PopCap’s games aren’t ones that require eight-figure budgets and massive media campaigns, but we defy you to find anyone who plays games on any sort of basis who hasn’t poured hours into Peggle, Plants vs. Zombies, or one of the studio’s other addictive hits. While the company initially made its mark on Mac and PC, the last couple of years have seen expansion to other platforms, notably the iPhone, which has hosted pitch-perfect iterations of those aforementioned favorites. Now, with the iPad release looming on the horizon, the big question is this: What’s PopCap planning for Apple’s tablet, and how soon will we be able to play it? Andrew Stein, director of mobile platforms at PopCap, wasn’t able to share many specifics in a recent phone interview, but did offer some insight into how the company approaches new platforms, as well as what opportunities they see in iPad development. Plants vs. Zombies on the iPhone "The iPad offers a new experience for both developers and customers, given that it has higher performance," says Stein. "Having the additional horsepower under the hood and the bigger screen, the higher-resolution graphics give a tableau for developers to get more creative with games. We can do things with the iPad that we can’t do on a smaller iPhone screen." In particular, Stein believes the large 9.7-inch screen will initially surprise iPad users, and likens the upgrade from an iPhone to that of bumping up to a new video game console. "I think that the size of screen is going to make the experience much more immersive, and it’s going to be more than what people expect

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Ever wanted to play Street Fighter on a guitar? Nintendo-music masters the Minibosses share the secrets to their success.       Case Study: The Minibosses Occupation: Rock band specializing in remixed Nintendo music Gear: Assorted Macs, iPod touch units running Bebot , Pro Tools , Tablature , and NES emulators like NESticle and iNES . Friends, rockers, geeks: The Minibosses.   Take a great thing from your youth and run with it. This could be the motto of the Minibosses, a Phoenix-based rock band that for almost 10 years has taken original Nintendo videogame songs and strung them together with incredibly energetic riffs and long medleys in a standard four piece rock format (consisting of two guitars, bass and drums) to become one of the most popular touring acts for any geek event. The band, which consists of Aaron Burke (guitar), Ben Baraldi (guitar), Robin Vining (bass), and Matt Wood (percussion), originally began back in Northampton, Massachussetts, as the Jenova Project, which toyed with the idea of throwing old Nintendo theme songs into the middle of other songs for the fun of it. When the Jenova Project broke up at the end of the ’90s and the Minibosses formed in 2000, the group had found its niche.   Getting to the Good Stuff   It’s one thing to love and adore the Nintendo music you grew up with. It’s another thing to get direct access to that music in order to learn how to play it with different instruments. This is where a series of free Nintendo Entertainment System emulators such as NESticle and iNes first came in. “Those are great because with most of them you can isolate the parts and only listen to the specific stuff you need to figure out,” says Burke. This process became even easier as media players like Winamp and iTunes allowed for Nintendo Sound Files to be loaded in. Third-party extensions like Slow Me Down allow the band the slow down the tempo in order to take the songs apart and reassemble them as needed.   Enter the Mac   Before any kind of CD release, or even a live performance, editing and mixing becomes crucial

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Valve’s announcement that their Steam service would soon be available to Mac users is huge news to the Mac gaming community. While the iPhone and iPod touch have taken off as gaming platform, the Mac has languished in a sort of gaming limbo. Sure we get games, but they’re usually a few months–or even years–behind the Windows version and some games are announced and never materialize. With today’s announcement, The Mac has taken another step to becoming a real gaming gaming platform. We had a chance to talk Steam’s Project Manager, John Cook about their move to the Mac platform, the future of Steam and Valve on the Mac, third-party developers and native- versus Cider-ported games on the Mac.    What convinced Valve to create a Mac version of Steam? John Cook: We recently announced Portal 2 in cooperation with the Steam community, and that’s an example of the transition we’re going through between entertainment as a product and entertainment as a service.  Another example of entertainment as service would be the 100+ updates to Team Fortress 2 that we’ve released since it launched in 2007.  As a result of that on-going service of Team Fortress 2, our highest sales for the product actually occurred 18 months after we launched.  In general, service businesses need to be as close to and as connected to their customers as possible. In order to support entertainment as a service, you need open, high performance Internet clients, and the Mac does a great job at that. What were some of the technological hurdles you encountered while porting Steam?

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This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for: Steam is finally coming to the Mac, and bringing the entire library of Valve games with it. The popular application is King of the Games on Windows, but now it has expanded its reign to include Mac OS X, too. Steam is a digital games distributor, a social networking platform for gamers, a multiplayer host for huge frag fests, and one of the most essential pieces of software for computer gamers everywhere. And if you still have no idea what we’re talking about, think of game titles like Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, Half-Life, Portal, and Counter Strike–these gems will finally be available for Mac heads everywhere. The availability of Steam for Mac gamers means that we’ll finally be able to kick the butts of our PC brethern, without investing in a pricey gaming console, or a Windows PC. Additionally, game publishers will be able to distribute all of their latest game titles via digital downloads, and we’ll be able to play all the various Valve titles across a multitude of different computers, regardless of operating system. We don’t doubt that the Mac versus PC debate won’t continue on for generations to come, but at least there’s finally some common ground. The Steam client for Mac beta will be available in April. To prepare you for the inevitable long nights of multiplayer game playing and trash talking, we’ve put together a comprehensive list of the most essential things you’ll be able to do with the Steam client. Think of it as, a beginner’s guide to a whole new world. Create a personal gaming profile The avatar you choose is the first important step to becoming an integral part of the Steam community. Choose wisely, and your future as an elite computer gamer will flourish. However, if you choose poorly, you may be susceptible to a variety of cruel gamer jokes. See what your friends are up to Valve has managed to virtually emulate those treasured times during our childhood, when you’d head outside just to see what the neighborhood kids were up to.

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We know spring doesn’t officially start for another two weeks, but the way the weather and the sun have been playing with our minds lately, it feels like it might really happen on schedule. Of course, if we know winter, there’s always at least one more trick up its sleeve. But this weather! It almost makes us not want to be inside playing with our tech toys.  So load up these links on your iPhone and get stepping out like us, because it’s another sunshiney week of the best of the best from Mac|Life. Features: – 10 Reasons Why You Can’t Always Rely on GPS on the iPhone – We like to laugh when we see people with smartphones and a GPS system; it seems so redundant. But the iPhone’s GPS isn’t perfect (none are), and you might find yourself needing and not wanting. Here’s how it can happen, in ten easy steps. Worst case scenario isn’t the bear, however; it’s having to use Bing maps. How-Tos: – Getting Started with Final Cut Pro – If there’s anything as complicated and as ever-changing as digital video editing, let us know, because it makes our head hurt. Apple’s good for taking the sting out of lots of things, and Final Cut Pro goes a long way toward doing so, but if you’re just getting started, it’s good to get a little help from your friends. Of course we mean your friends at Mac|Life. Reviews: – CarMD 2100 Handheld Tester – It seems only yesterday we were talking to a coworker who needed just this exactly little handy device. Well, actually, it was over a year ago, but you get the picture. If it had been yesterday, we’d have shoved this article under his nose and told him to diagnose his own car trouble in a snap.

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So, you’ve taken the plunge and purchased Final Cut Studio 3 — congrats! You won’t have too much "paper shock" when you open the tiny little box in FCS3, at least compared to the enormous boxes for the previous two versions, which featured multiple, Biblical-scale tomes pretending to be "instruction manuals." But that doesn’t mean that Apple has made the programs any easier to use — quite the contrary. Each new version has ladled on a plentiful helping of new features, which has only upped the confusion factor for those of you just joining the video editorial world that some of us take for granted. So where can you turn? Thankfully, your friends here at MacLife.com have you covered. Herewith, we present a look at getting started with Final Cut Pro 7, the main hub of Apple’s Final Cut Studio bundle. Fire up your software and cozy up to your browser, but be careful: In the words of Bill Cosby, "You might just learn something." Capture: Just The Facts, Ma’am Before you can do much of anything with Final Cut Pro, you’ve got to get your footage into the software. Although this may seem at first glance to be a brainless, non-creative task, you’ll soon discover it’s better to set things up correctly right from the start and save yourself a lot of grief later on. It doesn’t much matter where your footage is coming from — for the purposes of this how-to, we’re going to assume that you’re going old school with some kind of camcorder that still records on a tape format (let’s go with HDV) via a Firewire connection. (Side note: Final Cut Pro doesn’t play nice with some flash-based cameras such as the popular Flip MinoHD. While the files will import just fine, you’ll have to render the non-standard audio in those H.264 clips before you can even begin to edit, and then again every time you make an edit. We recommend you stick with iMovie ’09 for editing such content until Apple corrects this oversight.) Jack your Firewire cable into the available ports on your computer and camcorder. You’ll need a 4-pin to 6-pin cable, which should have been included with your camera. If you have a recent Mac, you might also need a Firewire 400 to 800 dongle, or cable for some (blame it on Apple for making this more complicated than necessary by removing the standard FW400 ports from newer systems.) The small end (4-pin connector) goes into the camcorder, which is most likely labeled DV Out or i.Link (for Sony cameras).

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    From its humble beginnings on a grad student’s Mac Plus to its complete photo-editing domination, Photoshop has changed the world in 20 short years.   Photoshop is everywhere. And while fundamentally it is the standard professional-quality image editor, it’s also a cultural touchstone with a reach that extends to advertising, fashion magazines, television, film, and the news. Lighter versions like Photoshop Elements, Photoshop.com, and even Photoshop Mobile on the iPhone have distilled its power for the masses, and sites like PhotoshopDisasters.blogspot.com chronicle painful misuses for everyone to point at and giggle about. “Photoshop” the verb was even added to Webster’s dictionary in 1992. In such a Photoshop-saturated society, it’s easy to forget that the software hasn’t been around forever. Since February 2010 marks the 20th anniversary of Photoshop 1.0, now is the perfect time to revisit everything from Adobe’s systematic dismantling of its competition to the way the software was used to make Katie Couric “lose weight.”   Two Decades of Photoshop   We give you every single Photoshop release, plus the effects of Adobe’s software on its competition and our culture.   1987   Release: Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, creates a program called Display for his Mac Plus. It can display 256-shade grayscale images on a 1-bit black-and-white screen with dithering.   1988   Release: Display is renamed Photoshop, and the Knoll brothers (Thomas and John, an effects expert at Industrial Light & Magic [ILM]) license the first version to Barneyscan, a slide-scanner manufacturer. Approximately 200 copies of version 0.87 ship bundled with the scanners. Cultural: The first working version of Photoshop appears at Apple, and the era of Photoshop piracy begins as engineers pass it around amongst themselves and gape in awe.   1989   Release: John Knoll demos Photoshop for Adobe’s primary art director Russell Brown and founder John Warnock

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Well, the year has certainly settled down into the same old routines that were popular in December of 2009. Whodathunkit? We’d hoped you’d have kept your New Year’s resolutions at least a little longer than two lousy weeks, but, then, we’re still spending (wasting) just as much time on Lolcats now as last year. At least we have a little something for you that isn’t a waste of your time. That’s right, it’s our weekly round up of stuff you might have missed while singing along to " The Internet is Made of Cats ." Features: – 50 Killer Mac Apps For Under $50 – Try to find software out there on the internet to do anything, and you’re bombarded with every developer in the world’s version of something. Some are free, some are share, and some cost a little bit. But why risk plunking down your hard earned dollars on something you’ve never even heard of before, something whose quality you can’t judge? See, that’s why you read Mac|Life. We’ve got you covered whether your interests are organizing your collections, sharing files, playing different media formats, getting your to-do lists in order, straightening your finances, or jumping into social media. – 20 Real-World Uses for Google Wave – From the moment it was announced, we signed up for  then pined and ached for our Google Wave invite. Once we got it, though, like a lot of people we weren’t quite sure what to do with it. Unless you know a few other people who can tap its digital richness, it’s not much fun playing with it by yourself. Pass these little lessons along to your friends and get Waving with the best of ‘em. Reviews: – Motorola Droid – Let’s cut straight to the chase here, never mind games, never mind software. Let’s talk the latest smartphone to try a crack at the iPhone’s well-deserved crown, the Motorola Droid

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When it comes to New Year’s Eve, it’s all about the party. From elegant, seven-course dinners to all-night drunken ragers, how you ring in the new decade sets the tone for the remaining 365 days; and since we don’t have the Macworld Expo to look forward to this year, the effects of a bad party can cast a particularly gloomy cloud over the first few weeks of 2010. But this year, you hold your own fate in your hands–literally. With an iPhone in your pocket, even the lamest of gatherings can be magically transformed into something that’s at least cool enough to chronicle on your Facebook page. The bad date The only thing worse than a bad party is a bad companion. Since you can’t exactly run out on your date (at least not before midnight, anyway), there are several iPhone-approved ways to avoid face time with your insignificant other. The easiest way to steal away for an hour or so is to fake an excuse. Using any number of sham phone call apps (we like Fake a Call , which lets you set a timer, voice type, ringtone and number with ease), you can trick your date into thinking an important call is coming through from your mom, sister, best friend (just make sure they’re not actually at the party), or, if you’re desperate, your doctor or boss. Or, to really sell the emergency, ignore the faux call and send yourself a fake follow-up text . With phase one complete (separation), you can move on to phase two, circumvention. Now, there are several ways to accomplish this, with varying degrees of difficulty. The simplest, of course, is to use your fake caller as an excuse to bail, but if you don’t want to worry about corroborating stories, head over to Google and find an illness

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Armed with ideas, ink pens, and those ever-handy cocktail napkins, Mac|Life ’s tech nerds imagine fauxtotypes of their own.   This year we asked other journalists to imagine the future of Apple hardware , but in our January issues from 2008 and 2009, we designed fauxtotypes of our own conception (see here and here ). But even though our friends in the tech community did the heavy lifting for us this month, we couldn’t resist going at least as far as “the cocktail napkin stage” with a number of ideas. In the illustrations below, we present six product concepts that imagine clever simplicity in industrial design. Or at least we hope our ideas reach that quality level–looking at some of these drawings, it appears that a few of us may have had cocktails with our cocktail napkins.   The HoloRad   Susie Ochs, Senior Editor The HoloRad is a wrist-mounted hologram projector that conjures up a realistic 3D image of Princess Leia (other hologrammed luminaries–such as Ben Franklin, Steve Wozniak, and the robot from the Short Circuit movies–are also available for purchase). The hologram character will read your email, RSS headlines, weather forecast, and other up-to-the-minute content. The HoloRad uses an always-on, next-gen wireless connection combining 4G networking, Wi-Max, and Wi-Fi. Sophisticated kinetic charging provides power for the device: Every time you move your arm, that energy is harnessed and stored by a micro fuel-cell battery. The HoloRad

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