For those of you that have downloaded any of the Disney Storybooks before you know that you are in for a treat as they bring the books to life on the iPhone and iPad.
Across the 28 interactive virtual pages of the book you can either read the story, have it read to you by the narrator or record the words and have those played back. This is great for your children to practice and listen back to their reading of for a parent to ‘virtually’ read the book to thier child when their not around.
Each page is beautifully illustrated, animated and can be interacted while the narration is clear and easy to listen too.
The storybook also includes additional activities including a matching game, 6 puzzles of increasing difficulty, 6 paintings and a talking Dory which acts similar to the talking animal games that are available.
At $6.99 it’s not cheap but it is an engaging way to re-live the Finding Nemo story.
The Finding Nemo Interactive Comic re-tells the story of Finding Nemo in a panel by panel comic book. You can either have the panels automatically appear or tap and swipe the screen to move through the story.
For your creative children you also get a step by step guide to how to draw the four main protagonists and you can either draw them directly onto the iPad or use the skills you learn and draw them elsewhere too.
Finding Nemo Interactive Comic is a universal app and is available from the App Store now for just $1.99
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Disney recently released the classic story of Dumbo as an interactive app for the iPhone and iPad. For children young and old the story of Dumbo is an endearing classic and while this interactive story book to the original story and artwork it also and features such as coloring pages, puzzles and a musical instrument in the form of a Calliope straight from the pages of the book.
The story itself is beautifully recreated in its electronic form and has well delivered audio to so that your child can listen to the story as well as read it. The pages come to life with animated action too which brings the story to life even more.
One if the most impressive features though is the ability to record your own audio of each individual page. You can do this one page at a time and when turned on the narration will be you voice and not the origami voice. This will be awesome if for any reason your going to be away from your child as this can be one way to stay close.
The three additional features are fun too. Playing the Calliope is fun and sounds very authentic. You can either freestyle or follow the tutorial to play along with the tune. The puzzle provides 3 virtual jigsaw puzzles for you to put together and each has 3 difficulty levels which increases the number of pieces in the puzzle.
Also pulling from the pictures in the book are the coloring pages. In these pages you have a paint brush, pencil and a palette of colors to color in the picture. You can save your handiwork if you want to come back to it later or email your completed masterpiece.
A nice added feature is the ability to personalize the splash screen of the app, not only with your child’s photograph but also their name which you can either type in or write in using your finger or stylus.
It’s no surprise that Disney would produce such a great app but it’s good to see it come to fruition.
This universal app cost $1.99 and is available in the App Store now, whether you are wanting to relive the story from your childhood or enjoy it with your child or grand children this app is a great way to do it.
[rating: 5/5]What we like
What to know
On rare occasions I will tell you to go and grab a game immediately and then come back and read this review…….this is one of those occasions and to be honest what do you have to lose when all you’ll be spending is 99 cents on a universal app that will work on both your iPhone and iPad should you be lucky enough to have both.
You may be thinking, especially if you already have Asphalt 6, why should I even spend more money on the next version of Gamelofts arcade racer and the simple answer is this, it’s Bigger, Better, Faster and there’s more of it, so much in fact this review may only scratch the surface of all the features that are packed into this racing game.
If you have played any of Gamelofts games before then you will know what to expect when it comes to sound and graphics, and in Asphalt7 Heat they continue to lead the way a rainbow of electric lights that illuminate 15 different tracks from all around the world and with a pumping soundtrack the game is a dream to both see and hear.
There are four control options to choose from so you are bound to find one that suits your driving preferences, from using the accelerometer, on screen steering wheel or the screen itself the controls work very well, and you can also choose from auto or manual acceleration depending on your preference.
The quality of the controls are highlighted due to the fact that you can jump straight into Quick Play mode and start winning races immediately. Quick Race is just the beginning though, as the Career, Online and Multiplayer modes are where the real value comes in.
The Career Mode is spread over 13 cups each with 4 different races and these include normal races, elimination, knockdown, paint job and king of the hill which all offer slightly different variations on driving as fast as you can around the streets of the world.
As you work your way through the career mode you’ll have the ability to unlock and upgrade a great range of licensed cars, from a Mini Cooper S to the Shelby GT 500, from a BMW Z4 to the Lamborghini Countach and everything in between. There are 60 cars in total so there should be something for everyone.
The cars handle as well as you would expect for an arcade racer, the game relies heavily on drifting but this is relatively easy to control, early on at least, only when you start to unlock the bigger, faster cars does it get a little trickier, by the time you unlock them though you’ll be well practised, right?
Of course you don’t have to work through the game and earn your racing stripes to unlock all the flash cars, instead you can purchase your in game dollars by spending your hard earned dollars via in-app purchase but it’s well balanced, meaning that if you are willing to put the time in you can achieve your rewards without the need of spending above and beyond the original $1 outlay.
The online options are really where the game comes to life and it does this in two ways. First up is the online multi-player where you can race against your friends, and enemies, in any combination of race types and locations. The online mode works well, the games come thick and fast and there is relatively little slow down, it adds a whole new dimension to the gameplay that will keep you playing Asphalt 7 for a long time to come, or at least until Asphalt 8 comes out!
If you don’t want to want to race against people online in real time you can choose the weekly event that makes up the Asphalt Academy and see how far up the world rankings you can get.
With the game being a universal app it’s good to see that your progress can be transferred between devices. Asphalt Tracker allows you to transfer your progress between devices using either Facebook, or Gameloft’s own servers and while this isn’t quite as seamless as iCloud syncing would be it works and prevents you having to play the game twice across all of your devices.
Asphalt Tracker also enables you to send offline challenges to your friends via Gameloft which just adds more depth to an already deep game and that’s before mentioning the goals are Gameloft’s equivalent of GameCenter Achievements.
After all this eulogizing you’d think that perhaps I didn’t have anything bad to say about the game, that’s not the case. Asphalt 7’s all about social gaming and this takes the form of Facebook integration, the problem with this is though that between races and for every earned goal you are prompted to confirm whether or not you want to publicize the achievement and if you don’t want to bombard your Facebook newsfeed with your progress it can get a little frustrating.
If you’ve got this far and have not been simultaneously downloading Asphalt 7 on your iOS device you have permission to do so now!
[rating: 5/5]What we like
What to know
When one normally envisages photoshop style effects and the workflow associated with them it generally revolves around the entire image, or a selection we have made with a simple rectangle or “lasso” tool.
TouchUp for iPad lets us use our fingers to paint effects on, or off of our images and photos, as well as layer further effects over one another. So how did we find the concept in every day use?
TouchUp is a well presented app. The people at RogueSheep have a relatively short history in apps. But then so do most software houses. In that time they have managed to put out apps of a definitive quality. TouchUp for iPad is no exception. RogueSheep have also won few awards. So we should be in good hands.
The main desktop of the app is rather hokey for my tastes, but works well. You can tap little photos of effects areas, or work areas, or your gallery to manipulate your workflow and import and export images.
The workspace when editing an image is clean and tidy, and best of all makes sense.
When you are done editing there are all the usual options for Twitter, Facebook or email to share your work. You can also import images from flikr to work on initially, as well as from your own photo library.
One of the things I really like about the app is that you can very easily recreate those trendy black and white shots with key objects colorized. In one of their tutorial videos on their web site RogueSheep illustrate this by painting color back into a street shot that has been made black and white, so that the traffic lights end up being the only coloured object in the picture.
But your creativity can go much further than that. Base effects included in TouchUp are as follows : Black and White, Sepia, Blur, Contrast, Brightness, Temperature, Saturation, Tint, Hue Shift, Color Paint Brush, Tint Paint Brush. And as I’ve already said you can layer and combine those.
It needn’t end there either, as Rogue Sheep offer more effects online as downloadable options. For cash, of course! But some of those are quite nifty. Like Dodge and Burn for $1.99.
How you combine and use those effects is up to you. And at any point you can go back and forth between the various layers of effects you have painted on your image, and tweak settings.
All the menus are easy to understand iPad OS popups that allow you to scroll though options, expand settings areas and twiddle widgets to get just the hue, brightness or strength you want to give an effect.
One niggle I had was that there are no controls for cropping or rotating your images. So you may need to use another app to get your photo prepared for TouchUp. By version 4.0, which is where TouchUp for iPad is right now, I would have expected that option to be in there. Perhaps in version 5.0?
Right now TouchUp is $2.99. And at that price I’d say it is money well spent.
$2.99 (View in iTunes)
Category: Photography
Updated: Oct 30, 2010
Current Version: 4
4
24.3 MB
Language: English
Seller: RogueSheep
© 2010 RogueSheep Incorporated
Rated 4+
Requirements:Compatible with iPad. Requires iOS 3.2 or later