With the introduction of the touch screen on smartphones, game developers had to come up with new control schemes that would work intuitively on the iPhone. And as iOS games evolved over time, new genres of games started to crop up which were perfect for the touch screens and on screen buttons.

One of those game genres is the castle defense strategy game. Even though you could play desktop and browser-based versions of these games, the touch screen on the iPhone worked so well that they were incredibly easy to pick up and play.

This week's collection of iOS apps is all about castle defense games. The first has a World War I feel as you battle your enemies across a series of dug in trenches. The second lets you play as a character from the popular Evil Dead franchise as you fight off skeletons and other ghoulish enemies. The third is a new game where you'll choose from three different races to fight your enemies in a humorous battle to create the ultimate barbeque sauce.

Trenches (99 cents) is a fun and challenging World War I-themed trench-warfare arcade game with strong elements of real-time strategy and unit and resource management.

With its killer combination of winning art direction, well-designed gameplay, and a shallow but steady learning curve, Trenches is hard to put down. You control British troops advancing from trench to trench, left to right, across a long, scrolling map (which you can tilt to scroll, or touch and drag the skyline to move). You touch and drag units to determine their path, and you can use a two-finger motion to direct all onscreen units to retreat, advance, or hold.

A relatively short campaign mode reveals the game's unit types one by one, letting you choose which you want to add to your arsenal, from basic riflemen on up to engineers, snipers, machine-gunners, and mortar crews, each with its own advantages and disadvantages (and each capable of improving if you can keep it alive). These include two drag-and-drop, single-use "units"--poison gas and an artillery barrage--which are expensive but effective when you used with care. (And since the Germans have access to gas and artillery, too, you have to keep a close eye on your own troop concentrations, because even a second or two of delay can break the back of your advance).

Trenches forces you to keep adapting your strategy on the fly, as you manage your money (which lets you buy more troops), your fortifications (which you can build with your engineer), and the tactical positioning of your units. The game has a smart, adjustable (and at-times brutal) AI to keep you on your toes, and it's difficult to recover once you lose momentum. In addition to the campaign mode, the game also has multiplayer (Bluetooth and Wi-fi) and skirmish modes, with skirmish letting you play single maps with varying objectives and difficulty (including variants like king of the hill and zombie horde).

While Trenches has a lot going for it, it's not perfect: when tested on a 3G, menus were often laggy and sometimes text wouldn't appear (so, for example, you couldn't see your money, score, unit costs, or in-game callouts). The game also slowed down and became unresponsive when many units were onscreen (making the otherwise fun zombie mode unplayable after a few minutes). That said, when Trenches works--which is most of the time--it's one of the best games of its kind.

Army of Darkness Defense (Free) is a castle-defense game based on (and named after) the third movie in the cult-classic comic-horror series "Evil Dead." You play the chainsaw-armed hero Ash Williams, and audio samples of his highly quotable dialogue play a starring role in the app.

Unlike so many movie tie-in games, Army of Darkness Defense manages to be quite good: it's a mix of resource management and arcade action, in which you re-enact the frantic defense of the movie's finale. Waves of enemies--skeletal and/or demonic "Deadites"--advance from right to left inside the scrolling castle interior. You move left and right (by tapping either side of the screen) and fight them yourself, with a shotgun autoattack and upgradeable special abilities. You also fight them with allies you call to your side, from peasants and swordsmen to heroes like Lord Arthur, Duke Henry the Red, and the healing Wiseman.

The gameplay revolves around choosing which units to build and when, earning gold by surviving each level's onslaught, and then using that gold to upgrade your abilities, castle, and units in between levels--but you don't have enough gold to upgrade very many of your special abilities and units, so you have to prioritize. You can also collect some gold (and iron bars, to speed up unit production) from fallen enemies while you're fighting--and that makes for some fun, fast decision-making, as you weigh whether to risk the melee for a quick boost to your resources.

Fans of both castle defense games and the movies (especially Ash, aka the goofy, over-the-top Bruce Campbell) will find a lot to like here. The game's only weaknesses are a lack of variety--you defend the same castle for 50 levels, followed by an infinite mode--and the potential to paint yourself into a corner strategically, requiring you to buy more coins as an in-app purchase. Overall, though, Army of Darkness Defense does a good job of balancing its core gameplay and its in-app economy, and many players will likely buy in-app currency just for access to more and more entertaining powers (like Ash's Deadite-reaving 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88, the "Deathcoaster").

Swords and Soldiers (99 cents for a limited time) is a fun castle defense strategy game that's fun to play and has a sense of humor. Your job is to command an army of Vikings with the goal of creating the ultimate barbeque sauce. Later in the game you'll also be able to play as Aztecs or Chinese Warriors, each with individual skills and units.

The graphics in Swords and Soldiers are crisp on the iPhone 4 Retina display, featuring cartoon like characters and colorful 2D backgrounds. The interface involves swiping horizontally to see more of the map, and on screen buttons for creating new units (once you've purchased them) and other skill buttons like healing and calling in aerial attacks. All the interface elements are done very well and the game slowly introduces you to each making easy to get up and running quickly.

You get a few different gametypes including Campaign mode, which lets you slowly go through each level of the game and unlock the extra races. A skirmish mode lets you jump into the action right away, letting you choose your map size, your race, and gives you all the upgrades as long as you can afford them. There is also a challenge mode you'll unlock once you've finished the Campaign, which lets you fight through survival, berserker, and boulder game types. With the long campaign mode and other gametypes, Swords and Soldiers offers plenty of content to give it great replay value.

Overall, if you like castle defense strategy games, Swords and Soldiers offers plenty of content, challenging gameplay, fun units to unlock, crisp grpahics, and a sense of humor that will make you chuckle as you defeat your foes.

Got a better castle defense game not shown here? Please let us all know about it in the comments!

A paid upgrade to the popular torrent manager uTorrent is in the works, the makers of the program announced today.

Less than a month after the release of uTorrent 3.0 (download), the program's parent company, BitTorrent Inc., revealed plans to introduce a paid upgrade called uTorrent Plus. Though it's still in development and unavailable to the public, uTorrent Plus promises to include tools that will eliminate codec problems, convert file formats, and move content between devices, according to the blog post announcing the product.

Also in that blog post, Jordy Berson, director of product management for uTorrent, promised that the free version "will receive the same level of commitment and development resources as it does now."

Around 100 million people call uTorrent their preferred torrent manager. To put that number in perspective, the security suite AVG Antivirus Free claims around 110 million active users, while Google CEO Larry Page just revealed that the Chrome browser has about 160 million users.

"uTorrent Plus is designed for people who are looking for a single solution to find, get, and play content anywhere, on any device," Berson wrote. The price point for uTorrent Plus has not been announced, The company has also created a sign-up page for people who want more information on uTorrent Plus.

Back in late 2009, software developer Nuance made waves with Dragon Dictation, a killer free app that translates your voice into text.

For Nuance's next trick, Dragon Go turns your voice into a search engine. Just tap the Record button, say what you're looking for, and presto: the app runs a search.

Wait a minute, doesn't the Google app do exactly the same thing? It does, but with decidedly Google-style results: Web, Images, Places, etc.

Dragon Go incorporates a wide range of mobile sites. Thus, a search for singer Brendan Benson produces results from not only Google, but also Amazon, Pandora, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, and even LiveNation.

Search for a movie and you won't get LiveNation, but instead an IMDb entry and showtimes from Fandango. Restaurant searches give you Yelp listings, and so on.

Wait a minute, doesn't the Bing app do exactly the same thing? Yes and no. Although it offers voice-powered search, the results are listed in one long (and rather inconvenient) column.

Dragon Go, on the other hand, sports a stylish-looking results carousel, which you swipe through to find the specific info you want: photos, videos, maps (courtesy of Bing, ironically), movie showtimes, tweets, etc.

For most results you can copy the URL or send it directly to Facebook, Twitter, Safari, or an e-mail or text message.

In my tests, Dragon Go exhibited the same kind of spooky accurateness as the Bing and Google apps (and, for that matter, Dragon Dictation). It even recognized my phonetically challenging last name. Amazing stuff!

The app is free, so you've got nothing to lose by taking it for a test-talk.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

Mozilla has begun turning the Firefox crank faster with a rapid-release development cycle. So what's in store now that we can expect a new version every six weeks?

A lot, including 64-bit support on Windows and a plan to reduce the open-source browser's memory usage. But the most far-reaching change probably is a project called Electrolysis that splits Firefox into multiple somewhat-independent processes.

Electrolysis holds the potential to improve responsiveness, smooth graphics performance, take better advantage of multicore processors, and tighten security. Mozilla already added one Electrolysis element to Firefox 3.6--the separation of plug-ins to their own patch of memory--but now programmers are spinning up the project again to tackle more.

It took a little while, but there's no doubt now that the Firefox team has woken up to the newly competitive browser market. Firefox, once the obvious alternative to pokey Internet Explorer, now must reckon with Chrome's fast rise, Safari leading the mobile-browsing charge, and IE's restored focus. Mozilla has responded with the rapid-release development cycle that produces a new Firefox every six weeks.

One goal of the faster cycle is to bring new features to market sooner. Rather than waiting more than a year for a major upgrade, new ideas can arrive as soon as they've made it through the testing levels of nightly builds, the rough Aurora version, and the more polished beta.

Collect the garbage
Chris Blizzard, Mozilla's director of Web platform, didn't detail a schedule for new Electrolysis features in a blog post today about the technology. But he did say work is back on the front burner.

A key improvement from the work will be separating the user-interface process from the part of Firefox that handles the contents of browser tabs. The expectation is a snappier browser, Blizzard said:

What we're really talking about with multi-process performance is responsiveness:

• How long does it take for a mouse click to be recognized?

• When you resize the window does it feel smooth?

• Does the browser mysteriously pause from time to time?

• Are animations smooth, without pauses?

Some of this should get better because Firefox will better handle a process called garbage collection in which areas of memory that had previously been used are reclaimed for use again. Garbage collection can cause a program to pause, especially a large Web app such as Facebook or Gmail, Blizzard said.

Another benefit of Electrolysis is that separate memory processes can cut down on security problems because it's harder for a malicious process to tamper with memory. And it's naturally better-suited to the multicore processors that dominate the PC market today and that have begun arriving on mobile phones and tablets, too.

Splitting up processes into separate domains, though, isn't without its downsides, too. One big one: memory usage can increase. And it complicates some matters. For example, if each tab has its own patch of memory, it can be harder to share cached graphics.

Memory work
In the nearer term, Firefox should be cutting back its memory consumption through a project called MemShrink. Some fruits of this project should arrive with Firefox 7, set for release in September.

Firefox 7 memory use could drop 30 percent, Mozilla hopes. But it's not easy.

Some big changes this week had to be undone because of crashes and other problems, said Nicholas Nethercote, who writes about the MemShrink project.

Another change in the works for Firefox is better 64-bit support. The automated build system, a collection of machines that runs tests on new versions of the browser, is being adapted for 64-bit versions of the browser.

Release engineer Armen Zambrano Gasparnian, who took early steps for 64-bit Firefox support last year, is on the case again.

"We now have a small set of Windows 2008 64-bit slaves ready to be put in our production systems that can generate the 64-bit version of Mozilla Firefox," he said in a blog post this week. He's been filing bug reports as a result.

"This is all preparatory work to fully support Windows 64-bit as a tier-one platform," Gasparnian said. Tier-one systems are the high priorities for Mozilla; Android is the newest example.

The 64-bit transition began years ago with processors; Mac OS X has already made the jump, and it's very common in the Windows world now, too. The chief advantage is support for much more memory, though there are some performance improvements as well.

One of the big obstacles to a 64-bit browser was that plug-ins such as Adobe Systems' widely used Flash Player also must be 64-bit in order to work. That'll be the case in coming months, though: Adobe has just released a beta version of Flash 11 with 64-bit support.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

If someone plotted out your life over the past five or so years, what would it look like? What if you could revisit every comment you've posted, every tweet, every photo you've uploaded or was tagged in, and recall every expression of the ups and downs you've made on the Net...all on a single timeline?

Memolane is a Web app that makes walking down memory lane visually interactive and borderline effortless. It extracts each moment you've shared with your online accounts from popular services such as Facebook, Last.fm, Twitter, Foursquare, and more and combines them into one visual timeline. Each tweet/photo/post/scrobble is organized by its respective tag dates, drawn from APIs and then posted as "memos" under each day.

Once you sign in with your various online accounts, Memolane will lay out your content as memos dating all the way back to the first day you activated your account. (Mine dated back to 2005, which was when I first started using Facebook.)

The Memolane timeline can be controlled either by mouse or keyboard. You can swipe through memories by clicking and dragging the memos left and right or by clicking on a timeline segment located at the bottom of the page. Playing with the HTML5-driven interface felt tabletlike and smooth.

The main section features expandable memos for days with multiple entries or photos. You can also customize and share specific segments to show what you were doing around a particular event, thanks to Memolane's "Stories" feature. Friends can contribute to your stories by adding parts of their own timeline to yours, should you give them permission. You can also quickly jump to any point in time by clicking on the master timeline, located at the bottom of the page.

Worried about showing too much personal content? You can also set privacy settings for each individual account; you can pick and choose select account histories to publicize, or privatize everything for personal viewing only.

Memolane has a comfortable interface and makes navigating easy, but it's the sentimental presentation that can truly hook you. Those who are active in their online lives will likely get the most out of the experience, but being able to look back at our social behavior spanning across so many services and trying to piece back your old life is fascinating. Memolane feels less like archived data and more like a streamlined, personal scrapbook.

Exploring all the fun, stupid, sad, and endearing moments of the past in a linear montage of videos, photos, check-ins and status updates is not just nostalgic, but straight up surreal. Being able to see tangible evidence of your memories and see how you've grown without having to spend hours or days scavenging your accounts is pretty darn cool.

Memolane is currently still in beta, but you can still sign up and give it a run. Check it out and sound off on the comments below!

Originally posted at Crave

Zinio, the popular magazine reader application for mobile devices, is now available to all Android users running OS version 2.2+. Previously only compatible with Honeycomb-outfitted tablets, Zinio at last gives the rest of the Android community access to its enormous library of full-color digital magazines.

If you haven't heard of Zinio, it takes magazines off the shelves and puts them into your mobile device, letting you buy single issues of or subscriptions to some of your favorite titles. Issues are available either in full color or in text-only mode, and some even include interactive rich media features. Unless you're a print magazine purist, it's a much more convenient way to do your reading on the go.

What's more, to celebrate the big release, the folks at Zinio are giving Android users free access to 12 current issues of popular magazine titles until August 15. Users get to enjoy the latest from BlackBook, Bike, ESPN The Magazine, House Beautiful, Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine, Maxim, Outdoor Photographer, Redbook, Robb Report, Seattle Met, Surfer, and Wine Enthusiast. Also, users on the T-Mobile network get five additional free titles from T-Mobile's U.S. "Freemium" offering, located inside the library of the Zinio Android app.

"Our goal is to give every magazine lover worldwide, regardless of platform, an immersive and seamless way to connect to and engage with their favorite stories--creating a comprehensive and compelling newsstand that is controlled by the individual and customized to their interests," Zinio President and CEO Rich Maggiotto said in a statement. "Extending deeper into the Android ecosystem on a global scale continues to help move us in this direction."

In our experience, the app works well, and its full-color magazines look gorgeous. So, with no fewer than 12 free issues on offer, now just might be a good time to take this digital newsstand for a spin.

Zinio is available now for free download in the Android Market.

Editors' note: Until July 22, 10 CNET personalities are showcasing their 10 personal favorite Android apps as part of the CNET 100. With each post, you can read why they hold the apps so dear and you'll get the opportunity to vote for your own favorite title. Then after the series ends, we'll collect the full list of 100 apps and announce the 10 that you, our readers, love the most.

If there's something to know about Android, CNET network blogger Scott Webster probably knows it. Though his passion for gadgets extends outside the Googlesphere, Android and all it entails is what he loves most. He analyzes the latest news and rumors on CNET's Android Atlas and is a senior editor for AndroidGuys. And if you're interested in a more female perspective on the OS, his wife Angel is the editor in chief of AndroidGals.

Though Scott can get pretty technical when writing about Android, his interests in the real world should appeal to just about everyone. Whether he's exercising, catching a movie, or reading, he's got an app for each activity and for organizing his life. Titles for checking the weather and "checking in" also populate his list, along with options for sprucing up a phone's widgets and protecting it from viruses and malware.

Over the next two weeks, be sure to check back each day on Android Atlas to see app choices from Jaymar Cabebe, Antuan Goodwin, Nicole Lee, Jessica Dolcourt, and more of the CNET crew. For yesterday's list, check out the picks from Seth Rosenblatt.

Originally posted at Android Atlas