Oho the Monkey – Oho’s Big Day

Oho the Monkey – Oho’s Big Day
Oho’s Big Day is an interactive rhyming book for toddlers. Oho is designed to be a fun experience for both the toddlers and the parents.

Oho is a smart, ambitious (and cute as anything) monkey who has a number of adventures as he makes his way through his jungle home. Along the way Oho helps a friendly lion, gets a bath from an elephant and does a bit a turtle jumping.

Every screen in Oho is filled with colorful graphics and animations. Some animations trigger automatically, others are activated by touch. Oho has a “read to me feature” or may be read by the child and the parents.

How did Kwik help?

It made develop so much quicker and easier. As a designer I needed something that didn’t require a programming background to use, but was powerful enough to produce the interactive book we envisioned. After a very thorough search of the Web and my failed attempts using other products, I found Kwiksher and was delighted to see that it was created as an Adobe Photoshop extension, as I was already familiar with Photoshop due to my design background. Installation was simple, and after a quick read of the manual and very little time I was creating my first ebook using ‘Kwik’.

Kwik operates in a designer friendly environment, providing an interface that is simple enough for anyone to use with only a basic understanding of Photoshop and the layers concept. The level of interactivity I was able to create using Kwik was ideally suited for the first of several Oho the Monkey children’s book’s. Our next releases will include embedded games and much more engrossing interactivity.

What are your favorite features?

The ease of use and speed to develop and deliver the final project. One of my favorite features was path sprite animation which including a great set of physical effects for realistic looking movement. For example, I was able to have a flapping butterfly slowly lift off a plant, then get smaller as it sped up and darted away in the distance going under and over layers. It helped give the book a 3-dimensional feel.

I also like using the flexible effect controls such as pulse and bounce that are a snap to implement that made for fast work on some of the more repetitive tasks across pages. Also, the ability to ‘share’ resources across pages helps shrink the project size as only one instance of a layer needed to be used throughout the books’ pages.

Any tips and tricks to share?

I’m currently putting together a “book” highlighting the effects and controls Kwik supports, and will post it on the Kwik forum when it is completed. I think more downloadable samples would help the user base quite a bit.

As a first time interactive book creator, there was a lot to learn about how to make a book engaging, especially for children that are growing up expecting a tactile experience while they read and learn on portable devices, but Kwiksher made the process fun and much faster than codling it from scratch. I can honestly say that Kwik stands far above the current crop of interactive comic and book creation tools today. I’m looking forward to using it on our next project!

Having been a technical support manager in my past career I would be neglect in not mentioning what a terrific level of support I’ve been given while learning and using Kwik. It isn’t easy to answer newbie questions over and over without snapping and Alex has been there backing me up throughout the project. Thank you for your rapid responses and patient explanations – it is truly the best way to keep customers happy.