Violet strikes again in the Mystery Next Door: an interactive iOS children's book Our friend Violet is back in the third original installment of this excellent modern series of interactive children's books from My Black Dog Books LLC. Violet and the Mystery Next Door (US$3.99) is a universal app that looks great in landscape mode on any iOS device. The book tells the story of how Violet finds a mysterious new neighbor, just her age, and goes about finding more about him in the snow.
The Violet series has added more play value with each story, and this one adds branching. At two points in the story, you are asked a yes or no question. Depending upon your answer, you are taken to a number of pages that follow that line, eventually ending up at the same place and continuing the story. This adds much more variety for small children since they can follow a number of branches, making the book shorter or longer. Eventually, kids will take all the paths, causing them to spend more time with Violet and her world. This was an excellent design decision and really adds a lot to the book. Another good choice was to put a book icon in the upper left that lets you scroll to any page in the book.
In one branch, you are asked if the mysterious boy sees Violet sneaking up on him. Answering no causes the boy to go into his house, where you see that he has a lot of toys. Then he runs outside to make a snow angel and vanishes, so Violet has to find him. When she does find him, they have an interactive snowball fight. If you tell the app that the boy did see Violet, she chases him to his Clubhouse, where you'll find an empty snowman. You can build the snowman by moving his eyes, nose, buttons and some other things onto it, providing even more play value. Violet and the mysterious boy eventually wind up at the snowball fight, and the story takes off from there.
Gallery: Violet and the Mystery Next Store GalleryContinue reading Violet strikes again in the Mystery Next Door: an interactive iOS children's bookViolet strikes again in the Mystery Next Door: an interactive iOS children's book originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 13 Mar 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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