my blog: Monster Coloring Book for iPhone and iPad review

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Monster Coloring Book for iPhone and iPad review

If there's one thing that all kids love to do, it's to color. They also love cute monsters. Put the two together -- and you get Monster Coloring Book! This iPhone and iPad app will allow your kids to color and paint without the mess or risk of markers making contact with your carpet or one of the other many disastrous things that can happen to your home when your child decides to express his artistic side.

Monster Coloring Book includes 175 different monsters to color, giving your child a plethora of options to choose from. They are separated into 7 different categories: starters, swimmers, sleepers, creatures, flyers, grab bag, and hairies.

Once a monster is chosen, you can select between nine different brushes and a wide selection of colors. For the younger kids who haven't mastered the skill of coloring inside the lines, they can use a paint bucket that automatically fills in the regions with the selected color. In addition to colors, Monster Coloring Book allows you to select between many different patterns. These patterns work nicely for clothing or the background or whatever your kid may decide! Lastly, a coloring book isn't complete without stickers, so Monster Coloring Book also includes stickers of hats, speech bubbles, balloons, glasses, hair, monsters, and more.

To use a sticker, you must activate it. When you first select the sticker, it will be automatically activated, but if you place it, you must hold your finger down on it to re-activate. When activated, you can adjust its size and rotation by pinching to zoom and rotate.

While coloring your monster, you can tap the magnifying glass to zoom into the picture. Intuitively, you may want to use two fingers to scroll around the picture when zoomed-in. Unfortunately, this doesn't work. Instead, you must tap the arrow buttons to scroll. I do understand why this may be favorable for small children because they might accidentally scroll with multitouch, but there are plenty of children who love to color that are old enough to understand the concept of multitouch. At the very least, there should be a setting that let's you decide what kind of scrolling will be best.

When you're done coloring your photo, you can save it to the in-app gallery where you can print your masterpiece, share it via email, turn it into a puzzle with the Monster Puzzles app, or export to your Camera Roll.

The good

175 different monsters
Wide selection of brushes, colors, patterns, and stickers
Fun, classical music
Ability to activate a Child Lock to disable promotional messaging, sharing, and printing
Universal for iPhone and iPad

The bad

No undo button
Have to scroll with a button -- no multitouch scrolling
No sharing to Facebook or Twitter

The conclusion

Monster Coloring Book is a great iPhone and iPad coloring book for kids. Well, I keep saying it's for kids, but as an adult, even I find it enjoyable and relaxing!