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The Best Apps For Children And Adults To Enjoy Together

Playing Appy families.

Tablets such as iPads tend to get passed along the sofa like remote controls these days and there are thousands of apps built for families to share and have fun with, from grocery lists to games.

Michael Brook, Editor of the Gadget Magazine confirms that there is a plethora of apps available “from wedding albums, to cookery apps, which teach children how to eat. Apps have changed our lives for good.”

Tablet apps offer some of the best ways for families to bond - but even the humblest phone can help families work and play together.

Create a family album
Flowboard - Touch Publishing (£2.99)

Flowboard will bring out the creative spark in anyone - offering an easy way to turn photos into rich, magazine-style picture books that really tell a story, with pictures, text and web links turned into scrapbooks or retro-style photo albums. It’s simple to use but offers powerful tools too. You can resize pictures and fit them in frames by pinching on screen, and layer photos over one another by tapping “send to back” and “send to front” buttons on the images.

Albums can be emailed simply as a web link so far-away family members can enjoy them too.



Boost children’s brainpower
Chess Pro (£6.99)

This chess tutor is perfect both for adults looking to take up the hobby and youngsters looking to up their game. The app also works as a “normal” chess game (i.e. two players can use it as a board) and you can play with family members via email.

For beginners, the “Trainer” mode makes it really shine. With arrows on screen showing threats, and moves you can make rather than pages of theory and demonstration, you simply play games, and the app shows you four Grandmaster-level moves if you are stuck.

Create pots on screen - and get it in the post
Let's create! Pottery HD (£2.99)

This app has a faintly magical, Harry Potter feel to it. You craft a clay jug on screen, stroking upwards to shape it, and strangling it to narrow the neck of a jar.

Once finished, your creation arrives in the post as a real, 3D jug. The jug that arrives is not clay, but is cleverly created in a 3D printer (a machine that prints objects rather than paper) and made from resin. Each costs about £10, and is posted within the UK.

Let everyone chip in with ideas for the garden
Garden Plan Pro (£5.59)

The clever app uses GPS to work out where you are (thus judging the climate) then lets you plot out a garden and immediately begins advising you to plant, sow and harvest - it even gives warnings of first frosts. It’s designed for beginners so children can get involved and is used by 250,000 people worldwide.



It's packed with tips on every imaginable sort of plant and herb - including how to make broccoli taste nicer, and what plants cohabit happily.

Let Dad plan barbecues with military precision
RainRadar UK/The Weather Channel (£0.69)

Two questions occupy British minds more than any others; "Will it rain today?" and then the follow-up, "When will it stop raining?"

Rainradar offers a rain forecast delivered direct from satellites, and is accurate to within five minutes. Probably a little over the top for a barbecue, but it does feel delightfully James Bond.

Weather Channel offers Android fans similarly detailed forecasts such as “Expect rain at 3.15pm”, plus hour-by-hour local forecasts.

Help a child deal with bullies
Dandelion (£1.99)

This award-winning app/book was written after the author Galvin Scott Davis’s son was bullied at school and has won multiple awards around the world. This short, sad, ebook couldn’t exist as a “normal” book - it’s all about touching everywhere on the page to set off its magical story.

Even adults will bite their lip at its sad story about bullying. A hand drawn interactive storybook, with the message that bullies are simply people with no imagination, and can be fought off with the “dandelions” of the mind is really cute. Children will love blowing into the microphone (where you usually speak) and watching seeds flutter off a dandelion on screen for example.

Capture a child’s life - and share it with family
MomentGarden (Free)

MomentGarden creates an online photo album that allows parents to share photos, videos and ‘moments’ (such as a text description of when a baby first crawls) with family members.  Moments’ can be sent via email or Facebook, and seen via any PC.

The app organises photos by date into a ‘Timeline’ to create a ‘life story’ for each child. You can add photos from your iPad library or take new ones and hi-tech parents can also add photos from Facebook directly from the app.

Sharing with family members is simple. You enter a list of email addresses, and those people will be sent updates from that child’s ‘MomentGarden’. You can add more people at any time.

Let the whole family write the shopping list
Grocery List: Buy Me a Pie (£0.69)

Post-it notes on the fridge are SO last year. This app lets families share an online shopping list, adding to it from iPhones and iPads.

Everyone can type in their own items from iPhones and iPads, or add from a pre-set list. They all appear on the same shared list, or special lists for dinner parties and other occasions.

Lists are protected by a PIN code, so details stay private, even if a phone is lost.



Get children to eat their greens
Henri le Worm (£2.99)

French chef Raymond Blanc teamed up with Simon Pegg for this app, which takes a rather different approach to making children eat healthily. It’s a magical animated garden, filled with talking characters, all voiced by Pegg, which teaches children facts about the food they eat before moving on to interactive recipes where parents and children cook together.

Learn the secrets of the world’s greatest photos
50 Greatest Photographs of National Geographic (£2.99)

National Geographic’s image of an Afghan schoolgirl in a refugee camp with startling blue-green eyes is a timeless classic. Their new photo app allows readers to explore how the 1984 image was taken along with 49 other classic photos from the magazine.  

Photographers explain in their own words how photos were taken - and some have extra frames, or even video, such as an underwater cave in the Bahamas in 2009, which play within the app

Share the magic of children’s first drawings
Sago Mini Doodlecast (£1.49)

The whole family can “watch” children’s first attempts at drawing with this cute app, which “records” as they draw on screen with a finger, and uses iPad’s microphone to capture what they say as they work on their masterpieces.

The app is aimed at children aged from two to six, and comes with 36 “prompts”, such as a blank page with a bird looking upwards, which asks, “What’s really big?”

Doodlecast saves the “drawings” as videos in the iPad library, which you can share with family via email or Facebook.