In this special edition of YALSA’s App of the Week, our app reviewers bring you their selections (listed in alphabetical order) of apps that make great gifts for teens. If YALSA Blog readers have ideas of great apps to give to teens during the holiday season, feel free to add them to the comments on this post.
Title: Biophilia
Cost: Free initial download, $9.99 to download all song apps.
Platform: iPhone, iPad, iPod (requires iOS 4.1 or later)
Bjork’s latest offering is part album, part exploration of music theory, and part audiovisual playground. Every part of this app is meticulously designed. From the font you see throughout, which was created especially for Bjork, to the sound and motion in the menu screen. Put on your headphones, and arrive in a galaxy of nine stars, one for each track. When you navigate to each song star, you have options to watch an animation, follow along with the score, read a narrative about the inspiration for the song or a musical analysis, and to play. In this case, play does not mean simply to listen to the song, but offers an option to explore an interactive piece, to play with the song, rather than just to play it. The music itself is as sensual and strange as Bjork’s other albums; the songs are conceptually connected by a love of nature and feeling of interconnectedness (hence Biophilia). I particularly enjoyed the ability to see the lyrics as the song plays in each animation. It can be hard to understand Bjork, but this app provides enough details that we might know more of her art than ever before.
A great gift for a teen who is fascinated by music, visual media, or the intersection of the two.
-Erin Daly
Title: Comic Life
Cost: $4.99
Platform: iPad
Comic Life is a great app for teens who like to write and for those who like to develop comics. Teens start their creation by selecting a template – there are a wide variety available including a traditional comic layout and a blank template that gives teens the chance to add and organize content from scratch. Once a template is selected teens add text and images, select styles of bubbles for the placement of text, and select fonts and colors. Images can be imported from iTunes for use in Comic Life. Everything can be manipulated from within the app including sizes of text bubbles, panels, images, and font. Multiple pages can be added to one project so a teen can easily create a graphic novel or comic. Works created in Comic Life can be printed, emailed, and posted on Facebook.
Anyone looking for the perfect gift for teen writers and comic creators will definitely want to consider Comic Life
- Linda W. Braun
Title: Lonely Planet Phrasebooks
Cost: $5.99
Platform: Nook Color, Nook Tablet, Android (OS 1.0 and up), iPhone, iPad
What better way to welcome in a new year than learning a language? Designed with travelers in mind, the Lonely Planet Phrasebooks provide a fun introduction to several foreign languages, including French, Italian, German, Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean, Greek, Portuguese, Polish, Swahili, Canton