This week, some beloved characters from children's books series make their app debuts. Also: How to Cook Everything for the iPad, and a graphic novel series.
Title: Go, Clifford, Go!
Publisher: Scholastic
Available: January 3
Price: $4.99
Background: The app is based on the Scholastic book series by Norman Bridwell. There are more than 126 million books in print from the Clifford series.
Interactive features: The beloved Big Red Dog encounters trucks, trains, planes, and motorcycles. Kids can tilt the iPad to make the trees sway, waves roll and characters animate. After reading the story, kids can play an action game in which they drive the vehicles featured in the story and collect bones for Clifford.
Title: How to Cook Everything Kitchen Companion
Publisher: Wiley/Culinate
Available: January 3
Price: $9.99
Background: The app has all of features in the How to Cook Everything iPhone app, plus new iPad-specific features. It is based on Mark Bittman’s bestselling cookbook, How to Cook Everything (Wiley).
Interactive features: Filters pinpoint searches by multiple ingredients, techniques, or cuisines; note-taking capability for every recipe; bookmarks to hold a user’s place in several recipes at a time; and a constant-on option to allow uninterrupted reading and recipe review.
Title: I Love You Through and Through
Publisher: Scholastic
Available: January 3
Price: $4.99
Background: Based on the Scholastic book by Bernadette Rosetti-Shustak and illustrated by Caroline Jayne Church, which has more than 1.8 million copies in print.
Interactive features: Aimed at preschoolers, the app has “Touch & Tilt” animated interactions, so kids can touch words to hear the story and then touch again to pause; touch characters or objects to watch an animation and see them move; and tilt the iPad to watch the story characters lean and move.
Title: The Magic School Bus: Oceans
Publisher: Scholastic
Available: January 3
Price: $7.99 for full app; Lite Version available
Background: The app is based on the Scholastic book The Magic School Bus: On The Ocean Floor by Joanna Cole and illustrated by Bruce Degen. The MSB series has more than 58 million books in print.
Interactive features: Kids can touch the words to hear the story and then touch again to pause and touch speech bubbles to hear what characters are saying; and tilt to find underwater bubbles that grant access to 26 real photos and 11 videos of underwater animals and plant life. There is a re-playable game.
Title: Zoo Train
Publisher: Busy Bee Studios
Available: December 16, 2010
Price: $1.99
Background: The app is an original concept, inspired by app creator Susy Christiansen’s preschoolers. It consists of five games focused on trains and animals, which teach word building, music, patterns, shape matching, and creative play.
Interactive features: Kids drag train tracks and letters, and can play a set of train whistles by touching them.
Title: Animals: Slide and Find; Trucks: Slide and Find
Publisher: Macmillan/Malloc Media LLC
Available: December 7, 2010
Price: $1.99 each
Background: The apps are based on the popular board books from Priddy Books.
Interactive features: With the Animals app, babies and toddlers can see pictures of animals and hear the sounds they make. There are questions about the animals, and children can slide their fingers across the screen to reveal the correct answer. The Trucks app allows kids to connect the names of each truck they see with the sounds each create.
Title: Mirabilis - Year of Wonders
Publisher: Random House/Mirus Entertainment
Available: December 2010
Price: Free
Background: The full-color graphic novel by Dave Morris and Leo Hartas was partly financed by Random, which serialized the first part of the story in its weekly DFC comic. Mirus is Morris’s and Hartas’s own label.
Interactive features: The iPad app comprises the first eight issues (200 pages). These issues are the Winter season; three more seasons will follow. Owners of the app get regular alerts of new episodes, and can buy the new content using the in-app storefront.
To be included in this weekly listing, please send us the app title, the book or other source for the app (if there is one -- original apps are fine, too), when it was released, price, background of the book (including such info as copies in print, when it was released, awards, and brief plot summary), and the interactive elements of the app. We also need the promo codes, and an image from the app if possible. Send all apps to Jim Milliot, and send news of children’s apps to Diane Roback as well.
