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The iPad 2 may be the ultimate device for parents who feel guilty for spending too much time at work. Not only can they now use the FaceTime video-chat feature to talk to their children on a tablet-sized screen, but a new app called Nursery Rhymes with StoryTime will let them remotely read bedtime stories to their kids too.
Yes, you can do that on FaceTime, but the £2.39 app does more than just pipe your voice over the airwaves to your sprog’s iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. It adds animations and interactive features that remind us of Alice for the iPad, one of the first great book apps for Apple’s tablet.
That’s no surprise. Nursery Rhymes with StoryTime is a joint effort between developers Ustwo and Atomic Antelope, the latter being the studio that released the Alice app.
The app will work on both the original iPad and iPad 2. Here’s a video demo of the new release:
We hope the app doesn’t result in more parents deciding to work late in the office rather than dash home, mind. The girl in the video doesn’t half look lonesome. As the app’s title makes clear, the subject material is traditional, with nursery rhymes including Humpty Dumpty, Jack and Jill, and Three Blind Mice.
In Crave’s personal experience, the main flaw with this remote-reading lark is that your toddler might decide they’ve had enough of reading, and quit out of the app to play Angry Birds or delete swathes of emails at random. Even so, the StoryTime technology is a wonderful idea, and one that we suspect may feature in an Apple TV ad sooner rather than later.
Atomic Antelope has certainly been busy. The company recently released a follow-up to the original Alice app, called Alice in New York, which has similar production values but not the StoryTime feature — not yet, anyway.
