Tortoise and the Hare, The
© 2012 Wanderful, Inc.
The Living Books have been reborn on the iPad. The first of three titles, The Tortoise and the Hare joins three others: Mercer Mayer’s Little Monster at School, Marc Brown’s Arthur’s Teacher Trouble and Harry and the Haunted House, and others are planned. Are they as good as the originals? Absolutely, although back in 1993, when the Living Books featured the state-of-the-art in graphics and sound they stood out from the rest. They combined full color animation with a crisp, responsive design. Today, however, the graphics look bit-mapped an the iPad's clear screen, as if they have been directly ported from an original version. This was immediately noticed by our testers: "the graphics look fuzzy." Of course the upside is that you get a "retro" look on the iPad. Fortunately, the original mono-touch design has been carefully adapted to the modern multi-touch environment to enhance a child's feeling of control. You can quickly jump to any of the still-funny-after-all-these-years hot spots with a single tap, and the outstanding sound hasn't faded a bit. This includes Barbershop quartets, multi-language narration and a banjo that could've come right out of a bluegrass band. The real magic of the Living Books was, and will always be, the way the "living" features work to help tell an already good story. Features include both “Read to Me” or "Let Me Play" modes. New to the iPad versions: a table of contents that makes it easy to jump immediately to any of the 15 pages, and two ways to change the page -- with a swipe, and with arrow keys to manually advance pages. All of these new editions let you toggle between two languages (English and Spanish) and the words highlight when they are touched, or read by the narrator. It's worth noting that the original Living Books were the first to use both the "read to me" and "let me play" modes as well as speech-driven highlighting. Both techniques have been widely adapted in children's language app design. The apps cost $5 and come in English and Spanish. Additional languages are sold as in-app sales (currently these include French, Japanese, German, Italian, U.K. English and Brazilian Portuguese). The bottom line? There's no doubt that the Living Books still have their magic. Our testers loved exploring the pages, over and over again, but they were also quick to jump to another app. Unlike the '90s, they have many more choices. See www.wanderfulstorybooks.com for more information.
$4.99, iPad, iPhone (100 MB)
Teaches: reading, Spanish, English (French is available as an upgrade)
CTR Rating: 84%