The April 2012 episode of Open Apple, the Apple II community’s only co-hosted podcast, is now available.

This month, our hosts chat with world video game record holder and Apple II game critic Brian Picchi, whose YouTube channel showcases the best and worst of Apple II entertainment. It’s a good time to be a convention-goer: registration has opened for KansasFest 2012, the lineup for Vintage Computer Festival East 8.0 has been announced, 8 Bit Weapon played at the Smithsonian’s opening of the Art of Video Games, and Jordan Mechner is keynoting PAX East. Kickstarter continues to be popular for reviving classic franchises, Ewen Wannop updates SNAP and SAFE on a shoestring budget, and Jordan Mechner unearths his Prince of Persia source code. On eBay, we found a rarer-than-the-Apple-1 copy of Akalabeth on cassette, a rare Apple IIGS-specific wristwatch, and a potential CFFA3000 scalper. Finally, we look at some gadgets that are new to us, including old iPads, new iPads, and DSLR cameras.

Find the show on the Open Apple Web site or in iTunes or the Zune marketplace.

Lim Thye Chean’s IIGS programming book, “Virtual GS” is now available from the iTunes store.  This free iBook was created with Apple’s free iBooks Author app and requires an iPad with iBooks 2 running iOS 5 or later.  Lim’s book covers several popular IIGS programming topics, including Pascal and GSoft BASIC.

Volume 15, Issue 2 (June 2010) of Juiced.GS, the longest-running Apple II publication in print, shipped today to all subscribers. This issue features a review of the FC5025 floppy controller; a tutorial for using the Super-Mon programming utility; an opinion piece on the growing divide between users and programmers of Apple products; and the second in a five-part series on transferring files between the Apple II and other computers.

This is Juiced.GS‘s second quarterly issue of 2010. Annual subscriptions are available for $19 for United States customers and $26 for international customers.

A relatively new iPhone app called iBASIC from AkeySoft Group brings several old Apple II games to the iPhone. Included are eight EAMON adventures, Life, Lemonade Stand, Hamurabi, and StarTrek. These are all text based games written in BASIC from the late 1970s to early 1980s.

The latest version 1.1 adds “the Apple DOS 3.3 command handler for BASIC programs, so that adventure games like EAMON can use DOS commands to access files like maps and other elements.” iBASIC is $1.99; there’s also a free version called iBASIC Lite.