Steam Live has received yet another huge update, this time adding some great new features and fixing some of those other little niggles! It’s an application that has been around for a while now and after a long stream of constant updates and improvements, it is bar far the best Steam Client for Windows Phone (At least until Valve releases their own official one!)
Some of the key features are as follows:
- Pin your profile to a live tile showcasing your latest games, playtime and other useful information.
- Get the latest Steam News with images directly on a Live Tile.
- Pin Steam Status information provided by SteamStat.us right to your homescreen on a live tile!
- View your friends list, games list, profile information, inventory, VAC ban status and much more in the application.
- Embracing the beautiful Windows Phone styling coupled with Steam colour schemes and utilising users profile background images.
Store Download Link: http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=6fb43bb9-07c3-48f5-a5cf-cfefb1b539ba
Technical Stuff about this update:
Memory usage has been greatly improved in the latest update and more memory improvements will be coming to the application to keep it running properly on devices with 512MB of RAM. A while back when the application was more primitive, it would have just let the phone download every single image in a list. For example, when downloading all the users games and displaying them in a long list, it would download the image for every single game.
When you get folks with steam libraries 600+ games, the phones quickly run out of memory and crash! I’ve now implemented a much more efficient system where it will only downloaded the maximum number of images that can be seen on screen at any one time. For the Inventory for example, it won’t download/store more than 6 images in memory at any one time. The 6 images stored in memory are updated as you scroll down/up the list of items so it will only ever download the images in view and delete the ones that aren’t.
Something else which is a small change but makes a big difference is detecting which part of the panorama a user is currently on and not downloading the data for that part until the user is actually viewing it. For example, nothing to do with the inventory happens until you pan onto the Inventory panorama item, at which point it will fetch the users inventory and fill the list box.
The same goes with all other panorama items, the friends and owned games lists won’t be populated and images downloaded until it is in view of the user, it’s a small change but really improves performance and reduces data usage.
