GROUP BY and aggregate functions

It appears that ther is no way to use an aggregate function ( max() ) without
also using GROUP BY. I'm trying to do something different, though. I have a
table of values and dates. I would like to return only the most recent row
for each value (which could be a username, to keep track of the user's
current widget count while preserving old values for recordkeeping). Like
this:

testdb=> select val, max(postdate) from status group by val;
 val|          max
----+------------------------
  0 | 2001-07-16 05:31:01-07
  1 | 2001-07-16 05:31:12-07
(2 rows)

except that I also need the (user's, whatever's) unique id to do any joins.
This is as close as I can get: there is now one row for each value of id. I
only want the value of id for the row that matches max(postdate).

testdb=> select val, max(postdate), id from status group by val, id;
 val|          max           |id
----+------------------------+---
  0 | 2001-07-16 04:43:02-07 | 0
  0 | 2001-07-16 05:31:01-07 | 3
  1 | 2001-07-16 04:43:02-07 | 2
  1 | 2001-07-16 05:31:12-07 | 3
(4 rows)

Any advice would be appreciated!

--
Henry House
OpenPGP key available from http://romana.hajhouse.org/hajhouse.asc