Print-book purists take note: Apple recently announced that the world's 200 million iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users have downloaded more than 15 billion apps from its 425,000-app collection. According to the company, books are among its most popular offerings (games are #1). To shed light on Apple's approval process, we turned to two well-regarded app publishers, who discuss recent titles that earned a quick "yes" from Steve Jobs's magic kingdom.
Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!
"You can think any THINK that you wish...." In this case, what app developer Oceanhouse Media wished for—and created—was a digital version of the 1975 Dr. Seuss classic Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!, which was among the top 25 titles in the iPad book chart within the first 48 hours.
Oceanhouse is the leading publisher of children's apps, with 71 of them in Apple's store. Oceanhouse licenses the rights to existing children's picture books and then develops custom software to bring them to life on hand-held screens. Think marks the midway point (22 of 44) of Oceanhouse's projects to create an app for every title that Dr. Seuss both wrote and illustrated. Here's how company president Michel Kripalani and his team (six full-time employees and a dozen or two freelancers) spent a few months creating the $3.99 app, from brainstorming to seeing it arrive in the App Store on June 21.
The Development: "Digital publishing is really a software play," Kripalani says. "You have to know what you're doing. You have to have updates and customer support. You have to have proper code management systems in place." Oceanhouse's proprietary "omBook" software, designed and written by veterans of the CD-ROM and videogame business, drives many of its apps including the Dr. Seuss titles and others by Mercer Mayer and the Berenstains. Think, as with other apps, began with brainstorming among a few employees. "Was there something special we could do with this app to take it to the next level?" asked Kripalani. Instead of immediately showing a "pan and scan" of the entire original pages, the designers decided to start each page with a minimalist scene—such as an unadorned hill—before showing "the full canvas of what Ted {Geisel] was drawing," Kripalani says. Then young readers gradually build the rest of the picture, layer by layer, by tapping on dancing question marks and seeing four to six new images appear, one by one, on the page.
Next, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which controls the licensing to the Dr. Seuss franchise, gave the developers digital images of Think's original pages, keeping the file sizes small. "Large apps can be troublesome to download and are often the first apps to be pushed off a device when the user runs out of space and is looking to make room," says Kripalani. Then came the voiceover recording. Typically, Kripalani's wife, Karen, a former actress, does a casting call or authors themselves read their own stories. But in this case, the team decided her own voice would work. "She can deliver in that motherly, kindergarten voice, and we don't have to direct her," says Kripalani. Karen recorded both the story and the words kids hear when they touch an element in a picture. Sound effects are also added, such as rain in The Cat in the Hat. In Think, kids hear whizzing as a cherry flies across the screen and a plop as it lands on top of whipped cream. Kids can choose to watch the story, movie style, on "auto play," which means a narrator reads everything aloud and the pages flip automatically. They can also touch "read to me" or "read by myself."
Layout comes next. Oceanhouse developers know they can't simply reproduce the original pages of a book. "Think of your average Dr. Seuss book; if you were to take that page and shrink it down for your iPhone, it would be so small you could never read it," notes Kripalani. The print Think is 40 pages; the app is 83.
Oceanhouse creates its apps in a format that works for both the iPhone and iPad, a tricky process that Oceanhouse keeps secret, since it's a big part of the appeal of their stories. "You're a mom, and you just bought this app for your son on your iPhone because you were at Starbucks, and now you got home, and you want to put it on your iPad," says Kripalani. "Do you want to buy it again? No."
The In-House Testing:
In lieu of corporate focus groups, friends and family (Kripalani and his wife have two daughters, one 2 1/2 years old and the other 14 months old) take a look once the app is built.
In Think, readers aren’t meant to turn to go to the next page until they tap all the question marks on the current one. In testing, Oceanhouse realized that readers needed more guidance, so it added a visual hint (the printed word “swipe”) when it was time to move on.
Everyone in-house needs to think the app is exceptional, say Kripalani. “We won’t release an app until we believe the majority of the customers in the world are going to give it five stars,” he adds. Only after the internal thumbs-up will Oceanhouse show it to Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which typically recommends tiny tweaks.
The Problems: Even though Oceanhouse is a veteran of the app business, introducing new features can be tricky. "Writing code can be a lot like puzzle solving." For example, Dr. Seuss Enterprises wanted to change a page of Think with 16 candy cane-like trees. Its idea: kids should be able to tap on any of the 231 stripes and see the word "red" or "white." "We just want to go the extra mile," says Greg Uhler, Oceanhouse's app development director. "If that's what they want, and we can do it, we need to do it."
Another challenge: creating the sound of the Bloogs—ghostly, jellyfish-like flying creatures that hover over black water. "They could easily be interpreted as being very scary to a young child," says Kripalani. "We spent a lot of time and did multiple revisions to get the sounds right." In the end, we arrived at sounds that are more cute, fun and playful but still feel very much appropriate for the images.”
The Approval: Typically Oceanhouse—which releases about two apps on the Apple store each week—gets approval in about eight days. "It's really straightforward," says Kripalani. "They're looking for a well-written app that's not going to crash." To get Apple's blessing, apps must pass its strict rules about pornography and violence—though that's not typically a problem with titles for young readers. While Apple has guidelines for submission information regarding icons, text, and screen shots, publishers supply the price that customers will pay as well as the on-sale date. For Think, Oceanhouse decided to stick with its traditional $3.99, which still put it into the premium-priced category, something that Kripalani calls "kind of crazy" since it delivers more than the print book that costs twice as much.
Although most customers tend to shop for apps on the weekend, Oceanhouse typically chooses Tuesdays for on-sale dates. "It's convenient for us," says Kripalani. It gives them time to return from the weekend and get out press releases. "It's not about day one sales," says Kripalani. Every Thursday Apple refreshes its App Store and features titles in its coveted "new and noteworthy section. "Every Thursday we're crossing our fingers," says Kripalani. Think did grab a spot in that section on its release, and shot up to #7 in the store.
To boost sales, Oceanhouse does its own promotion as well. With the Seuss titles, anyone running a Seuss app will immediately receive an alert message that a new title is available. "Apple is the easiest of the bunch," says Kripalani, who thinks that knocks against Apple, which now publishes guidelines for approval at its iTunes store, are unfair.
Unlike most of its competitors, Oceanhouse is also embracing the Android mobile-device platform, used by Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Google. In fact, it offers 48 apps for it. And when Google recently announced a list of 150 "top developers" that consistently deliver high-quality Android apps, Oceanhouse Media was on the list. Early on, Oceanhouse decided to substantially rewrite its code for these apps so that it's now easier to submit them for approval. Think, however, required a large number of changes, so Kripalani won’t predict when itwill be available for Android mobile devices.
Oceanhouse continues to design first for Apple, with great success. The small-but-mighty San Diego company boasts 30 of the top 200 apps in the book category for the iPad and 22 out of the top 200 apps in the book category for the iPhone. As Dr. Seuss says, "Oh, the thinks you can think if only you try!"
Angelina Ballerina's New Teacher
Nicholas Callaway gives a four-word prescription for getting digital children's book apps into Apple's store: "Make a great app!"
"That would be my first and last advice," says Callaway, founder and CEO of Callaway Digital Arts. People have to stop complaining and learn how to do it." The major media companies aren't necessarily the winners. "This is a true entrepreneurial frontier," he says.
So far Callaway has released 25 apps, including Miss Spider's Tea Party, two Thomas the Tank Engine titles, and on June 11, Angelina Ballerina's New Teacher.
The Development: Callaway developers try to create what they call a rich "UX"—or user experience—for iPad users. "This is a new medium, as distinct as books are from television," says Callaway. He tries to make Apple's "magical and revolutionary device come alive."
It's easiest to pick a property without a lot of rights issues, says Callaway. "If you want a robust app that has text, spoken word, still imagery, animated imagery, sound design, music—that can be a very complex rights negotiation."
Callaway approached Hit Entertainment, which owns the entire Angelina Ballerina property as well as Thomas the Tank Engine. For these titles, the two companies collaborated on each stage of design, including the crucial "wire frame"—a blueprint that diagrams of the app's navigation features.
Another route for app makers: fables and fairy tales, which are in the public domain. Walt Disney used these stories (and created his own) for a reason. "He was pioneering in a new medium, [with] ultimately the same issues," says Callaway. In the end, the intellectual property owner is either no one (in the case of fables and fairy tales), a partner (in Callaway's case, Hit Entertainment), or the developer (an app maker who comes up with original stories).
To develop apps such as Angelina, Callaway decided to create his own now 32-employee studio, which includes engineers, writers, editors, illustrators, 2D and 3D animators, graphic designers, interactive designers, user-interface designers, sound designers, and composers. It is "very much" like the old Disney model, says Callaway. "Everyone gets together in the studio. They're side by side. This is the interactive movie studio of the future."
Callaway created the book app for Angelina from a TV show episode, not from the original picture books. "Angelina began life as books. Then it moved from books to television. Now we're moving it from television to interactive media," he says. With an app such as Angelina, the user is in control, which Callaway calls "lean forward" as opposed to "lean back" media. "You can pinch and you can zoom and you can scroll," he says. "Angelina is a storybook, it's a coloring book, and it's a puzzle all at the same time."
Callaway changed the images for Angelina from the standard definition used in TV to the high definition used in apps. He doesn't care that Flash, Adobe's popular animation software, doesn't work for the iPad. "It certainly hasn't impeded us," he says.
"Our pricing strategy is dynamic and fluid," says Callaway. Angelina currently costs 99 cents. How much does it cost to build an app? "It's a little bit like saying, ‘What does it cost to build a house?' " he answers. "It depends on whether you're building a dollhouse or Versailles." Is Callaway building Versailles? "Yes, we are," he says. And in fact, it received a five-year, $30 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to create learning apps for mobile and tablet devices for kids in kindergarten through third grade. (Angelina, designed for the consumer market, is not part of this "ecosystem" of apps, Callaway says.)
The In-House Testing: Like Kripalani, Callaway also suggests, "Do all of your testing and your debugging before you submit." But Callaway embraces the idea that apps are always changing, before and after they're approved. Even after an app such as Angelina hits the Apple store, Callaway continues to make tweaks—partly based on what real users are doing. It just moved the read button on Angelina into a more prominent position after it discovered kids were clicking the better-positioned paint button first. "We want the read experience to be the primary experience," says Nelson Gomez, Callaway's director of development.
The Problems: "We have daily roadblocks," says Nick Schmitz, Callaway's senior designer. Among them are making the animations come to life seamlessly, without delays, Gomez adds.
And of course, the iPad is not a desktop. "The iPad has certain memory limitations," says Omri Navot, a Callaway digital artist. "It's kind of like using a computer with 1998 publishing power, but the public expects 2011 performance. It's a miniaturization of technology. There are constraints." The touch capability, for example, takes up a lot of memory.
To address the limitations, "sacrifices are made every day," says Callaway publisher Cathy Ferrara. In Miss Spider, for example, readers get an animated reward after they complete any of the six touch-screen puzzles. For Angelina, because the animated 3D reward is so memory-intensive, and because there are 18 puzzles—three times the number in Spider—the creators chose instead to have words, such as "brilliant," pop up upon completion of the puzzle.
When Angelina talks about doing a grand jeté, a pop-up appears in the app with a description of the move. Originally, Callaway wanted Angelina to perform the dance in the pop-up. But the company decided that because of time constraints, it would add that 3D animation in an update later this year. Also later this year, Callaway will make Angelina available on iPhones, not just iPads. "The print world is fixed," says Callaway. The app world is not.
The Approval: Early on, after Callaway makes its initial creative brief, it gets in touch with Apple. "We go out to Cupertino and meet with product managers, with their UI [user interface] team," Callaway says. "It's a real partnership." And yet, approval is no shoe-in. "Even though we may contact them early, they are never going to tell you they are going to approve an app before it is submitted," he says. "There is no inside track. Even though we have a nice relationship with Apple, it is absolutely a flat landscape available to all. No matter how great the concept may be, it all depends on whether it actually works and doesn't crash. The only way that is known is when it's finished and submitted to their app store team, and they test-drive it." As it turns out, Angelina got approved within a couple of days of submission.
For the time being, Callaway is not making Android-compatible apps. "When others put it together as seamlessly as Apple does," says Callaway, "we'll look at other platforms."
"This is a historic publishing opportunity," Callaway says in summing up. "For me, the possibilities are endless."
