Gamasutra cornered Epic Games’ Mike Capps (he of the very impressive Epic Citadel demo yesterday at the Apple special event), and Capps confirms that what you see running on your iPhone is the real deal — Unreal Engine 3, with all of the bells and whistles that it has on the major HD consoles. The actual game that Project Sword will become is being designed by Chair (which is the same group that did the popular Shadow Complex game for Xbox 360), and we’ll see the full project soon.

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Here’s a good sign that you’ve made some pretty significant changes to your application: three different people from the company write three different posts about the new design. That’s what the folks from Iconfactory did about Twitterrific 3. David Lanham wrote about Redesigning Twitterrific, not just the timeline, but also the settings, contacts, filtering, and more to “optimize the user experience.” Gedeon Maheux wrote about Twitterrific’s Tough Love, and realizing that Twitterrific had gotten out of hand, along with the steps they took to make it better rather than just pile more on top of it. Craig Hockenberry wrote about not designing for early adopters, whose expectations may limit making something better by expecting you to simply build on what you had before.

I was an early adopter of Twitterrific on the Mac, and still compare all other applications to Twitterrific when I am using them. When I first heard about the changes in Twitterrific 3, I was sure I was going to hate them. After having used it for awhile, I still think Twitterrific is my favorite iPad app. I’ve been using it since I bought my iPad back in mid-June, and although I’ve tried some of the others, I keep coming back to Twitterrific. Many others have just started using Twitterrific 3 for the iPhone or iPad because Twitter turned off “basic authorization” logins. All Twitter applications now must use Twitter’s (severely, thoroughly flawed) OAuth system for logging in.

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A few months ago, Twitter announced that they had acquired Tweetie and the web (I refuse to use the word “blogosphere” because it is a stupid word) exploded with predictions that they had effectively killed off the market for 3rd party Twitter applications.

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Steve Jobs just showed off some screenshots and functionality for Game Center, which will be officially releasing with iOS 4.1 next week. The official app will provide social networking features for App Store games, including friends lists, achievements, “auto matching” (the rest of the world calls that matchmaking), challenges and a host of other cross-platform features for gamers on Apple’s mobile platform.

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ALK Technologies today is releasing a new version of the CoPilot Live app with a feature called ActiveTraffic. It uses real time traffic flow information that mates with dynamic routing technology to get you to your destination by selecting alternate routes, then accurately estimating your new arrival time.

The traffic information comes from INRIX, which is a leading provider of traffic data. I tried the new app, and it certainly showed some traffic snarls. But here in southern Arizona, things don’t get too dicey even at rush hour, so there wasn’t any need to select a new route. I could see very detailed information in Phoenix, where traffic can be downright hellish.

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Plex’s big tease last week turned out to not be an Apple acquisition, but instead a big release, of both a rewritten Mac client to keep all of your media together in one place, and also a brand new iOS app, available now in the App Store for $4.99. Sure, the app’s a little pricey, but if you use the new Plex as your media center, it’s actually a must buy — not only does it work as a remote control, but you can actually stream media from your Plex library directly to your iPhone or iPad from wherever you are.

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No, Human is an intriguing little morsel of gameplay for both the iPhone and the iPad. The clever premise is that humans are planning to go out and explore the Universe, and the Universe, in turn, has decided that’s not a good idea. So, you’re actually playing against humans (who are lobbing fiery meteors out into space) and human-created objects like space stations and rockets.

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Here’s one Angry Birds fan who took things to a whole new level. An industrious fan decided to recreate one of her favorite iPhone games using balls, clay, eggs, slingshots and cardboard boxes for a sort of “live” version of the popular iPhone/iPad game. I sure hope that’s not a wick on the top of the big black bird … or do I?

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Here’s some great news for Netflix subscribers. The free Netflix app has finally made it to the iPhone and iPod touch. Netflix members on plans as low as US$8.99 a month can instantly watch movies and TV shows streamed from the Netflix servers.

This has been an eagerly-awaited app (the iPad version was available at launch), and I downloaded it this morning to give it a test. It works fine on both 3G and WiFi, and the 3G feature is a bit of a surprise given AT&T’s position of holding back on some streaming apps. Slingbox, for example, found dealing with AT&T tough sledding, but the company finally did get the app approved for 3G.

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Chapters (US$3.99 on the iPad) looks like a terrific app for your various notetaking enterprises. I haven’t yet been completely sold on the iPad as a blogging or writing device; so far, I’ve stuck with my MacBook rather than an iPad when I need to be out remotely somewhere keeping notes or writing things down. But Chapters is exactly the kind of app that could change that. With a simple and powerful interface and a set of features that steps aside and lets you write in whatever fashion you want, it could easily help your iPad replace a more powerful notebook computer.

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I still haven’t seen an actual iPad arcade cabinet for sale (all the ones we’ve seen so far have been made by hobbyists for themselves), but here’s a pretty cool case/accessory for your iPhone or iPod touch. Pinball Magic is a little device that you can slide your handheld into, and with the help of a free app, you can play a full pinball game live on a little miniature table. There’s a real ball plunger, flipper buttons, a full LED backlit display, and even a Tilt detector, so you can hit all the usual lights and gadgets (albeit in an extremely small form factor) without throwing quarters in at the local arcade. Assuming they still have those local arcades — I haven’t seen one around in a while now.

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Facebook has posted some pretty impressive numbers regarding its mobile users recently, including a developer saying there are more than 150 million active mobile Facebook users. The site itself has more than 500 million members.

- 12 million are using the Android client
- Nearly 59 million are using the Blackberry client
- 105 million are using the iPhone client*
- The rest are using clients built for Palm, T-Mobile’s Sidekick and more.

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We looked at Naturespace Holographic Audio back in May of 2009. I liked it then, and I like it more now. Naturespace is a free iPhone app that plays back carefully recorded natural environments designed for listening on headphones.

The recordings are created using the binaural technique, where two closely spaced microphones approximate the distance between your ears. When you put headphones on, the results can be dramatic and hyper-realistic.

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