In yet another way that Valve is taking over gamer’s lives (and us blissfully welcoming them), their popular gaming portal Steam just got a bit cooler with a brand new app on iOS and Android for free. However, the service itself is still in a closed beta, meaning you can download the application but not necessarily be able to do anything with it just yet. According to Valve, the app allows the user to chat with friends, view steam games, read up on any steam news, and purchase content for their gaming library.

In order to be considered for the beta, all you have to do is download the app and log into their steam account.

As time goes on more people are expected entrance into the beta program.

In Apple’s effort to completely do away with wired networking, they plan on deploying support for WiFi 802.11ac on their devices this year, according to a report by Apple Insider. This is also called ‘Gigabit WiFi’ and, as the name implies, such a network could go faster than one Gigabit per second data transfer rate. This potentially means that Apple TVs, Macs, and mobile devices could be downloading information at much faster rate than they have been in the past. Even the prospect of such a high wireless transfer rate is enough to get many folks excited.

While 802.11ac is not an official standard as of yet, Apple has been known to be ahead of the curve when it comes to wireless technology, and consequently, they have been among the first adopters of a new consumer-grade technology in the past.

And it’s a fair bet that this will pay off again.

In a relatively modest event, Apple held a press conference at the Guggenheim in New York City with the next generation of educational applications. With that, people came away with three exciting new announcements:

• iBooks 2 - Multimedia textbooks are now available in iBooks, complete with photos, videos, and interactive diagrams. Users can search terms within the textbook, highlight them, and make notes on any page they like. Each of the textbooks are available at a price point of $14.99 or less, far less than their physical counterpart. However, each of these textbooks are only available in the United States at the moment, and take up between 855MB and 2.77GB. Hopefully with the inevitable iPad 3, we’ll have a bit more storage space to put these books in.
• iBooks Author – Now people can create these very cool books for the iPad on their Mac OS systems for free. Authors can embed animations, videos, pictures, 3D objects, and even embed custom HTML in their books. It also allows you to import chapters from Microsoft Word or Pages. One important note, please carefully read the EULA for this application before you submit any completed work to Apple. While I can’t confirm anything, but I heard some rumors of it’s far-reaching implications for the authors submitting material. I’ll add more on this when there is something to say.
• iTunes U – Not to be confused with Wii U. A service that was primarily used to deliver lectures is now getting it’s own application. Any educator, whether it be a University professor or an elementary school teacher, can distribute courses online to be consumed by anyone, and for free. This particular app is definitely exciting for anyone looking to further their learning experiences. Introduction to Robots from Stanford University, Multicore Programming Primer from MIT, School of Architecture from Notre Dame, and much more. I’m seriously considering looking up some stuff on Photoshop CS5.

According to Patently Apple site, the US Patent office has officially granted Apple a new patent on organizing and displaying episodic content, essentially all of television programming. If nothing else, the patent greatly fuels speculation of the idea that Apple is designing a proper television set. But, to be fair, this could be used via the normal iTunes Store or Apple TV.

Even by patent standards, this is fairly abstract language. Essentially, the claim is that they can sort and display information based on meta-data from the television show, whether that be by actor, show title, date recorded, etc.

Here is a direct quote of the patent claim:

A computer-implemented method, comprising: receiving episodic content including one or more episodes of television programs and storing the episodic content in a data store; receiving metadata associated with the episodic content and storing the received meta data in the data store; displaying on a display device a menu arranged in an interface environment, the menu comprising a list of menu items associated with the episodic content; displaying on the display device a sort interface arranged in the interface environment, the sort interface defining a plurality of sort options and being configured to receive a selection of a sort option and to sort the list of menu items based upon the selection; in response to receiving a selection of a sort option: determining whether the received metadata stored in the data store includes metadata that facilitates sorting the menu items in accordance with the sort option: in response to determining that the received metadata does include metadata that facilitates sorting the menu items in accordance with the sort option, sorting the menu items based on the received metadata in accordance with the sort option; and in response to determining that the received metadata does not include metadata that facilitates sorting the menu items in accordance with the sort option: extracting from the received metadata that is associated with additional metadata that facilitates sorting the menu items in accordance with the sort option; providing the extracted metadata to a content provider and receiving the additional metadata from the content provider in response; and sorting the menu items based on the additional metadata in accordance with the sort option; and displaying on the display device the sorted menu items.

Many things came out of CES this past week, most of it is a further solidification of Apple’s hold on the market. One thing that Apple has expressed an interest in at CES is HzO “WaterBlock” technology. The company was advertising at CES that WaterBlock is an organic, non-toxic, solution that adds essentially no weight to the product and without it’s structure changing. Meaning that an iPhone will still ‘feel’ like an iPhone. Many mobile companies are “very interested” in such a product, including Apple. In fact, HzO has demonstrated that it can protect the iPhone 4S, iPods, and iPads.

Whether or not Apple ends up going with HzO is anyone’s guess, but you can bet that they are going to find some sort of water resistant solution for their products very soon.

From the folks at 5th Cell who brought you Scribblenauts, a new game called ‘Run Roo Run‘ is on it’s way this Thursday. This one looks to be a lot of fun, I’ll be picking this one up and I’m sure it will be on the AppSlappy review radar. By the way, I’m told there will 420 levels at launch.

Found this to be a cool Infograph of how and why corporations move to developing on the mobile space, from xcubelabs.

This is an obvious promotion for G-Forms, but fairly cool nonetheless. Not a whole lot needs to be said, it’s a fall from 100,000 feet, in space.