If you've been checking out the most popular list at the iTunes App Store recently, you might have noticed that a new game has reached the top of the charts--even unseating the mega-popular Angry Birds. It's called Cut the Rope and it challenges you to feed candy to a hungry little monster named Om Nom by cutting various ropes to direct the candy to his waiting mouth. It's a little hard to describe here, so check out Rick Broida's coverage of Cut the Rope here.

Beating out Angry Birds at the top of the charts is no small feat (it's been sitting pretty there for months), so it got me to thinking about what type of game reaches the top of the iTunes App Store.

Firstly, it seems you must have polish--both games were obviously painstakingly produced. From the main characters down to the menus and even the design of the buttons, the whole experience captures the ambiance the developers are trying to convey making the game more immersive. Both games have extremely cute characters; each of the different birds are adorable in their anger, and the little green monster Om Nom couldn't be cuter when he opens wide for the candy. Both games have simple controls that can be played by anyone--this seems to be the biggest factor. Just about anyone from any age group can grasp the simple controls, but the games are still plenty challenging. Finally, you need air tight audio, with little nuanced and silly additions like the muttering birds in Angry Birds, or the sigh of sadness when the candy misses Om Nom's mouth. Judging from these games' success, it seems as though the combination of these ingredients casts the widest net for capturing most iPhone gamers' hearts.

So what will the next big iPhone game be? My bet is that it will include all of these ingredients. You can be sure there are developers working right now to capture that perfect combination that makes a hit at the App Store. The only question is, what's the next big hit?

This week's apps include a cloud-synced todo list manager and an excellent sequel to one of the best first person shooters on the iPhone.

TeuxDeux ($2.99) is a simple, but effective todo list app for iPhone that lets you view and edit tasks and sync them with the TeuxDeux Web site. Though there are other more feature-rich task management and note-taking apps, the TeuxDeux app's main strength is its clean simplicity. The simple interface puts your todo list front-and-center with an input field at the top to enter new tasks. If you finish a list item, simply touch it to cross it off. A swipe of your finger lets you quickly browse through your list. You can tap an arrow in either direction at the top or touch the calendar days at the bottom to look at upcoming tasks throughout the week. You also get a Someday category for tasks that are larger life goals or things you know won't need to be finished right away.

After entering tasks or crossing off items in your list, TeuxDeux has a sync button at the top that syncs your list to the cloud. From there you can go to the TeuxDeux Web site to edit and reorder your tasks or view your calendar from your desktop computer. Overall, if you just want a straight todo list app with a clean design that lets you sync up tasks between your desktop and your iPhone, TeuxDeux is a good looking and effective choice with no unnecessary features.

Modern Combat: Black Pegasus ($6.99) is the sequel to Modern Combat: Sandstorm, one of my favorite first person shooters on the iPhone from last year. Much like Sandstorm, Black Pegasus offers a single-player campaign along with online and local multiplayer. But this time the action takes place in multiple locations including the Middle-East, Eastern Europe, and South America. You get three different control systems to choose from like Modern Combat: Sandstorm, but in this version the controls have been refined along with just about everything else in the game. The result is a beautiful and challenging first person shooter that's easily one of the best in the app store.

Like most FPS games on the iPhone, the controls take some getting used to, and won't be as easy to use as console or desktop games in this genre. But even with the somewhat awkward controls, you'll quickly get used to the limitations of the touch screen and start holding your own against the bad guys. One added control feature in Black Pegasus I particularly like occurs under special circumstances when an enemy attacks you--a button appears on the screen that allows you to defend a punch, then you hit it again to counter attack. In other situations something may be flying towards you, and a button will appear that helps you dodge the object. These gameplay variations keep the game interesting break up the action.

As you play through the campaign, you'll find all different weapons to experiment with including several types of machine guns, rifles, hand guns, grenades, and rocket launchers. A quick double-tap in the upper right corner of the screen switches weapons, and a single tap reloads your current weapon.

When you feel you've honed your skills well enough, you can setup a Gameloft account and play online in 10-player battles against people from around the world. Multiplayer gametypes include Battle, Team Battle, Defuse the Bomb, and Capture the Flag. In my testing I got into a few different games without a hitch (there seemed to be several populated servers), and noticed only a little lag-time while playing.

Optimized for the iPhone 4 Retina display, Modern Combat: Black Pegasus is a beautiful action game, and the story line, while fairly predictable, brings you through the action seamlessly. Overall, Modern Combat: Black Pegasus is one of my favorite iPhone first person shooters to date, and I think anyone who likes FPS games will appreciate the attention to detail in this action-packed sequel.

What's your favorite iPhone app? What do you think makes the perfect iPhone game? Are you happy with the simple feature set of TeuxDeux? Is Modern Combat: Black Pegasus a worthy sequel to Sandstorm? Let me know in the comments!

Picture this: you're in the backseat of a speeding car, trying to keep up with a flying saucer you just spotted zipping along the horizon. The only tricky part is keeping your iPhone camera trained on the UFO, which is constantly zigging and zagging out of view.

That's the intriguing premise of UFO on Tape, a simple but absolutely ingenious new game. The whole point is to see how long you can keep the UFO in your sights--a task that relies entirely on your device's accelerometer (or, if you have an iPhone 4, the gyroscope).

What makes UFO on Tape so cool is that it superimposes the UFO over real-world video footage--meaning you see exactly what you'd see if you were looking out the side window of a car.

It's a kind of faux augmented-reality, one that works best with the gyroscope-powered iPhone 4 (but is still plenty cool with accelerometer controls).

As you play, you'll hear the urgent, often amusing voice of your girlfriend, who says things like, "No, point it over there!" and "Can I have my camera back, please?" It's all part of the fun.

You'll probably last all of 10-15 seconds on your first try (if the UFO is out of view for more than a few seconds, your "camera battery" gives out), and I defy you to resist trying again--and again, and again, just to see if you can beat your last score.

Admittedly, once you get past the novelty factor, you may lose interest. But UFO on Tape is so cool and unique, you'll consider it 99 cents well-spent.

Bonus app: UFO on Tape comes from Revolutionary Concepts, makers of a game I consider vastly underrated: Banzai Rabbit, a fantastic Frogger reboot. It's available free of charge for a very short time, meaning you now have no excuse not to try it.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

Better wipe the face grease off that smartphone if you've got one: Yahoo plans to bring video chat to users of its mobile chat application.

In an interview yesterday with Reuters, Yahoo's VP of Mobile for the Americas, David Katz told the news outlet that the feature was on the way to the next version of the company's messenger app for both Android devices and the iPhone.

The video chat feature, which is said to work over both Wi-Fi and through carrier's networks, will also be cross-platform, allowing users on their phone to video chat with users on the company's desktop client (and vice versa). That opens up the service to a much larger potential group of users than through something like Apple's FaceTime, which currently only works for chats between iPhone and iPod Touch users.

Until the updated version of the app arrives (which Reuters said is still in review by Apple), users with iPhones and Android devices with front-facing cameras have a handful of options for video chat including Fring, Qik, and Tango. Skype too is expected to add the feature to its application at some point down the road, as the company has said that a third of calls made on its service are video chats.

Originally posted at Web Crawler

The first beta of Firefox 4 for Android arrived Thursday, offering users of Google's mobile operating system a browser interface with both smart new features and some weaknesses.

I tried the new beta on HTC's Google Nexus One, and I came away impressed overall--far more satisfied than with unstable and slower nightly builds for developers that I'd tried before. It's not going to be my default phone browser at this stage, but I'm not going to uninstall it, either.

Fennec background
Before we get to my impressions, though, here's the background. Mozilla is trying to reach the fast-growing and increasingly important mobile world with its "Fennec" version of Firefox. Android is the second operating system it supports after Maemo, which comes with Nokia's N900, which is as much a small computer as smartphone. Today, that market is dominated by browsers based on the open-source WebKit project, including those built into iOS, Android, WebOS, and Bada browsers and coming with BlackBerry OS.

Android is critical to Mozilla's mobile effort: with Apple blocking typical browsers for iOS devices, Google's operating system is the best remaining avenue to mainstream mobile relevance.

Unlike most Android applications, Firefox is native software that runs on the underlying Linux operating system and ARM processor rather than Android's higher-level Java-like foundation (now the subject of Oracle's lawsuit against Google). That native nature means Firefox compatibility is a more finicky issue: you'll have to check the supported devices list, which so far includes four tested phones and five untested.

Firefox, which needs Android 2.0 or later, is feature-packed. It uses the same browser engine as regular Firefox and therefore supports cutting-edge Web technologies such as Canvas and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for 2D graphics, Web workers for background processing, and HTML5's built-in audio and video. It can run many add-ons, a differentiator in the mobile-browsing world. And it's got the new JaegerMonkey JavaScript engine, which was powerful enough to run the full desktop version of Gmail in my tests.

Three advantages over Android
Three things jumped out at me as superior to Android's built-in browser, which by the way I'm using on a phone with Android 2.2, aka Froyo.

First, there's Firefox Sync. This lets you keep open tabs, browsing history, passwords, and bookmarks synchronized between whatever computers and mobile devices you have running Firefox. In practice, I'm not sure I want to inflict on my mobile phone the dozens of tabs I have openon my personal computers, but passwords sync in particular is a wonderful way to bypass the mobile-phone difficulties of Web page login pages.

Second, there's the superior window management. The native browser lets you move among windows by clicking Android's menu button and going to a window-selection screen.

I much prefer Firefox's approach. The tabs are in a vertically stacked list that's tucked away to the left of the browser window. You can reach it by sliding the main window off to the right with an easy drag gesture. It's set up nicely so you don't do this inadvertently.

A button on the bottom of the list lets you fire up a new tab. When there are more than seven, on my phone, a second vertical column of tabs forms to the right. Each tab has a thumbnail of the page, which can be a little hard to see given that each browser thumbnail is about two-thirds the size of my actual thumbnail. But I still find it a faster way to switch among tabs, something I didn't realize until Firefox I'd been subconsciously avoiding somewhat on the Android browser.

However, I did have one problem: each tab also has a big "X" to close it, and if you're not careful or have big thumbs, it's easy to close a tab instead of select it.

If you slide the main browser window the other way, you get a nice interface for adding a bookmark, going forward or backward through your browsing history, and configuring Firefox. This is the kind of thing that you might expect to see available through the Android menu, which in my testing led only to a blank screen.

Third, I liked the welcome screen. It shows a nicely formatted list of recently visited Windows that I find far more useful than a blank search box in the Android browser. Sure, I like searching, but I do a lot more.

Imperfections
Now onto the gripe list. It's longer, but bear in mind that this is not just beta software, but the first beta Mozilla has ever produced for Android.

First, Firefox isn't fast, even though performance is a focus of this release. Even if you have a Wi-Fi connection, all mobile browsers in my experience are frustrating compared to those running on desktops and laptop. But I found Firefox just wasn't peppy.

Part of this, I suspect, is that Firefox seems aimed to intercept higher-performance hardware coming after today's phones; Mozilla seems to have aimed for features and utility rather than bare-bones practicality. But some performance attributes are quite nice, notably scrolling and panning, which respond quickly and bring "inertia" so you can flick your view around.

And historically, beta software is usually slower than better-tuned production releases, so don't read too much into this.

I had two crashes, once apparently some user-interface interaction that went haywire and once when I tried to load Gmail with eight other windows already loaded. Firefox ground to a halt and crashed. Other times, though, I was able to use Gmail, even with its new priority in-box, an impressive feat.

Another problem I had was with zooming to read text. Firefox, like the iPhone and Android browsers, will zoom into a column of text on a larger page when you double-tap on it. However, unlike those alternatives, it didn't automatically scale the font size to something readable. I ended up rotating the screen to a horizontal orientation to try to squeeze in a few more pixels per letter, and even then I did a lot of squinting.

The good news is this problem is a known shortcoming. And it's not so much an issue with mobile-optimized sites I tried, such as Flickr and Facebook.

Firefox is big--more than 30MB including the application and data, which is much larger than any other application I have on my phone. The closest is Google Earth at half the size, which I had to delete to make room. Mozilla has said it hopes to pare the size down, though.

Another complaint is with the fonts. I found blocks of text less readable in general than with other mobile browsers.

Last, I had some difficulties with the user interface. For example, while setting up Sync, I couldn't move from the username field to the password field by scrolling the scroll wheel, as is customary on Android. Instead, I had to use the back button to hide the keyboard, manually scroll the page with my finger, then tap the next text input field.

Overall, though, Firefox for Android is a reasonable first effort. That's good, given how important mobile computing has become and Android's ascendance within that domain.

Updated 5 a.m. PDT with further detail about JavaScript, performance, and add-ons.

Originally posted at Deep Tech