Sesame Street

Giving your child an iPad or iPod Touch as a gift this year? Preload it with some quality apps before you wrap it. That way you’ll increase your chances for a positive first impression. Here’s a fresh batch of suggestions, arranged from young to old. Bizzy Bear on the Farm ($4) is full of clever talking animals and barnyard jobs that include gathering eggs, herding sheep and riding a horse. Every page has hidden surprises that support the story. Ages 2-4. DoodleCast for Kids ($2) captures your child’s doodles and voice at the same time, for instant playback. The process is automated and the products make wonderful digital snapshots of your child’s development. Keep the file for a dozen years and you’ll have an excellent mechanism for embarrassing your high school graduate. An active YouTube account is needed for the sharing. Ages 2-8. Nighty Night! HD ($1, shown above). If there ever was such a thing as a nap app, this is it. Seven bucolic barnyard scenes have a hidden light switch. Once touched, the scene darkens and the animals settle into bed. The sheep snuggles into a bed of straw, the chicks huddle under their mother’s soft wing. Once in bed the animals stir when touched, but they stay in bed. Clearly this app was designed by an experienced parent. Ages 1-3. Noodle Words ($3) turns 18 action words like spin and sparkle into action-related toys. Touch the word “pump” and it grows fatter. Touch again (what child wouldn’t) and the word grows some more, until it can’t take any more pressure and it starts zipping around the screen, giving children fun way to experiment with word meanings. For ages 4-7. Puzzle Pop ($1) is a set of 27 timed jigsaw puzzles that start easy and get harder. The animated pieces offer visual clues for helping you figure out where the correct order. Ages 3-up. Toca Kitchen ($2) turns your iPad into a griddle, with four hungry customers to feed. To make them happy, you drag, drop and chop various food items, using the microwave or frying pan. The fun starts when the customers get picky, and you have to figure out what they like. Ages 3-up. Another Monster at the End of This Book ($1). This second Monster at the End of This Book app has 12 more pages that document Grover’s creative attempts to keep Elmo (and your Read More

And so it begins -- the App Store has its busiest time of the year over the Christmas holiday, when iPhones and iPads and iTunes gift cards are unwrapped under the Christmas tree, and millions of people take to the App Store to pick up some great apps. There are lots of sales coming out this week. We'll have more posts each day, and stay tuned to our Twitter account for even more. That's just the beginning -- stay tuned all through the week for more deals on lots of different apps and games around the App Store. Everything will likely be sorted by Thursday (as that's when developers become unable to make any more price or app changes), but before then, we'll see lots and lots of apps on sale, no doubt. Read More

Noah Rahman has moderate Cerebral Palsy affecting his communication, cognition and upper and lower body movement. When he turned two, his language, cognitive abilitity and fine motor skills were diagnosed by a developmental specialist as being at least 12 months behind. Then Noah got an iPad. Four months later, his language and cognition were on par with his age level. His fine motor skills had made significant leaps. Today, the three-year-old (pictured at right with his father) spends an hour or two on his iPad each day. He switches his apps between reading and writing in English, Arabic and Spanish. In the fall, he’ll enter a classroom of five-year-olds. “The iPad unlocked his motivation and his desire because it’s fun,” says his dad Sami Rahman, co-founder of SNApps4Kids, a community of parents, therapists and educators sharing their experiences using the iPad, iPod touch, iPhone and Android to help children with special needs. SNApps4Kids taps into a burgeoning trend for people with disabilities. Touch devices — most notably the iPad — are revolutionizing the lives of children, adults and seniors with special needs. Rahman estimates some 40,000 apps have been developed for this demographic. “Touch has made it exceptionally accessible — everyone has an iPad, everyone has an iPod,” says Michelle Diament, cofounder of Disability Scoop, a source for news relating to developmental disabilities. “If you’re someone with a disability, having something that other people are using makes you feel like part of the in-crowd.” For people lacking motor skills, touch screens are more intuitive devices. There is no mouse, keyboard or pen intercepting their communication with the screen. Larger platforms, like iPads, are preferred over smaller iOS and Android devices for ease-of-use and, of course, the cool factor. Here are four ways that touch devices are changing the lives of people with disabilities: Before the iPad and other similar devices, using touch-to-speak technology was incredibly expensive, costing around $8,000. Now, it only costs $499 for an iPad and $189.99 for a thorough touch-to-speak app like Proloquo2Go. That relative affordability has made the technology more available for children and adults that can’t use their voice. With the simple touch of an iPad, a hungry non-verbal person can communicate exactly what he or she would like to eat. Those apps can then be customized with photos or features to suit an individual’s life and needs. Another option is Assistive Chat, which predicts several Read More

By РSpecial pack for your kids! Now families can share this giggle-filled story together in a brand-new way children will ask to read again and again. The Monster at the End of This Book for iPad is a truly enchanting reading experience for kids‚Äîand monsters‚Äîof all ages. Now you can experience Thomas & Friends like never before! Read, watch, listen, and play with Thomas, Percy, and all-new characters in this engine adventure. With multi-touch animation, CGI video, painting, puzzles, and games, Misty Island Rescue reinvents the reading experience for the entire family. Watch, read, listen, and play as this beloved, classic picture book magically comes to life. With multi-touch animation, painting, puzzles, and games, the Miss Spider‚Äôs Tea Party App reinvents the reading experience for the whole family. Lilup is the ideal bed time story. Join him as he drifts around the world making friends with wonderful animals along the way. Related Posts Read More

by Earlier in the week, ScrollMotion released a new Sesame Street e-book simultaneously for the iTunes App Store and for the Google Chrome Web Store. Over the last year, nearly a dozen Sesame Street e-books have been released for the iPhone and iPad, but this is the first title Sesame Street has released for Google Chrome. With Chrome 9, the Chrome Web Store is now available to all users in North America. That means users can install free or paid web applications for use across machines and even on the CR-48 netbook. Built using HTML5, this is ScrollMotion’s first Chrome Web Store release. When we talked to ScrollMotion last fall, co-founder Josh Koppel told us that because the company can build apps using an HTML5 base, porting those apps to other platforms — in this case the Chrome Web Store — is much less complicated. [iTunes link] is $2.99 for iOS (it works on both the iPhone and iPad) and $1.99 for Google Chrome. The story book is cute — read by Gordon from Sesame Street — and the iOS version includes the option for the reader to record his or her own voice for playback. Both versions of the app include options for reading along and for coloring digital images of Sesame Street characters. We bought the Chrome app to give it a spin and while the quality of the book and voice recording is good, we still think the desktop reading experience leads a bit to be desired. To us, it underscores why the iPad, iPhone and future Android tablets will have so much of an advantage over the CD-ROM children’s book of the 1990s: touch matters. Touch controls makes interacting with content more natural and makes the overall experience more engaging. The promise of HTML5 is that the apps will be usable on other devices. Just imagine how cool it would be if Chrome web apps could work on Honeycomb. That might not be in the cards for the immediate future, but we expect to see some sort of fusion between the two platforms at some stage. In the meantime, this is just one more example we can chalk up to the iPadification of the web. Read More

As a parent of two young boys, I was excited – very, very excited – when Callaway Digital Arts introduced their version of the popular . It’s one of our family favorites, just as I am sure it’s a family favorite in many houses. Fortunately, at the introductory $0.99 price point, your money is well spent (though it took a while to make that discovery). Read on to discover what I learned and why it took me so long to write what should have been a quick review. Imagine this scene: The Mom calls to the boys: “Hey boys, guess what? Your Dad just got a new e-book, !” “Let’s read it!” they scream. They get set up on the couch, and the Mom lets the 3-year-old press the magic icon to launch the app. From across the room I immensely enjoy hearing Grover’s actual voice read the title, the author’s and illustrator’s name – the “…very boring page” as the story begins. My first impression is heartwarming as the words are highlighted (somewhat out of sync with Grover’s voice), and we all ignore the delay (up to 2 to 3 seconds) of turning pages to a blank page while awaiting Grover’s appearance. And then it happens: the app crashes back to the iPad’s homescreen. Stunned, everyone looks at me – as if it were my fault or as if I could immediately explain or repair it. Despite the entertainment and the involvement by the boys (the reader is involved interactively in parts of the story), the app continues to crash. Is there a Monster at this End of THIS e-Book?! I do what I can: I close any possible multi-tasking and backgrounding apps. Crash… crash… crash… Disappointed, I wait for a day and then stumble across Lex Friedman’s review at Macworld.com. After reading, I figure I’m doomed to have the same failures he and his daughter have encountered. Finally, right before writing this review, I consult the App Store where the developers and commenters wisely state, ***…restart your iPad after installation*** BANG! It’s like magic, or a Festivus miracle! The app no longer crashes! Of course many of you may know to frequently reboot your iDevice after frequent upgrades or app installations. Occasionally I forget, however, and this has been my lesson learned! The app itself is amusing and an enjoyable rendition of this Sesame Street classic. As opposed to e-books Read More

By Rene Ritchie, Thursday, Apr 22, 2010 | Apple is keeping up the transition from “app for that” to showing how the iPhone makes its users lives better with three new TV commercials — Family Man, Dog Lover, and Backpacker Family man showcases the built-in Photo app with a video of a child’s birthday, the App Store and purchasing Jamie Oliver’s 20 minute meals [$7.99 - iTunes link] for cooking, and Elmo’s Monster Maker [$3.99 - iTunes link] for the kids on a car trip, and Viper SmartStart [free - iTunes link] for opening the car trunk. Dog lover highlight PetFinder.com [free- iTunes link] to help find that perfect dog, Facebook [free - iTunes link] to share the picture with friends, Hey Walkies [free - iTunes link] to find a place to run, and iCam [$4.99 - iTunes link] to stream the whole thing. Backpacker kicks off a trip to spain by finding a place to stay HostelWorld.com [free - iTunes link], sending back pictures with the built-in Photo and Email apps, and using the App Store to download Jibbigo speech translator English to Spanish [$24.99 - iTunes link] for automagic communication. (Unfortunately, we don’t think there’s an app for the bill that would come from all that roaming data…) Read More

Apr 22nd 2010 at 9:00AM I agree with Joey. Both my wife and I immediately thought this ad seemed an old-fashioned anachronism. Wifey wants recipes, and doesn't have her own iPhone? She's probably vacuuming in pearls too. Seems like Apple is on the roll here making sure they push the iphone 3gs sales as much as possible 'cause in a few month nobody will want it anymore... Wow is it like the 1950's again? Thanks for letting us know there is a new ad. And describing it from beginning to end. I'll be sure to head on to the apple website and view it right away. I love the in depth reporting on this one. TUAW (or The Unofficial Apple Weblog) is a website devoted to tips, reviews, news, analysis and opinion on everything Apple. © 2011 AOL Inc. All Rights Reserved. We value our readership, especially when we receive tips which help us write compelling content. Use this form to send us a tip. Note: Some fields are required. Read More

Published: March 21, 2010 Comment         This is my first attempt at making a review for a kid’s game. It poses new challenges, as I have to rely to a great extent upon the experience of others. To test Elmo’s Monster Maker I have used the experiences of my daughters aged 1,2 and 10. In Elmo’s Monster Maker you get to create a cute monster placing eyes, nose, mouth and hat onto a “blank” face. All three co-reviewers appreciated this, and all of them enjoyed both the different characters and the jolly voice coaching them. The touch controls are easy to use for 2 out of 3 co-reviewers; the 1 one-year-old had general trouble with not letting go when something had been selected. The main screen once a monster has been created shows your monster standing around. You can poke it, and drag it around the screen. Three activities are available as icons at the bottom of the screen. The camera icon lets you take a picture of your monster that gets saved into the camera roll. This was not really fun to any of the co-reviewers. I myself found it quite nice to get hi-res monster images that can be used for contacts and background for my phone. The second activity is a gag between your monster and Elmo. The 10-year-old enjoyed the different things Elmo and the monster got up to such as “Duck”, and a duck came flying. She soon found that there are only about five different interactions, and she couldn’t affect it in any way. The youngest co-reviewers found the entire thing quite boring. The third activity is dancing. You get to see your monster groove along to the looping background music. The music ranges from country western to urban hip hop beats. This was the most appreciated activity by all co-reviewers, and the two-year-old could keep herself busy for quite some time. The music is actually quite catchy even though it is only a matter of looping beats and rhythms. All reviewers found that the presentation is splendid with hi resolution monsters, and original voice talent. The application clocks in at 114 MB, and I appreciate that the developer has gone for high quality presentation. When I hand my iPhone to any of the three co-reviewers none of them choose to start Elmo’s Monster Maker. All three co-reviewers want more interaction to be satisfied Read More

By Staff, Tuesday, Feb 16, 2010 | From learning ABCs to counting 123s, going back in time to looking to the stars, the iTunes App Store has something for pretty much everyone. Here’s a sampling of great iPhone and iPod touch apps and games for kids. MONOPOLY Here & Now: The World Edition [$4.99 - iTunes link] – Celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the MONOPOLY brand as the game you know and love goes global. Doodle Jump [$0.99 - iTunes link] – insanely addictive game that’s currently #1 on the App Store Top Paid list. Dinosaurs: The American Museum of Natural History Collections (free - iTunes link] – most kids LOVE dinosaurs and this amazing app let’s kids explore the museums collection. Pickin’ Time [$1.99 - iTunes link] – another game to keep kids of all ages engaged. While teaching them about vegetables! Math Cards [$0.99 - iTunes link] – Sorry kids, it’s not all games. This app uses quick quizzes to improve basic math kill. ABC Animals [$1.99 - iTunes link] – really engaging way to help teach preschoolers letters, phonics and handwriting. Preschool Music [$0.99 - iTunes link] – includes four fun musical activities for preschoolers to jam along with. Perhaps not one for the back of the mini-van. Elmo’s Monster Maker [$3.99 - iTunes link] – super fun app that lets kids design their own monster friend to play with Elmo. Jelly Car 2 [$0.99 - iTunes link] – this game has become a real favorite on the App Store and this version lets you use your own much in the game. Word Magic [$0.99 - iTunes link] – great way to help kids 3-6 have fun with words and spelling. NASA App [free - iTunes link] – educate and entertain with this official app from NASA. Includes a ton of fantastic information about space missions past and present. Wheels on the Bus [$0.99 - iTunes link] – the classic. Brilliantly updated for iPhone and iPod touch. Any other great apps for kids that you would recommend? Let us know! Read More