Dan VanWinkle

I was sad not to get into the Steam Beta for Mac, so I decided to do something about it. I did a simple Google search for “Steam Mac Torrent“, and found the steam.dmg file that exists in quite a few places. Installed it, logged in, and get a nifty little message:

Well, a lot of people have talked about going to http://store.steampowered.com/macbeta/welcome and then clicking “Play Portal now for free!”. This will bypass the message telling you that you are not in the beta. All this link does is open the browser protocol “steam://run/52003”

This is where I decided to hack around, and found out something that I haven’t found anywhere else yet. I have purchased quite a bit of games on steam, so I decided to try to install one of them and got this message:

The developer wiki of for steam fully discloses all of the browser protocols (http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_browser_protocol). One such protocol is “steam://install/<id>”. Well, I have bought Portal already, so I figured why not try to go ahead and install it. I opened up Firefox, and typed this into the address bar: “steam://install/400“, as Portal’s id is 400 (I am guessing 52003 is the mac version). Low and behold, it worked!!! I can now install portal. Just out of curiosity, I looked up other gameid’s of games that I own, and sure enough, you can install every game that you own. Here is a comprehensive list of the games I have been able to install:

Batman: Arkham Asylum
Braid
Counter Strike: Source
Portal
Trine
World of Goo

Of course, all this will do is bring you to another place where you cannot do anything, you still can’t play them, but I figure, hey, at least I was able to install games, now it is up to the next guy to figure out how to play them.

Enjoy!

Update: Just for testing purposes, I tried to run steam://run/52003 on Windows 7, and got this message:

This confirms that there are different gameid’s for mac and windows games. Looks like a script will have to be run on Valve’s side to enable the games you own. I would guess that 52003 will NOT be the gameid for Mac Portal when out of beta, but we will see.

The Need to Know:
Title: MultiClutch
Author: Will Henderson
Version: 1.0
Price: Donation
Website: http://wcrawford.org/2008/02/28/everytime-i-think-about-you-i-touch-my-cell/

MultiClutch is a fairly simple App that installs as a preference pane in your System Preferences. After the install, you will see the logo above in the “Other” area of your System Preferences. The layout of the preference pane is very minimalistic and very simple. On the left side you have a list of programs that you have MultiClutch enabled on including a “General” category which will translate across all Cocoa applications. To add an application, all that you need to do is click the + icon as you do in many MacOS programs and select the application you desire. On the right side is a list of multitouch commands and what key press each command will perform.

Now, with the amazing-ness of adding MultiTouch commands to any application, there are a few things left to be desired. One huge functionality that I would love to see added to the program is the ability to add single letter commands without the need for the Command, Option, or Control keys. For example, in Aperture, I cannot add the ‘f’ key press by itself for going to full screen. I also cannot add ‘Option+F’ to filter the images. This may not be a big deal to those people who don’t use Aperture, but this is across the board including the likes of Photoshop and Gimp. It would also be nice to see some Carbon functionality added (You can’t use MultiClutch in Finder), even though this is not the fault of the Author, the addition of this can’t be done until Apple adds this. Luckily you can combine QuickSilver and MultiClutch and make a script to do whatever you want, then add what key presses you want to MultiClutch then to QuickSilver as a trigger (In that order, trust me).

With all of that, I still couldn’t live without the likes of MultiClutch in Firefox to browse back or in any program be able to zoom out then back in to lock my computer (Thanks to QuickSilver and a script I wrote, which I then tied to ‘Command+Option+Control+L’). Even with all of the missing functionality, MultiClutch is still an Application that any MultiTouch enabled notebook should not be without. Unfortunately for us, Will has accepted a job with Apple which means he can’t really work on MultiClutch any longer without it belonging to Apple (Thanks to the agreement ALL Apple employees sign when they start working there, I even had to sign one while working as a Mac Specialist in an Apple Store which pretty much stated *All Your Ideas Are Belong to Apple*). Luckily for us, Will has made the source code publically available (which I have and am working on editing) so the Open Source community can start working on it, and the fact that he is working at Apple now also means that it is possible that many people at Apple are working on integrating this into Mac OS as you are reading this.

If you love this program enough to use it everyday, please don’t forget to donate to Will. I am sure he will appreciate it greatly (I know he sent me a nice thank you email). Have fun with what should have came from Apple!

Update: I recently found a way to ‘trick’ MultiClutch into accepting single keypresses (even though they are not really single keypresses at all)! If you are like me and want to use things like ‘F’ for fullscreen in Aperture or option + [another key] in any other program, you can simply press ‘fn + F’ for ‘F’ or ‘fn + option + F’ for ‘option + F’ ect. Leave a comment if this helps anyone!