Valve finally unveils an overhauled UI for Steam, and it's awesome

So you prefer Direct2Drive?

First thing I said to myself too. Looks very similar.

Okay...as fantastic as it would be to have Steam (or something like it) on OS X, what good would it be at this point in time?

All of Valve's games are Windows-exclusive (and DirectX-based, preventing any ports from happening), not to mention most or all of other game developers' games, so that rules out having content for the Mac Steam community to play, unless we all just take our existing copies of Bejeweled 2 and TastyPlanet and add them to our games list in the Steam client. (Or, y'know, we could add our Games folder as a stack on the Dock and achieve the same thing.)

Apple's made it painfully clear over the last decade or so that they have no intention of supporting Mac gaming, so there's not going to be any encouragement from the OS vendor themselves for developers to start creating real games for the platform, like there has been from Microsoft.

Also, keep in mind that this is just a *beta* of an update to the look-and-feel of the existing Steam client. It's not a major new version of the client itself, and any (extremely hypothetical) releases of the client on other platforms would most likely be saved for major new versions, if other software is anything to go by.

Actually, the "just look-and-feel" thing isn't entirely true. One thing that's changed under the hood, according to Valve's press release, is that they've finally dumped the decrepit old IE engine they used to use to display the store, community, etc. pages, and put WebKit in its place.

Worked without any problems for me. You might try looking on their forum to see if anyone else has had that problem, and posting about it. There's a direct link to said forum in the titlebar of the new UI (in the form of a "beta" badge graphic), but if it isn't getting that far in the first place...

i figured it out. the Steam updater would hang at 27% and tell me there was some critical error. i ended up having to back up all my games, reinstall Steam and boot into Safe Mode with networking and run Steam there. the updating finished and now it works when i run Windows normal. major pain in the ass but now that i got everything running i have to say this new UI is absolutely phenomenal!