At long last, we’ve launched Wheels on the Bus on Android. I know, I know, took us a bit, but we promised and delivered (we are only 4 people after all)! For those Android enthusiasts you can check out Wheels on the Bus on the Android Market

‘Wheels on the Bus’ by Duck Duck Moose is a fun, interactive musical book, based on the popular children’s song. Come aboard the bus to spin the wheels, open and close the doors, swish the wipers, pop some bubbles, make a dog bark, and much more!

Some of the recognition we have been privileged to receive:

• 2010 Parents’ Choice Gold Award winner – Parents’ Choice Foundation
• Winner of “Best Children’s App” KAPi Award – 2010 International CES
• Editor’s Choice Award for Excellence in Design – Children’s Technology Review
• A Top 10 Educational App on the Apple AppStore since January 2009
• Featured in Steve Jobs’ Keynote address announcing the launch of the iPad 2
• Featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, MSNBC, Wired

Check out the Wheels on the Bus app on the Android Market

In addition, we have lots of cool stuff going on at Duck Duck Moose, including the launch of our very first music album (!!!!) Duck Duck Music: Favorite Children’s Songs, more apps coming for Android and two more apps for iOS in production.

We just realized it has been two whole years since we started Duck Duck Moose — time sure does fly! When we take stock of all that has happened in the past two years, we can hardly believe it — 6 iPhone apps, 4 iPad apps, 2 years (and a partridge in a pear tree). Our kids have gotten older (and more sophisticated as product managers) and we are about to welcome one new little project manager to the fold, due in March. We are so thankful for all the recognition, feedback and love we have received from fellow app developers and customers. Please keep it coming — we love hearing from you!

To celebrate our 2 year anniversary, we wanted to do something to celebrate (other than eat massive amounts of chocolate cake — mostly to be consumed by the pregnant duck), so we decided to offer Baa Baa Black Sheep at 50% off for a limited time!

This educational puzzle app includes two popular nursery rhymes: Baa Baa Black Sheep and Row Your boat. Explore the island of Baa Baa, where you can row-row your boat, see Baa Baa and his friends, and explore 3 underwater worlds, all while looking for matching puzzle pieces hidden throughout the island!

Download from iTunes

The best part of this wild ride has been working with children. We are constantly amazed by the little ones and how quickly they learn and discover new things. Check out a little video that we put together of children using our apps.

Happy Holidays!
Caroline, Michael, & Nicci

love Wordpress. Love it. Did I mention I LOVE Wordpress? The brilliance of Wordpress is how incredibly easy it is to get it up and running, how customizable it is with a modicum of programming knowledge, and now with a surplus of well-designed themes you can easily create a blog that looks great too. One of my favorite things to do is to start with a base template and modify according to my taste. I only do this for personal blogs of which I have many. I could probably feed a small country on what I spend per year on domain registration.

Anywho.

Today I added yet another domain to my collection and as I was looking for a great base template to start with it occurred to me to share some of the good ones I have found for those of you looking for inspiration or just a good base theme to start with.

Design Disease has some lovely colorful templates which can be used out of the box or customized. They also have premium paid templates, but the free ones are pretty solid. I particularly like this one.

Gigantic is a nice clean theme with decent type. This is the one I ended up going with. Download here

Irresistible – a lovely theme in my favorite color. Download here
WooThemes has other nice free themes here.

Color Paper — A well designed theme. Download theme

Design Pile for Smashing Magazine
Download

Magazeen Download Theme

Titan: a lovely, simple theme

If none of these themes is your style or you are looking for a specific style a great place to start is Smashing Magazine. The folks at Smashing have been kind enough to curate several galleries of themes. Here are a few to get you started:

• 100 Excellent Free Wordpress Themes
• 100 Free Wordpress Themes for 2009
• 83 WordPress Themes you probably haven’t seen
  

Here are a few guidelines for ensuring a successful Wordpress install:

• Always look at the demo of the theme, not just a screen capture.

  I often find that themes look very different in the live demos than they do in screen captures. A live demo will give you an idea of what the theme will look like when it is installed on your website and also help you to catch any cross browser display issues. Many themes are created by independent designers who originally designed them for their websites or who may have stopped supporting them, so it is good to check stability first.

• Read the designer’s notes

  Many designers post installation and other notes on their themes. Installation is usually standard, but these notes may help you customize, learn how to install supplemental plugins and fix small issues.

• Change the write permissions of your headers files on older versions of Wordpress

  I found this one out the hard way when my installation was hacked and my server shut off my website. Lock it down, baby.

• Make sure your new installation plays nice with your old installation

  If you have an old template in play with lots of content, it is a good idea to make sure things translate over smoothly. The newest versions of Wordpress have a theme viewer that will let you see what the first page of your content looks like before you activate a theme — this can give you a good idea of what might break. Another option is to install the new theme on a dupe of your website and move it over when you are satisfied. This, however, takes a little more work and since I like to live dangerously, I usually just do my switching late at night.

• Try and keep it similar

  If you aren’t big into coding, the best thing to do is pick a template that is similar in layout to what you would like your final theme to look like. Font sizes, Font colors and image banners can be easily swapped, but when you start doing heavy construction you find yourself knee-deep in someone else’s code which can leave you feeling like it might have been easier to start from scratch.

• Rely on plugins

  Plugins are incredible and you can usually find a plugin for everything that you want to do – why reinvent the wheel? If your theme doesn’t have a feature you would like, say tag clouds, rest assured you can find a plugin for it.

Now go forth and create.

Wheels on the Bus, Old MacDonald, and Itsy Bitsy Spider all won Parent’s Choice Gold Awards! Duck Duck Moose was the only publisher to receive three Gold Awards – the top honors given by Parents’ Choice Foundation — in the Mobile Apps category.

For toddlers who are eager to learn, try Old MacDonald, Itsy Bitsy Spider, and Wheels on the Bus. The creative team at Duck Duck Moose has created – and delivered – exquisite lessons of cause and effect with a charming and whimsical touch.”
– Parents’ Choice Foundation

Wheels on the Bus

Old MacDonald

Itsy Bitsy Spider

We are so honored! For years, I’ve seen the Parents’ Choice Awards on children’s toys, books, and music in stores, and I remember trolling their website when looking for ideas for good birthday presents. Parents’ Choice Foundation has been around for decades and is the nation’s oldest non-profit program recognizing quality children’s media.

Check out the Parents’ Choice Reviews of:
Wheels on the Bus
Old MacDonald
Itsy Bitsy Spider

have no idea what’s in the water this week, but it has been a banner week for press. We at Duck Duck Moose are over the moon about all the exciting coverage (not your typical week to be sure).

Here are some of the exciting tidbits:

Geek Dad on Wired.com

One of the first blogs to discover our first app Wheels on the Bus, wrote a post on Duck Duck Moose this week.

From an early childhood perspective, they get it right from start to finish… They have what I’d call the ‘Sesame Street Sensibility’ — a real respect and understanding of what will work for young children.

Praise for our newest app:

Baa Baa Black Sheep

USA Today gave Baa Baa Black Sheep, a 4 out of 4 star rating in an article on apps for traveling kids.

Baa Baa Black Sheep also received an Editor’s Choice Award from Children’s Technology Review.

The iPhone Mom gave Baa Baa Black Sheep a wonderful review, calling it a “winningly interactive app.”

iLounge also reviewed Baa Baa Black Sheep, calling it a “top pick of the week” and noting that “Baa Baa Black Sheep’s ability to completely enrapture kids is… impressive.”

The San Francisco Chronicle

interviewed us and featured Duck Duck Moose in an article on how “iPhone moms turn ideas into kid-friendly apps”

Our apps were also featured in several Top Lists.

All Duck Duck Moose apps were ranked the #1 Stories and Songs Apps in Babble.com’s Top 50 iPhone Apps for Kids.

Several Duck Duck Moose apps were also selected for Macworld’s Toddler Favorites List and CNET Australia’s Top Apps for Tots

We are so grateful for all the attention! Whatever is in the water this week, we hope it sticks around for a while.

Jeremy Horwitz of iLounge recently interviewed us about our design process. Check out the full interview on iLounge.com!

spent two fantastic days at the Dust or Magic AppCamp in Asilomar. I talked about “How We Turned a Nursery Rhyme into a Best Selling App” (check out our 2009 presentation), and spent two enlightening days with some of the best and brightest in children’s interactive media – child development experts, educators, other app developers, reviewers, writers, and some of the legendary veterans in children’s software. We spent time reviewing dozens of apps, brainstorming new concepts, and talking to kids who came to participate.

Highlights include:

• Ann McCormick’s story about founding the Learning Company: “Apple gave me a computer and $1000 in 1979, and that’s how we started the Learning Company. The best work was done early when we had three or four people and were very light on our feet.” In reference to the iPad, she said, “It’s the computer we’ve been waiting for since the 70’s… Finally we can do what’s needed for kids.”
• A Panel of Legends from the children’s software industry, including Mark Schlichting who told his story about starting the Living Books series at Broderbund. He talked about how he created “shared vision within the company… As I was building my first prototype, I needed voices and sound effects. I had everybody be a voice. My boss was a barking dog…” He also mentioned how now with the new app market, there is the “opportunity for a garage band to happen again.”
• Warren Buckleitner’s Child Development 101 for Software Designers
• Darren Carstens’ talk on “How I Made an iPhone App” and how he learned about the iPhone SDK from YouTube videos created by 12 year old kids!
• Mandeep Dhillon’s (CEO of Togetherville) presentation on the Economics of the AppStore. He talked about how distribution changes the game. With the AppStore, developers can sell directly to consumers. He mentioned “the rise of the little guy” and how little startups (like us!) can compete with large companies.
• Tips on how to get PR for apps by Robin Raskin, former editor of PC Magazine and Founder of Living in Digital Times, and Reyne Rice, Trends Specialist for the Toy Industry Association – including how to talk to editors, send press releases, enter awards, and use social networks.

And of course, AppCamp had a bonfire by the beach, complete with S’mores! We had aspirations to create an AppSymphony but perhaps that will have to wait until next year…

Caroline

• Find Dust or Magic on Twitter
• Follow Duck Duck Moose on Twitter
• Check us out on Facebook

K, I have to admit that this is a bit of a shameless plug, but we are kind of over the moon excited about being nominated for the iPod/iPhone Developer of the Year Award! (!!!!) If you have enjoyed our iPhone apps, please consider voting for us online (click the button below to vote). It takes less than a few seconds and will bring you loads of good karma!

When we started our little company over a year ago we began with nothing more than a strong desire to create quality products and a keen excitement to work with each other. In the past year we have learned a lot, our ambition has grown as has our dedication to developing high quality and engaging products. The most rewarding aspect of our our work at Duck Duck Moose has been working with children.

Thanks to all those who have helped us along the way and to the parents and educators who have contacted us with feedback and praise. Keep it coming, we love to hear from you!

We have had a lot going on at Duck Duck Moose in the past two months. C and M’s older daughter recently turned 4 years old (how fast time goes) — Happy birthday Elizabeth! Michael has been burning the candle at both ends by juggling his job at a start-up, concerts with his trio and a full time job at Duck Duck Moose. Caroline has been handling a full schedule with her usual grace — raising two little ones by day and working on DDM at night (sometimes until 2-3am) and I have been freelancing and illustrating combined with a 6 week trip to India (you wouldn’t believe the scarcity of working wifi!). Amid all this craziness (and with little sleep) we somehow managed to create Itsy Bitsy Spider — a new musical iPhone app for kids.

Itsy is a bit different than our other two apps. The illustration style has more depth — the artwork was drawn in Illustrator and all of the gradients, textures and shadows were added manually in Photoshop. In addition, Itsy functions more like an interactive movie of sorts with panning from screen to screen that is initiated by touching the star character — the spider, all to the tune of the popular children’s classic.

Everything on the screen is interactive. We added many new elements to engage little ones in a variety of learning activities:

- Count from 1 to 10 as a squirrel builds his house
- Find hidden eggs on a scavenger hunt
- Make music with musical eggs that play 12 notes
- Stack hats on the spider’s head
- Listen to classical music with violin and cello
- Record your own singing!

For more screen captures and information on our new app, please visit our website: duckduckmoosedesign.com

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, please try it out and let us know what you think. We have gotten so much great feedback (and creative ideas) from our customers!

ccording to Greystripe, a mobile ad network, 29.5% of all iPhone users are “iPhone Moms”. It is no wonder, when there has been an explosion of apps marketed towards Moms from educational apps for kids to apps that help you track feedings, diapers and sleep schedules. Read the original article on Tech Crunch: Is The iPhone Mom The New Soccer Mom?

I just discovered this really cool site called Personas where you can search your name on the web and it will return a profile of what it finds. I searched my own name and it found my professional affiliations, illustrations and other various things.

Here is the profile for Duck Duck Moose:

What is it?
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.