The world is changing..

Friday, 22 October 2010

Last night I was lucky enough to be invited to a lecture given by Dan Witters of Kiwa Media at University College Falmouth (who have just been voted the best place to study creative writing according to blog.saltpublishing). Dan and his team are award winning app designers working with both  the Apple and Android formats. According to Dan the Android share of the market is marching ever closer to a staggering 80%. 

Lets have a look at one of the apps Kiwa had made for Penguin publishing for one of their popular children's books- Hairy Maclary by Lynley Dodd

If you buy the print version it is a beautiful thing and a parent can read it to their child, brilliant. Yet the app brings a little more to the table-

The dogs tales wag and their eyes roll, not much extra you’ll say. 

If you touch the text the splendid David Tennant will read it to you, argh!?!? Sound good?

If you touch an individual word the app will spell it out for you. 

You can record you own narration if David Tennant’s brogue isn’t your thing.

Okay then, how would you like to change the language of the text with a click? Spanish anyone?No, how about Polish?

Well, how would you like to remove all the colour from the illustrations and with another click select from the colour pallet and finger-paint the trees blue and the dogs green?

There were probably a lot more, but at this point I couldn’t keep up with the note taking and anyway you get the picture. There is a whole brave new world out there to explore, if we have the courage...

I’m sure I’ll be returning to the subject very soon

Have a good week Matt

Oh, by the way the images were pinched from the ProfWriting website and amazon.co.uk