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Duck Duck Moose apps for iPhone and iPad

18.08.2010
When I first got an iPhone, I didn't realize just how many features it had. Sure, I knew I could surf the Internet with it, check my e-mail, make unstable phone calls, and such. But I didn't know that the iPhone could also be a great kid distractor. The App Store is rife with apps geared toward the toddler-and-up crowd, which can work wonders when it takes too long for the entrées to get served. I took a look at three such kid-geared apps from developer , with a little help from Anya (who is almost 4-years-old), and Sierra (who is 20-months-old).

($1 on the iPhone and iPod touch, with a $2 version for the iPad that adds a few trivial niceties) has probably provided the most overall enjoyment for my kids. While Anya (the older one) now spends less time with the app than she did before, she derived many accumulated hours of enjoyment from it. And Sierra is still a big, big fan.

The app plays the familiar children's song as it presents a colorful outdoor scene. You can tap on pretty much to make something happen--and oftentimes, tapping on the same object multiple times makes something different happen. Tap on the window of the house, for example, and it will slide up and something will jump out. Tap it again, and something else jumps out. My kids love tapping all over, discovering the different actions and sound effects that they can trigger.

When you tap the titular spider himself, the next lines of the song are sung ("Down came the rain..."), and the entire screen pans over to a new section of the scene. It's cute, extremely well-executed, and offers plenty of exploratory fun.

, a $2 iPhone app, plays similarly to Itsy Bitsy Spider, with some added puzzle elements. The app actually couples its title song with Row Row Row Your Boat, which is frankly an odd pairing--though my daughters never seem to mind. As you explore the game, loading sheep into boats (because, hey, why not?), it's obvious that Baa Baa is less coherent to navigate than Itsy Bitsy. The path your rowboat takes is far more ambiguous than the spider's journey, and the added puzzle element--finding scattered objects across the game's numerous screens to fit into outlines across the bottom of the screen--feels tacked on. And Sierra tends to get frustrated quickly with Baa Baa Black Sheep, since it's far more difficult to get to a specific screen in the game than it is in Itsy Bitsy Spider.

Had my kids and I never seen Itsy Bitsy Spider, we'd surely appreciate Baa Baa Black Sheep more. But the latter game tries too hard to improve upon the simple greatness of the former, and it doesn't quite gel the same way.