Cowboys and Aliens: The Kids Book App to Benefit Starlight Children’s Foundation

[Maura]

Cowboys and Aliens: The Kids app for iOS is an educational book app that offers children an immersive, personalised experience of colour, sights, and sounds. The app was written by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, NY Times bestselling author and creator of Platinum Studios’ Cowboys and Aliens blockbuster movie, and developed by ISBX. The publisher, Orbit, has partnered with Starlight Children’s Foundation and will donate $0.25 for every app downloaded to go towards helping seriously ill children and their families to live better lives.

Cowboys and Aliens: The Kids, introduces the storyline of how the kids of the Cowboys, Native Americans and Aliens meet, play, and share while their parents are away battling for the future of the world. The characters Tymm, TC, and Luke meet each other, play with toys and finally find common ground across race, creed, colour, language and species. The storybook features activities such as individualised narration, colouring and painting, as well as animation and picture manipulation throughout a storyline that encourages friendship through sharing.

"We are very proud of Cowboys and Aliens: The Kids, and we are confident that kids, their parents, friends, siblings, and grandparents will all enjoy the story and the different activities," said Orbit's Chris Adams.

The book is displayed in landscape orientation, and has 22 pages, with each one containing one comic-book style image. The artwork, created by Platinum Studios, has all the power of great comic book art, but with self-illuminated images. All the art features multi-plane animation, so that panning produces the most movement in the foreground layer, the least in the background layer, and the appropriate movement in the intermediary layers. As a universal app, it displays optimised, smooth, vector graphics and text on all iOS devices.

At the bottom of each page is a single line of text that can be heard spoken aloud by touching the Play button, and as each word is spoken, it changes colour and seems to jump off the page in perfect sync with the narrator, Chris Adam. There’s also a Record feature, which enables kids to record their own narration on each page. The You icon enables the reader to choose any character, Settler, Native American or Space Alien, and have a photo of their own face become the character’s face throughout the book.

Click here to download the universal app for $4.99: Cowboys and Aliens: The Kids for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store

Source: Orbit Media Group, Starlight Children's Foundation