Today I talk to Richard, from Clarence-Henry Books, author and illustrator of Rudy and Cirrus of Karma, another beautiful storybook made with Kwik and available at the Android Marketplace. Somehow a new user of Kwik, Richard was pretty fast learning, creating and publish his first app with the plugin. Enjoy!
Alex) Tell a little bit about you and your company
Clarence-Henry Books is an independent micropublisher of children’s picture books. One of the goals is to build picture books into apps to help expand to different media and reach new markets.
What is the “Rudy and Cirrus of Karma” about?
Rudy and Cirrus of Karma is about a boy named Rudy who breaks his mom’s treasured vase and blames his little brother and sister. His mom sends him on an errand and he soon discovers sometimes what goes around comes around.
It’s a picture book app with the option to read or to have the prerecorded voice read to them. It also contains scene action related sound effects to enhance the storyline. Since the book is for kids 5-10 I used the normal page advance feature rather than buttons.
How did Kwik help you to build it? Any favorite features?
I work in graphics and use Photoshop everyday but have no experience in .lua code so obviously Kwik enabled me to go where I’d otherwise never attempted. Read to me audio is easy as a walk in the park to apply in Kwik.
Any trick/tip you would like to share?
I noticed a lot of picture book apps are pretty large. Some as many as 80mb. I wanted to make mine as lean as possible so I saved my background images as .jpgs at a quality of 60 to compress the images as much as possible without losing quality. Unfortunately I did this before Kwik had the new export to .jpg function but I’ll certainly use it next time. I did the same thing with the audio files using Adobe Audition to save mp3s at a bitrate of 56 kbps and sample type of 22050, 16-bit. It’s not the highest quality but I think it’s sufficient for a tablet app.
What is your overall experience with us (product and services)?
Is this a trick question? It’s been an eye opener and a blast. Really.
What is next for you and your company?
Build more picture book apps with Kwik and hopefully expand to iOS.