Adium is a user-friendly chat application designed exclusively for Mac users. Adium supports all of the most common chat protocols, including AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, and Facebook Chat, as well as at least a half dozen others.

Where the program really shines, however, is not the long list of protocols it can use but the visual interface; Just about everything about the way it works and looks can be customized. The look of the contact list can be tweaked to one’s liking in just about every way possible, making it easy to find your online buddies. Message windows can be individual or tabbed in a single window and they way they display the messages also has several options to suit ones needs from a very professional appearance to something more along the lines of iPhone text messages. Even the icon on the dock can be set to various different colors or you can easily import your own.

Did I mention it supports Growl notifications? For those unfamiliar with it, Growl integrates with many programs on your system to show you little pop-up notifications of what is happening in the background without making you Cmd-Tab back and forth. Adium integrates with Growl perfectly and allows you to see when your buddies come online or go offline, when you get a message, when a file transfer is completed, or just about anything else within the program that you might want a notification about.

Just about the only feature that I truly wish Adium had that it does not have integrated is video chat. Many of the chat protocols it has integrated can support this, but the program itself does not (yet?) support it.

Sounds like a great application, right? Well, I’ve got more good news. It’s free.

If you chat online via one of the various popular chat programs out there or even multiples, then this is the application for you. It blows just about any other chat program out of the water and will make your Windows-using friends jealous that they can’t get it.

The iPhone OS 3.1.3 update is now available via the iTunes store. This a firmware update does very little other than fix some small bugs experienced by users of the 3.1.2 firmware. You can update your phone to the latest firmware simply by connecting it to your computer and letting iTunes download and install it. Direct download links for the update are not yet available, but will be posted once they are. For those of you using jailbroken and/or unlocked phones, do NOT upgrade, as your phone will no longer be unlocked and may become temporarily bricked.

In case you missed this, MadTV predicted the now announced iPad way back in 2007.

In case you’ve fallen off the face of the Earth and haven’t seen this all over the place already, Apple today introduced their newest product: The iPad. This is indeed, as you may have suspected, the long rumored tablet that has been getting so much hype over the last several months and from the looks of it so far, the hype was justified. Starting at $499, it offers web browsing, email, photos, video, functions as an iPod with iTunes, is already compatible with 140,000 Apps for the iPod Touch and iPhone, introduces a brand-new type of eReader from Apple called iBooks, has integrated maps, and much much more.

There’s really no way that I can do it justice, so head on over to Apple’s website to find out more.