This won’t stand, Valve. So that you’re constructing a brand new video recording system into Steam. Nice! However in consequence the desktop model of Steam has now misplaced what I think about its second-most very important button, proper behind the large inexperienced Play. Valve is hiding my screenshots and I can not overstate how a lot it is sending me.
There may be some PTSD concerned right here. As soon as upon a time I owned a MacBook Air, and I liked that laptop computer. Good piece of {hardware}: no Home windows laptop computer has ever had a trackpad that good. It weighed nothing. The battery life was killer in its day. However man there have been some issues about Mac OS that I could not stand, together with notably Apple’s desire for hiding away all my recordsdata, as if catching sight of “.jpg” would instantly stricken me with the bubonic plague. If I needed to have a look at the images from my telephone within the Images app, straightforward peasy, however discovering the precise recordsdata concerned spelunking by some horrific sequence of folders.
Considered one of my strongest opinions about computer systems is that I shouldn’t need to dig by, like, “Consumer > Wes > .temp > astuvkcaqcf > 4748949585” simply to search out some rattling recordsdata.
Possibly Apple’s gotten higher about that within the years since—I do not know. However to see Valve go down the identical street now makes me need to choose up my PC and stroll instantly into the ocean with it. I reside about two miles away from the ocean which is a very long time to hold a 30-ish pound desktop, however on the intense facet, holding onto it would guarantee I sink to the underside of the ocean the place Steam’s screenshot interface can now not damage me.
For a few years the Screenshot window has included an omnipotent button, a easy car for uncooked, environment friendly digital scrapbooking. You clicked it, and it opened up a Home windows Explorer window straight to all of the screenshots you’d ever taken for that particular person recreation utilizing Steam. Straightforward! Its different options have at all times been far much less helpful to me: I not often need to add a screenshot to the Steam Cloud as a result of I don’t put up on the Steam boards. I don’t want to make use of Steam’s screenshot administration window as a result of if I am taking a screenshot, I simply need the dang .jpg, or an entire handful of them, to add onto this web site.
Now in Steam’s newest beta, clearly pulling in a simplified interface that prioritizes the Steam Deck, the power to browse to one-click bounce to that folder is gone, changed by a Share button. You additionally used to have the ability to right-click a person picture and bounce to the file location that approach. That is gone, too. Valve needs you to remain inside Steam for all these things now, furthering a development the place all computing occurs in an app and barely acknowledges the pc it is put in on.
Has something been extra of a scourge on pc interfaces this final decade than the Share button? It is the last word “clicking this does not truly do shit, nevertheless it does open up a listing of different issues you are able to do that used to have their very own buttons” little bit of obfuscating UI design. Through the Share button, Steam now lets me, separately, click on “Save picture” and select the place to avoid wasting a screenshot on my pc.
However it’s already on my pc, Valve. The place is it? The place did you set it? WHERE ARE MY FILES!!
The outdated interface stays within the non-beta department of Steam for now, however I need to implore Valve: convey again your second-best button. Do not make Steam one other casualty of the obfuscation period of interface design. Typically The Outdated Methods are greatest. I’d even settle for a return to skeuomorphism if that was the one method to get again the straightforward click on motion I crave. Animate your screenshot window rolling open like a file cupboard filled with manila folders if that is what it takes. Simply give me again my button!