iPhone Apps for Kids: The Rootz Interactive Books Series

The Rootz Interactive books series - from David Holmes and iconic Apps - promises to provide “fully interactive and educational adventures’. The series currently consists of four titles in the App Store:

Malcolm Mushroom Catches a Cold
Sue Sultana’s Christmas Party
Postman Plum Gets The Job Done
Patrick Potato Gets an Eye Test

The Postman Plum book is currently free in the App Store - the other three are priced at $0.99 each. All the books feature: “vibrant hand drawn pictures” and narration in a funny (in a laughing with him, not at him) British voice.

Read on for some brief thoughts on why this series has been another surprise hit with my (5 year old) daughter …

I bought a first book in this series (the Malcolm Mushroom title) hoping that I’d be able to cajole my daughter into occasional, grudging tolerance of story reading on the iPhone. She’s already a bit of an iPhone whiz, and has a lot of ‘pure fun’ sort of apps at her disposal - so I always figure I need to do my best to sneak in the educational ones.

We read the Malcolm story once together, and she was mildly amused, but quickly switched over to a game when we were through. And then … a few days passed and, with zero cajoling required, she loved it! She’d read it on her own quite often - laughing at the funny parts and enjoying discovering additional sounds and dialog when tapping on various areas of the book’s illustrations. Each page boasts some of these extra sounds and they’re a major success I’d say. My daughter loves finding them and tapping them in much the same way that when we read a pop-up type book, you can never move onto the next page until all the cool pop-ups or pull-outs have been uncovered and checked out thoroughly.

The illustration style used in the books is what I would call lighthearted and cartoony, and again seems to add to the fun of them. The stories themselves are similar in feel - and they’re nicely written.

Page turning is done via simple swipes that mimic an actual page turn in a physical book - and both of us found it easy to work with.

Following the success of the first book, I went ahead and grabbed the other three - and I’m happy to say they’ve also been a resounding success. The current favorite is the Postman Plum title, but this is apt to change almost daily - as each of the books is getting a lot of attention, and still entirely without any persuasion or prompting. My daughter has always enjoyed reading (being read to and starting this year, reading to us) - and I am so, so glad of that. I love that we’ve found a set of books on the iPhone that appeal to her and help to continue nourishing her love of words / stories / books. It really makes my wife and I very happy.

My only ‘wish list’ sort of thoughts on the Rootz Interactive series are that it might be nice to see a stories compilation rather than all standalone titles, or perhaps a ‘frequent flyer’ discount for those who buy multiple titles.

Overall though, I am a big fan of the Rootz Interactive book series - they are charming, well written, and very well executed overall as iPhone apps.

QuickLook: Super Sniper for iPhone

Super Sniper is a new app that just hit the app store today. Always a fan of games like silent scope I figured I’d drop a dollar on it and see what it was like. Here’s the app store info:

Description:
Super Sniper from Coresoft is a fast paced action arcade game featuring real time Sniper Scope zooming, incredible graphics, thrilling music and realistic Sniper Rifle control and sound effects. Terrorists have taken over the city and it’s your job to eradicate them. Your spotter will call out your next target over your radio link, so keep your ears open for his call outs, they are invaluable! You will have a fixed time to neutralize each target before you become the target, and these guys never miss! Some of the Terrorists will have taken hostages, these guys will require a head shot and ONLY a head shot, otherwise you run the risk of taking out the hostage, and that’s an instant Game Over! Big bonuses are awarded for Head Shots and a time based bonus is offered for completing each level quickly. Super Sniper uses the tilt and pan feature of the iPhone to provide the most realistic sniper control to date.

Super Sniper is offered at a discount price of $0.99 for a VERY limited time.

Website: http://www.coresoft.com/
Support Website: http://www.coresoft.com/

READ ON for my quick look at this new game…

Look - this game has a lot of potential to be really good (its sort of like silent scope in theory) but so far it has some big issues:

1. The accelerometer is at times not sensitive enough, and at other times overly sensitive. I guess the best way to explain it is that the accelerometer only wants to respond to large changes in angle - so you end up moving way past where you were trying to go. When you’re looking to headshot a terrorist, taking 20 seconds to try and aim at him isn’t exactly fun and most times ends up with you getting a Game Over for your troubles.

2. Moving from building one to building three (or across the “map”) is laggy. With what should be very small images there should be almost no lag in this type of movement. Its the same on my iPhone and my iPod Touch 2nd Gen so its not like its an iPhone only thing.

3. The hostage head hit box is too large / or the scope movement is delayed. I can be moving across a terrorist target diagonally from upper right to lower left and fire when I’m roughly in the middle of the terrorist’s head - this will almost always result in a dead hostage. I would stop on the terrorist … if I could but once the scope is moving there’s almost no stopping it.

Long story short - this could be a really fun game for those moments when you have a couple minutes to screw around, but ultimately it falls short because the controls are too jerky. Even once they fix the controls, if you’re looking for a game to spend hours and hours on, this isn’t it. Super Sniper should turn into a cool little 5 minute at a time game though once they work out the kinks.

Featured iPhone Theme: Gears of War 2

This is the Gears of War 2 iPhone theme, from MMi forums member iPhone_Man4u - which caught my eye today. Here’s a little more detail from the theme’s creator:

Here is the Gears theme i been working on, i still have to make lock screens and boot screens for it also i will release the icons, and a blank icon for you to put what you want in it, and the signal, and wifi, battery bars also …

I’m not super keen on the size / emphasis on the theme’s title on screen, but assume that if you’re a big Gears of War fan, this may be right up your alley.

Check out the MMi forum post HERE for more details and download link …

My Hometown - Success Stories of Austin iPhone Devs

Here’s another item that has brightened up my Saturday - a recent piece in the Austin American Statesman highlighting the success of a couple of prominent Austin-based iPhone developers. I’ve been living in Austin for about 8 years now. I’ve previously lived in a fair few other places, and some great cities, but nothing can match Texas’ capital!

Austin game developer Brian Greenstone has been riding a wave of sudden celebrity.
In the past few months, Greenstone has been interviewed by CNN, The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine’s online edition. It’s all thanks to several Mac computer games he developed years ago that he tweaked in the spring so they could be played on the iPhone …
Only five months after uploading the games on to Apple’s App Store, sales of his games have reached $4 million, of which Greenstone gets 70 percent through his company Pangea Software. Some Pangea titles include “Enigmo,” “Antimatter,” “Bugdom 2,” “Nanosaur 2″ and “Billy Frontier.”

I’ve heard of Pangea Software a lot, since way back when the App Store was launched, and had been aware of many of their popular titles - but until today had not realized they were based in Austin. Yay Austin. Pangea are easily one of the top iPhone publishers it seems, both in terms of financial success and in the quality of their apps.

A second successful iPhone developer mentioned in the Statesman’s article is Glenda Adams of Aspyr Media, the creator of the excellent Lemonade Stand game for the iPhone. My daughter and I play this one a lot (I’ll do a quick look review of it soon) and like it a lot.

After putting it on the App Store at the end of October, Adams promptly sold 30,000 copies of the game for 99 cents each.

Anyway, good to see some hometown folks thriving in the iPhone development arena.

iPhone - Be a Good Lad and Go Pour Me a Beer

This cheered up my Saturday

The drinkin’ tinkerers over at Instructables created the Serv O’Beer to interpret a “pouring” motion with an iPhone into a real, albeit foamy, beer.

Talk about your ’showing off’ sort of apps on the iPhone - having it participate in the pouring of a cold one has got to rank way up there.

Gizmodo’s post has more details on how this was done, and you can check out the demo video HERE.

Source: Instructables via Gizmodo

Bizarro iPhone App of the Day: Name That Fart

OK, I know - we’re all well-aware by now that there are a ridiculous number of fart-related apps in the App Store - but this one still drew my attention with this short and far from sweet description:

Fart trivia at its finest …

That’s it - the full description of Name That Fart on its iTunes / App Store store page. Fart trivia??? Huh - really? Wow, I don’t want to think about that for too long, so I’ll wrap this up by letting you know you can grab this bizarro app for $0.99 in the App Store now …

Quick Look: webfeedr iPhone Native Friendfeed App

webfeedr is the new (and first I think) native iPhone Friendfeed app …
I’m a big fan of Friendfeed, the great ’social’ aggregator, that let’s you flow all your activity in Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader Shared Items, Stumbleupon, Flickr, Last.fm, and a ton of other social / sharing sites into it. It provides threaded conversations on everyone’s shared items, so it sparks some great dialogue and debate.

So I was interested to see a first native iPhone app for Friendfeeding launch today - interested enough to fork out my $0.99 and give it a whirl in fact. Hit the jump for some brief first impression thoughts and more screencaps …

One of the first things to take into account when sizing up webfeedr is that Friendfeed already has a pretty darn good iPhone optimized site, and is very easy and cool to use on Mobile Safari. Oh, and apparently Friendfeed have got their own iPhone native app not just in the works, but already in the App Store queue. So … webfeedr may need to be pretty special to stack up well against those two options.

Anyway, on to some quick thoughts on webfeedr:

Its interface is clean and easy to navigate - in fact it’s quite similar to the FF iPhone optimized page - with quick links for changing between main views up at the top of all screens - to change between Me, Friends, Rooms, and Everyone views - it does not have a link to ‘Best of the Day’ (and week / month) among these top choices, as the FF web app does. That might be a link that many will miss.

The app also has large, easy to spot buttons to Search and Share (post a message) up near the top of its interface. The Share function offers separate text entry fields for message and link, which seems quite handy.

There are (quite tiny) links under each post, for commenting, liking, and going to the link, if there is one, associated with the post. I have two gripes about this portion of the app. I found these links difficult to tap / hit and get a response - that may just be me, my clumsy fingers. The other is that links open in Safari - it would be nicer to see them open in an inline browser of some sort.

webfeedr’s interface is not bad - it just doesn’t strike me (at least so far) as way better than FF on Mobile Safari. Even its page load times when switching views and so on don’t seem much faster than FF in the browser.

Here’s a quick look at the FF iPhone site, for those who haven’t seen it:

Overall, my feeling about webfeedr is that it’s a good app, and reasonably priced at $0.99 - but not great yet. I also have a strong feeling that Friendfeed’s own native iPhone app will probably trump it - as nearly everything they’ve done so far has been pretty impressive.

So, it seems to me that webfeedr will need to bring some updates out and add some new bells and whistles if it wants to compete well with Friendfeed’s own offerings.

What do you all think? Any Friendfeed users ’round here?

Via: Mashable

Coming Soon: New Edge iPhone Game

No, not the Edge network from AT&T, but a rather unique app from Mobigame that uses the motion sensors of the iPhone and some powerful animations to make for a unique gaming experience. Looking a bit like something out of the movie Tron, Edge allows you to control a cube through several hazardous environments and traps that get more and more complicated as you move along.

The upcoming Edge game for the iPhone (due in the App Store next week) looks like it may have a lot of appeal. I’m such a non-gamer, or lame-gamer (preferring things like chess and darts and word games to all this physics fun) that I can only take the word of other experts for this - like the TUAW post quoted above, and also my good friend psylichon, in his EIC blog post. He says it looks “totally innovative and really really hard!”.

The app is developed by Mobigame, and has apparently already won awards on other mobile platforms.

Oh, and I should add that the video demo looks pretty damn cool as well, even to me

Any of you keeping a keen eye out for this one?

Check Out The Secret ‘Bells & Whistles’ in Google Mobile iPhone App

Google has revealed an ‘easter egg’ (a secret little area of a program that can be revealed if you know the right key combinations, or in this case, the right place to swipe) in its Google Mobile iPhone app - that offers some fun bells and whistles for the program.

To reveal the Bells and Whistles section, you need to continuously swipe upwards on the ‘About’ button on the Settings page for the app. This should show you Bells and Whistles as an extra menu item. From that menu you can:

• Change the theme color of the app
• Change the default sound (to a monkey or a chicken)
• Choose a waveform to appear when you speak
• Set whether to have links open within the app

Not a huge new range of settings, but better than a kick in the teeth, and sounds like the Google Mobile team had a lot of fun adding these.

Source: Google Mobile Blog via BGR

Must See: Amazing Sketches Done on iPhone Painting App

Saw this mentioned on Friendfeed tonight, by Mark Wilson - and boy am I glad I did! This set of sketches done with the Brushes app is unbelievable. I’m about as artistic as Bill Parcells is likable, but even a philistine like me can appreciate how good these are.

Disney artist, Stef Kardos, is posting iPhone sketches to his Flickr page. The miniature digital paintings were done on-site using the Brushes iPhone app.

Here’s another from the series:

The Drawn.ca site has more details on this and a great video demo of the Brushes app in action.

I have to say I was amazed by two things when I watched the video and looked through the set of sketches - the talent of Stef Kardos, and the extraordinary capabilities of the Brushes iPhone application. This is the mother of all iPhone painting / drawing apps.

Check out the full Stef Kardos Flickr set HERE- and let us know what you think …