This Week's Best Apps

In this week’s well-protected app round-up: Tron tanks, embattled; French fiefdoms, established on the iPhone; social media links, elegantly arranged on the iPad and much, much more!

The iPhone version is a perfect translation of the game, one that improves upon the original with a solitary mode, very good computer opponents and the ability to see just what tiles are left and what moves are and aren't possible.

acrossair: acrossair, who’s really having a go at making this whole augmented reality thing useful, just updated their app to support the iPhone 4′s gyroscope. Turns out it makes AR browsing smoother than a tub of butter. Free.

Skype: When Apple announced iOS 4′s various flavours of multitasking back in April, two of the most compelling were background music (Pandora) and background VoiP (Skype). With Skype’s new multitask-enabling update, we’re two for two! Still no video chat, though. Free.

Star Wars: Trench Run 2.0: Updating to Star Wars: Trench Run 2.0 gets you new levels – defend Princess Leia, protect the Y-Squadron during the Battle of Yavin – and new ships – Darth Vader’s TIE, the Millennium F-in Falcoln – but best of all it lets you use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a controller for playing the game on your computer. Turning your iPhone into a starship that can make the Kessel Run in under 12 Parsecs? There’s a paid update for that. $6 app, $1.19 upgrade.

Zen Bound 2, previously exclusive to the iPad, is now available for the iPhone. It takes advantage of the iPhone 4′s retina display and gyroscope to bring butter-like smoothness to the beautiful game.

Flipboard: If one app had the internet on fire this week it was Flipboard, which culls users’ Twitter and Facebook feeds for links and arranges them into a pretty little magazine. Everyone realised how awesome the idea was, rushed to try it out, and subsequently no one was able to actually plug in their Facebook or Twitter info to use the thing. That was the first bummer. Then Joel wondered if they were scraping a little more information than they were allowed to scrape. Could be! But in terms of what we’ve seen so far, FlipBoard looks like a very promising way to beautify all those retweets. Free.

Zenbe has become my de-facto to-do list – beating Google’s and any sort of Apple solution – for two reasons: aase of use and cross-platform compatibility. I can make grocery list on the computer and check them off on the iPhone at the supermarket.

Micdroid: It’s like the T-pain app on the iPhone but with less pizazz and bling, and for Android. It’s still in the early phases of development so things might get wonky but hey, if you’re auto-tuning your life, things are supposed to get wonky. Yaaayehyeaa.