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.

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.

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.

Words With Friends
Category: Games
Last Updated: November 1st, 2009
Current Version: 3.0.4
Size: 2.7 MB
Price: Free ($2.99 For Ads-Free Version)

Words With Friends is quite possibly the most addicting and fun online game I have yet to play on the iPhone. Easily the hands-down best word game for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Words is a must-have for any fan of word games. Although there is still room for improvement, as I will touch on later, this game takes the classic board game of Scrabble, of which I am also a huge fan, and mixes things up a bit to presumably avoid getting sued. Essentially, the rules are exactly the same as Scrabble, but the double and triple letter and word tiles are rearranged and some of the letters have different values. There is of course an offline mode allowing you to hand your phone back and forth and play with a friend, but where the application really shines is the online play. If you have friends with an iPhone you can send an invite to them through your contacts list (It searches your contacts’ emails to see if they have a matching email on record with a game account) or you can enter their Words username. If you don’t have friends who can play or are just looking for a challenge, you can also have the game automatically search for an opponent and assign you to someone random. Games can be played at a very quick pace or sometimes you only end up making a move every once in a while and the game can stretch over days. For those slower-paced games, it even uses push notifications to alert you when it’s your turn, if you so desire. Don’t worry, though, if an opponent takes too long to play they will automatically forfeit after several days of inactivity. If you’re as hooked as I am and get impatient waiting for an opponent to play, you can also play multiple games at once, up to 20 simultaneous games – a number which makes my brain hurt.

To be fair to an otherwise incredible game, I will be touching on the improvements that I briefly mentioned earlier. First and foremost would simply be an option to mute the game’s sounds without completely silencing your phone. Aside from that, any other improvements would simply make an already great game even better. For starters, some sort of statistic tracking would be fantastic. Even if it isn’t something along the lines of a global leaderboard, just seeing some local stats such as your own win/loss ratio, your best scoring word, and other similar stats would be fantastic. It would also be nice to have a published word list or for them to simply just use the TWL that is accepted by clubs and tournaments across the country. It would also be nice to see the potential score of your word as you are placing down the letters and maybe highlight the placed letters in red if they do not form a valid word. Last, but certainly not least, would be the ability to more easily rearrange your letters when it is your turn and allowing you to move them and test placement while you are waiting for the other player to make their move.

Aside from the improvements I just mentioned, some of which are hopefully already being worked on by the developers, this game is absolutely fantastic. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch and are looking for a good time sink, install the Word With Friends. You will not be disappointed.

Any avid mac user is familiar with the capabilities of the Menu bar. There are some great built-in icons in that upper right hand corner of your screen, such as the clock, spotligh search, wireless, and volume control, but here are a few third party options that will take the utility of your menu bar to the next level.

iStat Menus
This is the grand-daddy of menu bar stat tools, offering a pull-down calendar, CPU usage, disk usage, memory usage, network activity, and more. For the short period of time that this was not yet compatible with Snow Leopard, I was completely lost.

Butler
Butler’s goal is to make every day common tasks that you perform on your Mac easier. It’s functionality extends far beyond simply the menu bar, but the menu bar features in particular can make just about every aspect of using your Mac easier and quicker.

Caffeine
Caffeine for your Mac serves the same purpose as it does for your body. It prevents you from falling asleep. This tiny program sits innocently in your menu bar until you activate it before doing any task in which you don’t want your Mac to fall asleep, such as watching a movie.

FeedAnimal
If you have a few RSS/Atom feeds that you like to keep tabs on, then this little menu bar icon is perfect. It displays the unread count next to the icon and can even broadcast new items to Growl.

Spirited Away
Hate clutter on your screen? Spirited Away gets rid of it. It’ll just innocently sit on your menu bar and check to see how long your applications have been idle. If an application is idle for a set amount of time, it will get hidden.

Camouflage
If, like me, you have a desktop cluttered with icons, then you might want to clear that up sometimes and remind yourself of what your wallpaper is. Camouflage temporarily hides all desktop icons to do just that.

Coconut Wifi
Mac OS X has it’s built in wifi icon, but Coconut Wifi offers what it doesn’t. It displays you a small bubble on the menu bar which indicates whether you’re in range of a wireless network or not and gives info if you click it.

Know other free menu bar applications that you think deserve a place on this list? Leave a comment and let us know!

Ever wondered when would be the appropriate time to celebrate your Mac’s birthday? Sure you can buy it a present to commemorate the day you purchased it, but it’s not like that is its true birthday. With one tiny download you can easily find out about where it was made and in what country it was constructed. Coconut Identity Card (65KB) will tell you the exact week your Mac was built, where it was built and can even tell you the same information for your iPod or other Mac hardware by entering in the serial number manually.

A new “game” for the Mac called Lose/Lose, created by some guy named Zach Gage, which has a retro-style feel to it is truly a lose/lose scenario for anyone who has the nerve to play it. This so-called “art project” is, simply put, a game of Russian roulette that you play with the files on your computer. In a space-invaders style of gameplay, aliens come down at you, but the big twist is that every one you kill permanently deletes a random file off of your hard drive. If for some reason you come across this game, just don’t play it. Delete it and never look back. The following video tells you a bit more about the “game” and warns those who are tempted to play it.

For those of you that absolutely have to run one or more Windows programs on your Mac, there are a few great options out there. Parallels Desktop being one of the foremost choices. As of yesterday, the latest version, Parallels Desktop 5.0, hit store shelves and is ready to improve your Windows virtualization experience. Their website boasts the product as being faster, smarter, and more powerful. It now offers full Windows 7 support, including the Aero interface and supports DirectX 9.0c/9Ex with Shader Model 3, with no loss of performance or speed. Being the fastest virtualization software currently available for the mac, this truly makes using the latest Windows software on your Mac easier than ever, whether it be Windows-only office applications, Games, or whatever else you need to do.