ABC Food
© 2011 Peapod Labs
Fifth in the series of the ABC apps from Peapod Labs (see also Music, Wildlife, Play and Go), ABC Food turns your iPad or iPhone screen into an alphabet-themed visual encyclopedia. Instead of using stock art, however, these apps pull photos from royalty free sources, such as Flickr and YouTube. The result is an authentic presentation of letter-themed food art. You start by pressing one of the 150 thumbnail images, organized alphabetically. Each leads to a letter themed food item. For C, for example, you won't want to miss the closeup view of a child eating an ear of Corn, one of the 38 photos used to illustrate the letter C. Others include coconut, chocolate and croissant. Hungry yet? Each word is spelled on the bottom of the screen. Touching any of the letters within the word lets you quickly jump to a new set of words, offering a nice secondary navigation technique. But wait, there's more. About a third of the photos include either YouTube videos (you can watch a girl learning how to separate egg whites, for example) or rub-away images, where rubbing a whole bar of chocolate gradually uncovers a chopped up bar, beneath it. Note that you'll need an active Internet connection to keep the app updated. There are two minor flaws. The first is that it is too easy for a child to end up in the App store. The second is that your child might try to bite your iPad.
$1.99, iPad, iPhone
Teaches: language, reading, letter recognition
CTR Rating: 94%