Ultimate Dinopedia: The Most Complete Dinosaur Reference Ever (iPad)

$6, iPad

Teaches: science, dinosaurs, ecosystems

CTR Rating: 90%

CTR Review

This printed dinosaur book-turned-iPad app is rich with content (over 600 dinosaurs are listed) but it has some rough design spots. The app, by "Dino" Don Lessem, certainly does a good job living up to it's "most complete" claim. If you live with a young paleontologist, this is a viable consideration; and there's enough content to explore to satisfy a child's imagination. If you're looking for hot spots and games, this isn't your app.You can either simply swipe through the 112 pages, one page at a time, or jump to a specific page using a set of side-scrolling thumbnails. Each page contains a huge, beautiful close-up of a dinosaur, picture information, and a dramatically narrated paragraph describing the dinosaur on the screen. At any point, you can jump to a contents window, navigate using a family tree, browse dinosaur profiles, or look at 14 short videos that illustrate how the dinosaurs move. We noticed a few nonfatal glitches. If you flip through the pages quickly, you lose the images (the screen turns black) and you have to wait a few seconds before the pages keep up, indicating a buffer problem. When you want to view a video, you have to manually flip your screen from vertical to landscape view. All in all, this is a good example of how a picture book can be converted into app, and offer add-on content that help all the facts have more meaning. If you live with a future paleontologist, this is an app worth consideration. Takes 382 MB. See http://www.nationalgeographic.com/mobile. Created by ScrollMotion for National Geographic.