If you've tried to play a game on Steam anytime in the past few years, you've probably come up against the problem that any ongoing updates are paused as soon as you boot it up. You could manually make it work, but sometimes the download would restart when you quit and it was in general, a pain in the ass. Now though, Valve has updated Steam to not only make simultaneous play and download possible, but a whole host of other download related changes too.
Updates now won't necessarily happen automatically, as you can now choose whether you want them to be downloaded, or simply let you get on and play the game as it is. This is a boon for those that sometimes find themselves having to wait for a big update on a slow connection before they can play.
If you experience high latency but have a decent bandwidth, your download rates should now go up too, though that's not much consolation for struggling with all online games.
There's also been quite a few changes for Big Picture mode, including the ability to opt into betas and edit launch options. Cloud sync errors shouldn't loop anymore and as long as you don't move the mouse cursor, it will no long appear.
There's loads more fixes and tweaks, along with updates for Mac and Linux users, that should make both platforms more Steam compatible.
Read the full changelog here.
