Top Toddler Apps: Endless Alphabet

Since my 21-month-old son uses my iPad nearly as much as I do these days, it seems appropriate to review some of his favorite apps along with my faves.

I recently downloaded Endless Alphabet by Calloway Arts (designers of the terrific The Monster at the End of This Book), and it has quickly become a favorite. Two immediate advantages: it's free AND contains no ads, a rare combo these days. I don't mind ads on my apps, but too often they frustrate my son when he can't get them off the screen or gets taken to the App Store or web browser repeatedly when he accidentally hits them. So no ads is a big selling point in a toddler app. UPDATE: Ads have now started appearing, although they are rare. About once or twice a day one pops up, usually when he starts up the app. They aren't as bad as ads in many free toddler apps, but still a bit of an annoyance. I paid the 99 cents to make them go away.

The game here is simple enough, but keeps him engaged for a good long time. You pick a word out of the ever-changing lineup (the app downloads new words regularly - again, this is FREE!):



Then you get a straightforward puzzle, putting the letters into place. It's got enough of a margin of error that he rarely gets frustrated, and is smart enough to let him move two letters at once if he wants (another important toddler feature - letting them touch however they want).



When the puzzle is done, they are treated to a short animation about the word with a voiceover giving its definition.



And that's it - now you go to the next word or pick a new one! He can easily spend 15 minutes at this, which is as long as anything keeps his attention.

I think he's right at the perfect age for this app. A few months ago, his fine motor skills weren't quite good enough for this type of puzzle. By the time he can recognize all the letters on his own, simply slotting them into place won't capture his attention for very long. But it's perfectly designed for a two-year-old.

If I have one complaint, it's that the letters don't always say the right sound - an E will always say its short sound, even if its long sound is used in the word. But this is really a very minor in an outstanding (and did I mention FREE?) app.

Conceptis Brings Japanese Logic Puzzles to the iPad

I'm a puzzle nerd, although I'll admit that having a baby has slowed me down a bit. I do regular crosswords and occasionally sudokus, but I'd rather do a cryptic crossword or another type of Japanese logic puzzle like a Nurikabe, Heyawake, or Hashi.

These logic puzzles are perfectly suited to the touch interface of an iPad, but until recently they were only available via iPhone apps. The low resolution limits the size of the puzzle grids, and therefore the difficulty of the puzzles. The hardest Nurikabe in the paid app only took me about ten minutes to finish - and I am not especially good at these.

Finally, though, these are slowly making their way to the iPad in full HD resolution!

 Most of these puzzles were invented by Japanese company Nikoli, but are often distributed in the United States by Conceptis, Ltd - while the iPhone apps were under the Nikoli name, the iPad apps are by Conceptis. Currently there are six iPad apps available:

• Nurikabe
• Hashi, also known as Bridges
• Pic-A-Pix, also known as Paint By Number.
• Link-A-Pix (a Pic-A-Pix variant)
• Fill-A-Pix (another variant)
• And of course, Sudoku

The interfaces are clean and uncluttered. These apps are all free, and come with an impressive 120 puzzles each to get you started! 40 easy, 40 medium, and 40 hard. Additional puzzles can be bought in various packs ranging from $1.99-2.99 depending on the size of the puzzles.

If you enjoy Sudoku, or its cousin Ken-Ken (which has been making regular newspaper appearances lately), I highly recommend you check out these other logic puzzles via these excellent free apps! These just started rolling out in November, with the most recent appearing in January, so hopefully they will continue to release other puzzle types.

My favorite iPad text editor: PlainText

One app I've been using a lot lately is PlainText, a simple text editor that syncs seamlessly with Dropbox and saves as actual .txt files. (Free with ads, lose the ads for $2.)

I use TextEdit a lot on my Macs, doing almost everything I can in plain text or .rtf documents. I only use Word when I actually need the features. But it was surprisingly hard to find an editor on the iPad that could open and save to a simple .txt. I tried Evernote, but it saves you work as some internal file type that can't really be accessed outside of Evernote itself. Same for my extensive collection of notetaking apps that allow both typing and handwriting.

I wanted an app to work on simple lists, blog posts, and other writing projects in, so that I could also open them in TextEdit or other programs on any computer. Enter PlainText.

It's simple and does its job beautifully. It creates a folder in DropBox, and you can either set it to sync continually or only when you tell it to. (I had it set to sync continually, til my husband was using the computer and got annoyed when it kept telling him that Note.txt had been updated - now I sync manually.) You can create subfolders within the app. The text editor itself is simple, no frills. The document list is in a column on the left (it doesn't autohide in portrait, by the way), or you can go into focus mode and see only the text you're working on.



It's certainly nothing fancy. But it is precisely what I'd been looking for. If I could wish for one upgrade, I would want it to also do simple .rtf files, possibly via MarkDown. I've had a hell of a time finding anything on iOS that does .rtf. But for now, it's serving its purpose very well.

Stylus holders

If, like me, you partially got the iPad to write on and don't like writing with your finger, you probably own a stylus. And given how few cases come with stylus holders, like me you probably don't use it as much as you'd like to because it's hard to keep it with the iPad.

Zoogue is now offering "free" stylus holders - the true cost is only $2 shipping. Of course, they are made to work with Zoogue cases, and so they may or may not work with yours. But $2 is a pretty minimal investment to find out, and now that I've got mine I can copy the design with a thinner sheet of plastic that will fit in my case.

Better than the Website 2: Photobucket

Lots of sites have poorly-designed apps that just aren't necessary or useful considering how well the iPad browses the non-mobile-optimized web. But a few have apps that I even prefer to the website on a desktop browser.

The latest is for photo sharing site Photobucket. Although it has long been my photo host of choice (or at least, since Yahoo! Photos shut down), the website is slow, clunky, and cumbersome to navigate. In fact, I think I share fewer photos because it's just a pain to use.

The app may completely change my photo sharing habits. The interface is simple and sleek, photos load quickly, everything works smoothly and like you expect it to.




Icons in the top right let you navigate subfolders, upload and download pics to/from your iPad, and share the photos. When you are viewing a single picture, you get the familiar list of copy-and-paste options for sharing it on different types of websites.




I have yet to run into a single glitch or bug, though I've only been using the app for a day.

This is an especially great find for me right now, because with a new baby I've been looking for ways to streamline my photo taking/sharing. I have a small camera with an Eye-Fi card in the diaper bag, and the card uploads all pics both to my computer and a private folder on Photobucket. This app now makes it ten times easier and more convenient for me to sort through those uploaded pics, move the good ones to public folders, and share them with friends and family.

The one thing I would love to see in an update is the ability to select multiple photos in an album to perform batch actions like deleting and moving to another album. Currently these actions are only available as you view each photo. But even so, I'll take this app over the website any day!

Need a good calendar app

So, I really don't like the calendar that comes standard with the iPad. It just never behaves the way I expect it to - I think swiping will change the month.... Nope! I try to enter a new event by tapping the start time... Nope! I'm sure I could get used to it eventually, but I'd rather find something I like better.

Unfortunately, what appears to be the best contender doesn't actually exist yet. Someone on the MacRumors forums (where I get most of my iPad advice) pointed me to an iPhone app called Week Calendar. The devs, Utilitap, are working on an iPad version right now. They've been posting updates and screenshots on their twitter feed, and it looks like exactly what I want - basically iCal for the iPad, which for some reason the built-in calendar isn't at all.

But I can't have that yet, and they don't even seem to have an estimated date for it. In fact, there is no mention of iPad anywhere on their site or blog - you'd never know it was being developed if you didn't check their twitter. Which to me suggests it might still be a while and they don't want to get people's hopes up. :(

Another one suggested to me is Cozi, a family calendar with an online version that links to the mobile versions. There is also an ad-supported free version that I downloaded to check out. So far, I am not impressed. It doesn't really have either a monthly or a good daily view - it seems you're always stuck in a week-or-so-ish view that just shows as many appointments for as many days as it can fit vertically on the screen. Eh. Not impressed.

One that I have not yet tried is CalenGoo, which is made (AFAICT) to look like, act like, and sync with Google Calendars. Which probably means it's good, but I don't use google calendars so I'm not really prepared to drop $7 on it to try it out. Maybe I'll try google calendars first and give it a shot if Week Calendar takes too long.

Further calendar suggestions are more than welcome! Of course, I have a To Do app (Manage) that I am quite happy with, so integrated to do functionality is not really needed, but I know that some to do apps do have a good calendar so I'd be willing to consider them - as long as they're worth the purchase price for just the calendar even if I don't use the to dos!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Pocket Frogs

It would be downright irresponsible of me to talk about the iPad without talking about the one app that uses half its battery life right now:



Pocket Frogs.

To my surprise, my husband, who rolls his eyes at the mere fact that I own an iPad, is possibly more addicted to the game than I am. Above is an actual screenshot of our nursery, where I am letting some serpentis babies grow up to sell for a tidy profit.

It's just a simple collecting-and-breeding game. I've never played a pokemon game, but I assume it's kinda like that but without battles (especially given that the name is clearly a reference to pokemon's pocket monsters). You could just breed what you like, or there is a list of over 200 awards to serve as your goals to guide your play. Being the anal sorts that we are, my husband and I are going for these goals.

(Psst- by the way, this game is FREE!)

My frogs:



One annoyance, which you might have noticed in these screenshots, is that the game only runs in portrait mode. It does not rotate when you rotate your iPad. WTF?

The main minigame involves jumping around a pond to catch flies, find new frogs to breed into your collection, and find presents. This game seems a lot easier until you a) try to grow a baby frog, whose tiny size makes it harder to catch anything, into a adult via fly-eating and b) realize that only the largest (and fastest) flies are worth XP. At first it's nice that you can speed up a frog's maturation by catching flies, but now I'm at the point where one fly per minute (approx, other than large flies) + a frog that takes 10+ hours to mature + the difficulty of fly-catching with a tiny baby frog leads to an annoyingly long time tapping lily pads in that pond. So more and more I'm just letting the babies sit there and grow on their own - which, with limited habitat space, slows things down a lot. But that's probably a good thing, because it also means I can't sit there and play with the frogs for hours on end!

Now, endless fly-catching isn't the only way to speed things up. There are potions to grow your frogs and stamps to make items in the mail arrive faster. Potions are much more useful than stamps, IMO, and accordingly are harder to come by. Of course, if you're the type to spend real money in-game, you can buy packs of potions or stamps (as well as other useful goodies) in the in-app store. Clearly NimbleBit is taking the Zynga route to game profitability - get people addicted to the free games, sell them bits and baubles to make the drug stronger. :)

There are also racing and puzzle minigames, but I haven't been too interested in these so far. The main attraction really is setting and meeting those breeding goals, along with finding the occasional particularly pretty frog to keep in your collection just for fun rather than for strategic purposes.

If you like collecting sorts of games, and like FREE apps, this is a must-have.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

A quick bit of advice for fellow iPad newbies

If you just got your iPad and are scouring blogs to see what apps you absolutely need, here are the first two you should start with:

1) AppStart - It is FREE right now to celebrate the release of iPad 2, but who knows how long the FREE will last. So snap it up! It's a terrific intro to what's out there, and it's how I found many of the apps I currently use the most. And honestly, the terrific layout will be an instant intro to how things are different on an iPad vs a laptop.

2) AppShopper - This terrific (and also FREE) app lets you create an app wishlist and then lets you know every time those apps get an update or a price change - so if there's an app you'd like to try but feel like the price is just a bit too steep right now, you can wait for a sale and pounce! You can also browse all the apps that have recently gone on sale, a great way to find apps you'd never think of on your own, while they're having a free day! If there's an app you've gotta have, go ahead and pay full price by all means - you never know if the next price change will be up or down, after all. But for the ones you're just curious about, AppShopper will help you explore without breaking the bank.

You can find the sites that gave us these two great apps, AppAdvice and AppShopper, in my blogroll to the right. Lots of useful info on those pages, as well!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad