Steam UI Beta

Valve has just released new beta for there Steam Client. The beta was release on the 23rd and provides a completely redesigned user interface.

It’s very easy to activate if you’ve already got steam installed, and if you have any bugs or you don’t like it, you can just roll your steam client back to normal. To activate the click here or in steam navigate to settings-> Account and click the change button on “beta participation”.

The new interface is overall a much nicer experience, each game now has it’s own web/info page showing you which of your friends have the same game, your achievements, any new updates about the game,even the store has a redesign which allows you to see if any of your friend have already brought the game.

Steam Main Game Page

The new game pages look great, layout is easy to read, game information is listed relevantly, and if you don’t want all the game info you also have the choice of a list mode like normal or even an ICON mode for listing all your game(just like thumbnail in windows). You also now have the option to add custom categories to your games and then filter your games library via you category, so for example you can have your favourites like you can now, but you could also have an FPS category, or setup Multiple Favourite so on a shared computer “Mikes Favourites” and “Vanessa’s Favourites” etc…

Steam Game View in ICON mode

Valve have also added some new views, with a “Downloads” view now available. This lists all your new games that are currently downloading anything weather that a new game installing or if an update is downloading, also shows handy stuff like how much is downloaded, how much left to go, download speed etc…

Steam Downloads View

There is also a NEWS view which provides an access to all related valve news, so product updates, new game release, official community groups(e.g. TF2 blog, l4d blog). It loads to a nice aggregated view showing all current news, but also offers filtering by channel, searching and access to archives(if you want to check old news???), but again all in all nice layout giving a much improved method to find out what is happening on steam or in your favourite game community.

The new interface itself, also is much snappier then the current UI. Page changes are crisp and although still relatively resource hunger no more so than the current UI. Steam’s official release information can be located <a href=”http://store.steampowered.com/uiupdate/“>here</a>.

For anyone who uses steam, give it a go if you don’t like it or have problems you can always go back, but as it’s beta steam is asking for feedback too so now is your chance to get steam to fix any little bugs you get or to see if they can add a feature you think is needed.