Alakazapps today is proud to announce Magic Beer Bottle 1.0, a beer simulator that literally comes off the screen. After demonstrating what looks like a normal iPhone(R) ‘beer app’ , the performer of the trick can literally pluck the top off the bottle – it becomes real in their fingertips. Beer simulators have existed since the dawn of the App Store, Magic Beer Bottle takes the concept to the next level.
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Touch Arcade has the news that the long-awaited Ravensword and a number of other games built on the Unity game engine have been rejected by Apple from the App Store. The problem appears to be a number of API calls in the engine (though not specifically the game themselves, as I understand it) that allow the games to access the iPhone’s number and send it back to the developer’s servers.
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Apple is looking to hire a game and media software engineer for its iPhone and iPod touch team, perhaps signaling that the company intends to expand its first-party software offerings.

The listing posted this week is noteworthy because Apple has only released four applications on its iPhone App Store since it first launched, and only one of them — Texas Hold’em — is a game. The $4.99 virtual card game was released in 2008.

The advertisement seeks a full-time employee to work at the company’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters. Apple is looking for a “passionate gamer” with 3 to 4 years of video game development experience. The person would help design and implement “interactive multimedia experiences” on the iPhone and iPod touch. Only candidates who have shipped “at least one AAA title” are asked to apply.
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NASA creates prototype chemical sensor

Jing Li, a physical scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, has used the hardware connectivity made available in iPhone OS 3.0 to create a “compact, low-cost, low-power, high speed nanosensor-based chemical sensing” external attachment. The prototype device, which is said to be about the size of a postage stamp, connects to the iPhone through its 30-pin dock connector.
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AT&T is clearly not going to take it anymore. Today, they blasted back at Verizon for the nasty ads about AT&T coverage.

In a press release today, the communications giant pulled out all the stops:

“AT&T’s wireless data coverage reaches 303 million people – or 97% of the U.S. population, where they live and work.

AT&T is the #1 network for smartphones, with twice the number of smartphone customers than Verizon, our closest competitor. Some of the reasons include:
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The Teehan+Lax iPhone home screen concept is about to become a reality thanks to saurik.

Initially the concept will materialize as a lockscreen widget via saurik’s new Cydget framework. Dubbed Element, a beta will hopefully be available by next week.

You can see from the screens it’s essentially just a scrollable list of applications and notifications. We envision it behaving in much the same way that the list view does in the Calendar application. Read more…

Apple has quietly launched iTunes Preview, a web based preview for those iTunes links that used to just open the application.

Previously, when linking to a song or album in iTunes your browser would open a blank page and prompt you to open the link with the iTunes application. This was fine if you had the iTunes application installed but annoying if you didn’t. Read more…

As the iPhone has proven itself to be a formidable competitor in the handheld gaming business, the president of Nintendo has said his company must differentiate itself to survive.

As Apple portrays the iPod touch and iPhone as the ultimate portable gaming machine, Nintendo, maker of the Nintendo DS, has seen its profits freefall last quarter, from 133 billion yen a year prior to 64 billion yen. Highlighting the newfound competition between Apple and Nintendo, The Wall Street Journal noted that Nintendo has fended off several potential portable challengers, but it hasn’t quite faced a competitor like the iPhone.

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Large-scale layoffs have been hitting everywhere in the past year, and Electronic Arts is now no different: according to Gamasutra, the game publisher announced today that it will lay off 1,500 workers by April 2010, after posting a year-to-year decrease in revenue and a net loss of $391 million.

About 1,300 of the freshly unemployed individuals will result from the full closure of some of EA’s facilities. This will cost EA money at the outset, but they estimate Read more…

Have you ever tried to imagine the iPhone with an operating system other than Apple’s iPhone OS. The Chinese certainly have and they successfully made an iphone clone as usual running the Google Android OS 1.5, this is quite interesting as it brings ideas and speculation about running other OS’s on the iPhone. Oh how we can only dream of being able to boot an iphone and choose which OS to run such as symbian, Android OS, heck even the Palm Pre’s OS and yet it again it will only be a dream.