Great iPhone Apps for Kids: Cookie Doodle

Cookie Doodle for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch is a great app for kids for three big reasons:

1. It's fairly easy for children 3(-ish) years and older to understand and use without constant help from Mom or Dad.
2. Instead of a game that rewards with a score or unlocked levels, it encourages simple creativity. The reward is the cool thing you make.
3. It's $0.99.

Cookie Doodle is an app that lets your kids go through all the steps of making a "virtual" cookie, from rolling out the dough, baking it, decorating it and eating it. Kids can pick from huge lists of types of dough, frosting, and other decorations. The app is also updated constantly for holidays, so right now for instance the app is configured for Valentine's Day cookies. But even if your child can't read yet, the interface is still simple enough to figure out how to use.

My daughters, especially my youngest (4 years old), love this app. Lots of apps for kids take a few minutes of their attention before they get bored, but when they're using Cookie Doodle they probably spend more time on it than any other app. There are so many choices and steps until the cookie is finished, that once they finally complete what they are working on they've already thought of another creation to make.

Trust me. Put it on your iPhone and hand it to them when you get to the restaurant, and before you know it you'll make it to when the food arrives with no drama. That is, unless they're fighting over who's turn it is to make the cookie.

Cookie Doodle by Shoe The Goose is available for $0.99 from the iTunes App Store.

Share the Photos From Your Kid's Camera Instantly

This is such a simple idea, I'm disappointed in myself that I didn't think of it first. I've written about the awesome Eye-Fi memory cards before - the cards that connect to any WiFi hotspot and automatically send the pictures you've taken to wherever you want - Flickr, your home computer - wherever. It's a cool idea (especially for backup) but I never bought one because I like to edit and process my photos before I share them with the world.

So this year Santa brought my oldest daughter (six years old) a camera for Christmas. Not one of those crappy Fisher Price cameras (of which we've had two and one never even worked) but a real point-and-shoot camera from Canon (in pink, of course). I also got her a regular 8GB memory card to go with it. (The bigger card is mostly for the videos, of which she takes a LOT. I blame iCarly.)

Then a couple of days ago I was reading the latest newsletter from Photojojo, which was about how putting an Eye-Fi card into your kid's camera and connecting it to their own Flickr stream

will let them instantly share their images with the world (or your family at the very least). Apparently blogger Jason Kottke is doing this with his three year old son and wrote it up in a blog post that Photojojo found. 

It's a great idea for a few reasons. Being able to instantly share the images, my daughter will be able to get feedback from her family about what she's doing, which I hope will further encourage her to create new images. Selfishly, I'm excited about it because now I won't have to deal with going through, editing and uploading the pictures she takes. People can drop in on her Flickr feed whenever they want to see the things that she is seeing without any involvement from me. Plus, it will all be backed up. Awesome.

A 4GB Eye-Fi card only costs $39.99 on Amazon.com and the 8GB card costs $79.99. The pro version costs $119.99, but it's still 8GB and is really only for people with cameras that primarily shoot RAW (as opposed to JPEG) files.

$40 and I don't have to go through all my kid's photos on a regular basis? That sounds cheap to me.

Related Posts (written by Chris Ford):

CES 2011: A Mobile WiFi Hotspot in Every Camera with Eye Fi [Babble.com]

Blogging at ABC 2009 - The All Baby & Child Product Expo

2009 is year-two for me at the ABC Expo, and even though the economy is not what it was last year, you'd hardly know it from attending the show. There seems to be just as many booths and products as last year, and once again I'm trying to blog about all of them.

Well, not all of them exactly. Just the products and companies that have something new or interesting to show. And even then there's absolutely no way I'm going to be able to get to everything. So if you're interested in what I'm writing about, go over to this page at Babble.com's gear blog Droolicious (where I blog about products for parents and children).

And fair warning to companies showing stuff at the show

- if your product has "Mom" or "Mommy" in it's name and it isn't something that ONLY someone female could use, then chances are I'm going to pass you by.

The highlights so far:

A fairly big write up of the new Orbit G2 stroller.
The Bugaboo & (RED) promotion and brand new (RED) Cameleon in black denim.
Jennifer Garner's favorite stroller, the Maclaren Grand LX Custom.
New Paul Frank designs for Clek Olli car booster seats.
An awesome infant bath tub called the Puj Tub.
A genius camera accessory designed to get infants to look up at the camera - the Shutter Buddy.

Modern Day Dad at CES 2009: The Consumer Electronics Showcase.

So tomorrow I'm heading out to my sixth (can it really be six?) CES - the consumer electronics gadget extravaganza here in Las Vegas. And like last year I'll be blogging about a lot of what I see over at Babble.com. In fact this year I even got a special "Blogger" pass which, as far as I can tell, gets me free lunch in the blogger lounge (while supplies last), extra attention from exhibitors, and the slightly condescending looks from those holding orange "Press" badges.

Oh, and I got a free bag which, even though it says "CES" all over it, is pretty sweet.

I'll be looking mostly for anything related to children, parents, parenting or (of course) dads. If you've heard about anything that I should check out, please leave a comment and let me know. This show is so massive, it's going to be hard to even get to the stuff I'm planning, let alone find stuff I never even thought of before.

Wish me luck.

[Check out my posts from CES 2009 over at Droolicious on Babble.com]