Today I am talking with Amanda, from Rattledash Media, author of the Poor Poor Jack, another app made with Kwik.
Alex) Tell a little bit about you and your company
My brother Patrick, and I started Rattledash Media in 2011, with our main focus being on publishing traditional pBooks, eBooks, and interactive children’s books for the mobile market.
What is Poor, Poor Jack about?
Poor, poor Jack is a picture book about Jack the pumpkin, who is trying to find his place in the world. He tries all kinds of jobs but with unfortunate results. Really, he just wants to be someone’s Jack-O-Lantern. We felt that Poor, poor Jack would make a great interactive app, for the iPad and iPhone and so far we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from our customers on iTunes.
How did Kwik help you to build it? Any favorite features?
Kwik helped us develop Poor, poor Jack without having to hire a programming engineer. When I found Kwik, I was thrilled because I have a lot of Photoshop experience as a graphic artist and Kwik allowed me to focus on the layout and design of the app rather than worry about writing LUA scripts, or hiring someone else to do them. And the best part was how FAST we were able to develop our app, by using the (Kwik) plug-in. It was pretty easy to learn the program and see great results, immediately.
My favorite feature is having the ability to make path animations, and sprite animations. I also can’t wait to learn the multi-language functionality. I didn’t get to use multi-language in Poor, poor Jack initially, but I will definitely revisit that option in the next update (and in future projects).
Any trick/tip you would like to share?
I wanted to make a specific part of my background image interactive. For example, I had a fire image (which is is baked into the background), that I wanted to add a “crackle” sound effect to, if the child touches the fire. So, I selected a portion of the fire and created a new layer, filled the empty selection with white and set the FILL opacity to 1%, making the white virtually invisible. Then I was able to assign that layer as a “button” with the crackle sound effect added. It turned out really well, and I ended up using that opacity trick in several of the pages.
What is your overall experience with us (product and services)?
I can’t thank Alex enough for his help. Not only was he super fast and timely with his responses to my emails, but he always had the right answer. Great customer service. Great product.
What is next for you and your company?
Coming up next, we are going to make another interactive children’s book. The hard part is deciding which one. But lucky for us, we now have a great plug-in to use thanks to Kwik.
Thanks again Amanda and Patrick for sharing their experience!