Cameron Friedlander

http://posterous.nullintovoid.com/ipad-apps-my-2-year-old-loves-smule-magic-pia This app is amazing, I'n not sure it's for kids but my son loves it. There are three views of the piano: 1. Invisible; just touch the screen and watch it light up and play the keys, dragging your finger across the screen results in all keys being played, very cool. 2. Spiral; piano is in a spiral and the keys are quite large, easy for a kid to play. 3. Normal; see all the keys, zoom in and out to only display snippets of the keyboard. There are also a few other very cool options. You can have it play certain songs, including twinkle twinkle little star and the moonlight sonata. You can play along as it tells you which areas of the screen to hit. I love this because I can sing to my child as we tap the screen together to the song. Really a well done application. At $.99 you can't go wrong, very stable. http://magicpiano.smule.com/ http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/magic-piano/id356416346?mt=8

Every week, or randomly, I'll share an app my 19 month old loves. I've bought plenty and since my kid actually has his own iPad he appears to be a good test case and quite crafty at that. http://posterous.nullintovoid.com/ipad-apps-my-2-year-old-loves-toddler-countin //-------------------- Toddler Counting is not the most exciting app but it is the most basic, and this simplicity is what makes it hot. At $.99 this app is worth it, you can't go wrong. There are only two-stages "easy" and "hard". It shows random images (pizza anyone?) and asks the child to count the items by tapping them, in any particular order. This continuous reinforcement of counting appears to be helping my own child, who went from not understanding numbers to counting. For whatever reason he loves this app and that is all it does, over and over with different imagery and a sometimes-laughable vocalization of joy from the narrator. There are some basic flaws but what do expect for $.99? If the child gets too excited they can cut off the narrative, feedback of the words. Also if the child drags his hand across it by accident he knocks off about four numbers at once. But this is neither here nor there since it just goes and goes. http://itotapps.com/Site/ToddlerCounting.html

Every once in awhile a great article comes around that shows you why all these blogs just kinda suck when it comes to features; don't worry I'm including this one as well. The future is data, data and content. Wolf might be focusing on the obsessive MIT sense of data journals but you can easily see that every post you make to Facebook is beginning to keep a journal of your life, and guess what? You don't own it. Take a quick read of this article to get some idea of what our lives will look like in the NEAR future. Great piece of journalism. HCI mechanics to pay forward from this? Data visualization, consumer facing listeners, data trackers (easy to use), social mashups. Link etc at my personal blog http://posterous.nullintovoid.com/the-future-data-data-driven-life-the-new-york