Hip Hip Hooray for Hippo Hooray
Among other things, the iPhone has turned out to be a lovely device for small children to engage with technology. We have lots of parents of small children in our Jackson Fish Market extended family. Creating high quality, focused, educational, and entertaining software for toddlers on the iPhone seemed like a noble task (and with an end result that we could use ourselves — and test on our kids). Today we are proud to announce a trio of apps in our new Hippo Hooray series — Hippo Hooray Colors, Hippo Hooray Letters, and Hippo Hooray Shapes.
Hippo Hooray Colors, Shapes, and Letters are great ways to help young children learn their colors, shapes, and letters as well as keep them entertained. Colors, shapes, and letters appear in a variety of contexts on colorful backgrounds with rich imagery. A young voice encourages the child to choose the right colored object, shape or letter, helps them if they don’t pick right the first time, and pats them on the back when they choose correctly. Every so often a short video will pop up congratulating your child on doing a great job.
Amid beautiful illustrations, you’ll find Honey the Hippo and Raphael the Robin (yes, he paints!) peeking out from behind scenery, and coming out to encourage your child. (Keep an eye out for the monkey with the cupcake hat.) In addition to high quality artwork, the user interface is as simple as can be letting your toddler focus on cognitive, language, and motor development — not to mention fun.
Each of these new apps for the iPhone are available right now in the App Store for only $0.99. Search for Hippo Hooray, or click on one of the screenshots below and let us know what you think. Fun!
11 Responses to “Hip Hip Hooray for Hippo Hooray”
They look gorgeous! Congratulations! I’m buying them now for my kids!
Congrats man!
That looks awesome (as always).
congrats! now port them to xbox live arcade so I don’t need to support at&t
These look great. A really smart way to apply your design and development strengths in a niche market where visuals and color are highly valued. Fantastic idea, and the products look beautiful.
Cool, hopefully some day the Zune HD will allow this type of app. My daughter would love it!
Congrats! This is a great app, my 3 yr. old daughter can open my iphone and go to the photos so this is one I will definitely use.
On a sidenote, did you guys design this car on http://www.theyrebeautiful.com , I’d love to know how to make something like that, really like the side window “ad”.
Thanks all for the nice comments
Scott – Yes, we did (sort of) design the car on http://www.theyrebeautiful.com. The Library of Congress has a ton of high res vintage photos that make great references. Check http://www.shorpy.com too. The images on both sites are for the most part in the public domain.
So what I did in this case, I took an image of a 1940s classic car and re-rendered some of the elements like the tires, windows, doors. Then I simply added the window reflection and lettering in Photoshop. The inner shadow on the letters and window edges add that extra touch of realism. Keep us posted on your car designing adventures!
They look nice, but seem (at first glance), a little overpriced (sorry) for a single experience. Maye offering all three for $1.99 would be a better price point.
I’m saying this because I just bought the entire Curious George Dictionary app, that has colors, numbers, quantities, letters, shapes, and opposites for only $2.99.
It looks nice, though. Please don’t hate me for the comment!
Hi Hilel,
Saw you at the JobNob fair yesterday. Why didn’t you hang around? You left before the actual fair started. Next time stick around, okay?
-JN
Fun! I want to play with hippos…
Jenny,
Thank you so much for sharing those details about the car image, I’m going to check those out in a sec.
BTW, Ava still loves this app and hope you guys do more like it. She’s grown quite attached to my iPhone though so it can be a bit difficult to ask for it back.
Then this morning I’m coming back from grabbing a coffee and glanced at my recent calls and there was one that stood out. She had placed a call to one of my former employers, and the call lasted 7 mins, oops. I ended on good terms though, so I’ll call him to find out what he heard, or maybe it left him a voicemail.
Anyhow, I think its relevant to mention here because kids will be spending time using the app, but without putting it into airplane mode thus not being able to receive calls, I need to figure out a way to turn off the phone so she can still use the apps. Thoughts or should I read the instructions that came with it for once
?