Do you remember how amazing it was to crack open a brand new box of crayons and take in the waxy smell just before making a creative masterpiece? While Colorific doesn’t have the waxy smell, it still succeeds in transporting you back to a time when coloring was the bane of your existence.
Colorific, by Alexey Rashevskiy, is a simple yet fun app for children. Colorific features pre-loaded coloring pages as well as the ability to draw and create on a blank sheet of virtual paper. The coloring pages are outlines of dinosaurs, children playing sports, animals and other youth-appropriate images.
The app has simplistic controls, which include a menu screen, e-mail option, a reset button, and the ability to turn on/off the music as well as undo and redo buttons. The main coloring area allows you to choose the size of your coloring pencil, choose paint pots that let you fill in a larger area all at once and an eraser to fix any of your mistakes.
The Good
Colorific is a simple, yet fun app. It doesn’t crowd the app interface with options and it doesn’t overwhelm with unnecessary functionality. It simply does what it is supposed to do.
The chosen music for the app is fantastic and putting a child down in front of your iPad to let them color via this app will make you feel like you are infusing him/her with symphonic goodness. It helps to alleviate any guilt you might feel about bathing your child in beams of electronic light.
The app features a fair selection of pre-built coloring pages, which will keep your child entertained, and the blank sheet of paper offers endless creative options. The pages are also interesting enough to captivate children of various ages and gender neutral enough to interest both girls and boys.
Sharing your children’s drawings is something that all parents enjoy doing and the fact that this is built into the app is awesome. Once a drawing is complete, you can e-mail it to a parent, friend, grandparent or sibling so that other people can enjoy the creation.
The Not So Good
The actual coloring aspect on the app is very difficult to get perfect but perhaps that isn’t the point. If you are anal retentive though, and you like to stay inside the lines at all costs, you will find that aspect of the app a bit frustrating – regardless of how small you make the point of your pencil crayon. It seems that defaulting to the paint bucket to simply fill in the picture is an easier option.
On the iTunes store page, the developer does offer the suggestion of using a stylus to fine tune the coloring but giving your child a stylus to use, depending on their age, may not be a fantastic idea.
The other drawback to this app is that the coloring pages seem to be of the same difficulty level. It would have been nice to see a few pages with drawings that were large-scale in nature with less detail for children whose fine-motor skills are not quite polished yet.
One aspect of the app that is lacking is in the multi-touch functionality. If your child is pressing down on an area of the screen and attempts to draw, they won’t be able to. This can cause frustration amongst the young people who are using this app, especially if they don’t quite understand what they are doing wrong. It would also be great if you could draw multiple lines at once like you can in the Disney Toy Story digital book app.
The last area of criticism is the price. $2.99 is a pretty steep price tag for a coloring app that your child may get bored of after a short time. Unless the app plans on adding more pages with future upgrades, the price just doesn’t seem justifiable.
The Verdict
The app is fun and does provide ample opportunity to get creative and be taken away into a land filled with color and sound. If the developer were to decrease the price of the app they might see more parents investing in it for their children. All in all though, it is definitely one of the better iPad apps for children.
