January 2, 2012

Kids piano - interesting music app!

I've bought, installed,played with and let my daughter play with "Kids piano" by developer "Sunny day". There is a trial as well. Full app is here.

This is a truly great start for an app with many facets. However, in order to be used more by toddlers, some things need to be done and there is a lack of polish on some features.

* Plus: Great ideas! Truly great ideas in this app! There is a  note/tone memory game, coupled to color and shape. Really great pedagogical idea.  There are different input imageries, and so on.
* Plus: There are also three "voices" - piano and both womans and childrens voices for vocalizing. The childrens voice *immediately* grabbed my daughters attention. But then the sample problems appeared (see below).

* Problem: Many clicks to start a feature. My daughter cant remember it all, and quickly learned to avoid this app altogether. Solution: Shortcuts directly to different parts of the app, that we can put on the homescreen. Android can link to activities, that might be one option. Where should it start? Note memory game, piano player, etc

* Problems: Samples not good. "So" sample of voice 2( of 3, the children) has a clear silence/delay at start, that ruins use completely. Samples (even in this full version) are of *terribly* LOW quality.

* Problem: Songs list unusable for toddler rendering play-along feature unusable. Categorize songs and allow filtering by parent, add icons to songs so that small children (who don't read) can select songs themselves. This would improve usability enormously!

* Problem: Too many things is happening on some screens - really the thing is the note history, that I think one should be able to disable for toddlers, it is distracting.

This is a great effort but there remains work to get it to work for my daughter. It is a great start and I recommend having a look at the lite version to get a good idea.

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