Steam, Steam, Steam.

I knew this would be a love/hate relationship from the start.

You see, Steam for Mac, I love your games. Well, some of them. A lot of them are crap. But the ones your parents, Valve, made, like Portal and the Half-Life series, are unparalleled. Team Fortress 2 seemed like great stylish fun when I tried it briefly (under Windows), although it’s not really my thing. And you distribute some unbelievably great third-party titles too, like Braid and Machinarium.

I love how everything seems to perform better and crash less under OS X than under Windows, even on the same hardware. And I love the way I can switch from a full-screen game to any other app instantly via ⌘-Tab, and then switch back with no delay or funky redraw problems. That’s something I’ve never seen under Windows.

But I think you have some misconceptions about how Mac software should behave. Here are just a few of the things you’re doing wrong:

• You have a “Run Steam when my computer starts” preference which is unchecked by default, while “Open at login” for Steam.app is secretly enabled as Steam installs. That’s downright deceptive, and no way to win friends.

• You’re putting the software I download in my Documents folder, which is inside my home directory. That’s an incredibly bad idea. Documents is for, well, documents. I might keep my homedir on a second drive, for one thing. I might have a different backup strategy. There are tons of reasons this is the wrong choice. What’s the right choice? Authenticate and install into /Applications, like every other OS X vendor does (yes, even Adobe). Keep your data files inside the application bundle they belong to. If you have data files common to more than one game, they can go in a Steam folder in /Library/Application Support. The only things that should go in my home directory are things pertaining to my own user account, such as settings and save files. (That’s what ~/Library/Preferences is for. Not ~/Documents.) This isn’t Windows, where you can just ejaculate files all over C:\ and no one cares.

• When I choose “Create an application shortcut” during an install, you put the shortcut in an Applications folder inside my home directory. This makes so little sense I don’t even know how to respond to it.

• If I also ask you to create a desktop shortcut, what you create isn’t a proper shortcut (we call them “aliases,” by the way): it’s a full copy of the app bundle you stuck in ~/Applications. That’s nothing but a pointless waste of disk space.

• Speaking of wasted space, you’re also inexplicably installing the Windows executables for some games. I hope you’re doing something really clever with them.

We could talk for hours about how awful the Steam app’s user experience is — how your tooltips deactivate your main window, how you won’t stop bombarding me with ads for games that won’t run on my Mac — but all that is secondary, and besides, it only hurts you when I decide not to shop at your hideous store. But the issues I listed above are all demonstrably bad practices that make my computer harder to use.

Please, Valve, hire some experienced Mac developers who care about doing things right. And fix your shit.