![]() They choose from one of six salon patrons-some of whom have quite literally gone to dogs-and give them a badly needed shave and a haircut. Toca Hair Salon really lets your kids explore their creative side. Version of the app designed for the iPhone and iPod touch.) I found the tasks in Toca House a little more mundane-washing dishes by dragging across a stream of running water or delivering mail to each resident by putting brightly colored envelopes in their corresponding mailbox-but younger users will probably get a kick out of completing these virtual chores. (Note that while I’m reviewing the iPad-only Toca Doctor HD, there is an identical It may not help your toddlers bone up for their MCATs, but it is a fun little app. In total, the app offers 21 puzzles and mini-games, and just the tap of a button brings a new series of maladies for you to treat. (In a particularly clever touch, the bandages features birds and cats that tweet and meow when they’re put in their proper place.) Or you might have to rearrange your patient’s internal organs like the pieces of a puzzle. In Toca Doctor HD, you help clean up scrapes by swiping your finger across the screen, and then placing a bandage over the boo-boo. (Again: Heed these lessons well, my young daughter!) And while it’s nice to get the rousing cheer from the apps when you successfully finish a task, the real fun comes from the tasks themselves.Ĭlean Sweep: Help the residents of Toca House complete chores like mopping up the floor by making a swiping motion on the screen. In the former, a patient comes into your doctor’s office, complaining of a series of maladies the the later, you help five extraordinary roommates tackle their household chores. The aforementioned Toca Doctor HD and Toca House are more task-oriented apps featuring a series of mini-games. And once all the cakes are devoured, Toca Tea Party makes her place the dirty cups and dishes in a tub of soapy water-a lesson I hope sticks with her throughout her teenage years. She needs some help dragging the pitchers of tea and punch around the screen for refills or mopping up virtual spills with an on-screen napkin, but that’s where Dad comes in. My daughter is on the younger side of the ideal age range for this app, but she’s still able to drag the tablecloth, plates, and cups into place. It’s amazingly simple to get started with Toca Tea Party. The common factor appears to be just launching the app and letting your imagination take you where you want to go. Yes, these are games, more or less, and some of the apps- Toca Doctor HD and Toca House, for example-give you a rousing cheer when you complete a task, but if all a kid wants to do is tap objects indiscriminately, then the Toca Boca apps are perfectly willing to accomodate that. That said, Toca Boca’s apps don’t really punish you for tapping the wrong thing. A few very obvious taps and swipes in a typical Toca Boca app, and you’ve learned all the controls you need. Toca Boca apps aren’t terribly complicated to operate, and that’s a good thing when your target users are still trying to master the art of tying their own shoelaces. But in tapping my way through these kid-geared games, I’ve come across a few common themes. ![]() After all, Toca Boca’s apps cover everything from train sets to doctor’s offices to hair salons. It’s always a tricky business making generalizations about what a specific app maker does and doesn’t do with its products. And for that reason, I thought I’d use the release of Toca Train to look at some other Toca Boca-built apps to showcase a handful of the developer’s other iOS titles as a way of spotlighting why these offerings stand out from the App Store crowd. It’s a terrific app with touch controls easy enough for young fingers to master-exactly the sort of thing I’ve come to expect from Toca Boca. Toca Boca recently rolled out a new app, Toca Train, which turns your iPhone or iPad into a toy train set geared at small kids.
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