AlphaBaby: Something for the Kids
You’ve got a shiny new mac, it cost a lot of your precious money, but it was worth it. You love it. Everything is perfect, until your son/daughter/little brother/little sister wants to use it.
You fear the worst. And for good reason. For kids, the logic is this: You press buttons, things change colors on the screen. Pretty. End of story. Solution: Press lots of buttons.
Trouble is, they’ll mess with your volume, eject your iPod, delete that important file on your desktop – even get overexcited and start banging on the keyboard repeatedly (ouch). That’s where AlphaBaby comes in. Fire up AlphaBaby, and let the 3-year-old in question bang away.
“But what of my files?” you ask. The genius of AlphaBaby is that it disables most key combinations. Apple-Q won’t quit (another, more complicated key combination will though) and all other keys (when pressed) will spawn the letter colorfully and at a random location on the screen, accompanied by another (you guessed it) random sound effect. Kids love it.
But AlphaBaby goes beyond that. You can also choose how to display letters; what font, what color, what size. Or maybe you want to add some shapes in, or perhaps some random pictures from your iPhoto library. AlphaBaby provides more functionality than would be expected (or in that case, needed) in a program simply for kids. But for some reason older, more *cough* mature people *cough* (read: me) seem to find it amusing.
AlphaBaby can even say the letters out loud when the corresponding letter is pressed on the keyboard, making it an educational tool as well. It’s not going to teach your kid calculus, but it could certainly help younger toddlers learn the alphabet, names of people in pictures and more, using OS X’s built in text-to-speech technology.
AlphaBaby is free, open source, and the .dmg is less than a megabyte to download. Warning: Kids will get excited. MacApper is not responsible for broken keyboards. For Windows users, there is a similar program called BabySplat which is also free, although lacking in AlphaBaby’s advanced features.
hello, wontering if any one has put a group or animals and sounds together for alphababy. Trying to find one. If not guess I will do it.