Via a series of brilliant teasers sent out to various Mac news sites, Valve Software has been slowly intimating at their forthcoming release of Steam for Mac OS X. From Valve’s distributed imagery, games like Half-Life, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and Portal would all be on tap. The Game Developers Conference next week could be the venue for an iron-clad confirmation.

Yes, that is what it looks like. iMaxi – The Apple iPad Case with Protective Wings takes the obvious moniker joke to the extreme. Etsy seller Hip Handmaids says the case “shields [the iPad] from all those unsightly and embarrassing data leaks that would make any motherboard worry!” See what they did there? The case also comes in a… red-threaded interior version. True story, bro.

On the same day Steve turned 55, iTunes recorded its 10 billionth song download. What are the odds of that?! I’m no mathematician, so bear with me… let’s see… divide by 12… carry the 55… the answer is… purple. What? In any event, Happy Birthday Steve!

The Touchy Remix from Intactlab is an interestingly-designed, table-like computer with a curved fiberglass base and 40 inch touchscreen (1366 x 768 resolution). Powered by a fully-integrated Mac mini, it also has four USB ports and an optional iPhone dock. You can get all Touchy feely with this video demonstration.

The iPhone app addLib, as described by WOW, “mixes the Grid System, a fractal theory, the golden ratio and the Facial Recognition System, and then creates graphic design. It seems the layout is made at random, but it comes from the rigorous calculated system.” So in short, it takes your ugly-ass photos and attempts to lesson their horrific nature via embellishments of typography, form, and placement. Get it via iTunes now.

With the announcement of the iPad, a whole new world of cases and protection for the device has presented itself. I’m a big iPhone case whore myself (with the Switcheasy Colors still my favorite), so this type of development intrigues me greatly. Griffin already has a line of iPad cases available, including the FlexGrip (pictured above), Elan Passport and Sleeve, and the Jumper. As with most iPhone cases, my main protection gripe applies here, too: why doesn’t anyone ever protect the home button? (except for you, my dear Switcheasy Colors case).

With many months of speculation, rumors, and guessing put to rest, Steve unleashed the iPad upon planet Earth today. What is an iPad? A Kindle on steroids? An iPhone without the phone? A MacBook lite? Well, beyond a tampon joke-maker’s dream, it’s a little bit of all of those. Entry-priced at $499, it comes with Wi-Fi and/or 3G, a 9.7-inch LED touch display, and Apple’s 1GHz A4 custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip. The feature list covers the full capabilities best.

Sorry for the non-update yesterday, folks, but my dry, bony little fingers were too nervous to type in anticipation of today’s APPLE “LATEST CREATION” EXTRAVAGANZA! With some claiming to already have photos of a late-production Apple tablet, that mythical product announcement seems like a shoe-in. Although, wouldn’t it be funny, after all this mega-hype, if the tablet didn’t even exist? …No? Not even a little? In any case, stay tuned to live coverage from the event to get the latest as it happens!

Yo Nexus One, I’m really happy for you, I’mma let you finish making headlines, but the iPhone is busy SAVING LIVES. Dan Woolley, trapped beneath the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince for over 60 hours, used the iPhone app “Pocket First Aid & CPR” from Jive Media to treat his own wounds and stay alive. The above before-and-after Google Earth images reveal how the hotel was reduced to rubble after the massive Haitian earthquake.

BumpTop has released a Mac version of its 3D OS (Finder) interface. The user’s desktop is essentially transformed into a virtual room, which facilitates pinning files to a wall, stacking documents together as a single “pile”, or growing/shrinking items in real time (to establish a visual hierarchy). On the Mac-specific side, the interface now even has multi-touch gesture support. Meager words don’t do BumpTop justice, so check out the interface video to see just how cool it is.