Digger Dirt

Digger Dirt

Digger Dirt and His Sweet Rewards is a highly entertaining children’s picture book app. Children love to discover the animation and sounds on each and every page. These interactions, tapping or dragging, are friendly and intuitive.

In the story, Digger Dirt wants change. He creates a vision, sets his goal and works to achieve it. He teaches his children how to do this and they all learn the sweet rewards of work. Digger enjoys the journey with his children as they work together learning patience, confidence, trust and love among the twenty one rewards found in the book. Digger and his children are excited and proud as they enjoy the fruits of their labors. Each page is filled with animation and sound.

• Delightful, engaging story with great illustrations
• Fun interactions with lively sound effects
• Read to Me or Read Myself options
• Navigation bar
• Bubbles that teach the rewards of work
• No Hotlinks

This childrens book app is available on iPad, Android, Kindle and Nook.

How did Kwik help?

I loved the ease of use of the Kwik extension to Photoshop. I had illustrated Digger Dirt in Photoshop so I had all of the elements needed for animation and interaction. Digger Dirt was first created as a children’s picture book that we self published on Amazon. I was pleased that I could take what we had already created and with no coding create an app.

What are your favorite features?

Kwik makes it easy and seamless to use navigation. I simply checked a box and Kwik took care of the rest. I especially like the multiplier feature. It was fun to create flowers, stars, butterflies, etc that magically multiplied on the screen.

Any tips and tricks to share?

I discovered the hard way that all layer names, file names and audio names need to be unique and need to be space free using the underscore or dash in stead of the space. I also learned the hard way that there is no undo in Kwik so be careful of what you delete. I used a lot of audio on each page so i found it useful to set my global sounds to channel numbers at 25 and up thus I was not having problems when I needed to change an audio for one page. Backup often. I wish I had know these things as I was starting out but as soon as you learn them, Kwik becomes a breeze. I will be creating many children’s book apps using Kwik.

Alex’s Review

Digger Dirt is a good example of how easy/faster/cheap is to build on top of a published book and transform it into a storybook app. Anne did a brave job creating the full app by herself without no previous experience on how to develop apps. This was the reason I created Kwik: to enable people to bring stories to life, without code! What I liked the most about this app is the Sweet Rewards concept, although I would prefer a better visual clue than colored ovals. It is an innovative way to provide further feedback on the page contents and the activities. As a suggestion for future ones, I would prefer not to have so much white (in fact black) space in the pages (the area where the navigation page shows up) but I believe the decision for that may be related to the original art format. For sure a good start of Take Flight Books!