The story is a short twelve pages of rhyming fun about a boy named Nolan who has a scary dream and decides to face his fears. The app is cleanly designed and clearly made for the littlest users but gives parents a nice list of settings to choose from. The app opens directly to the first page of the story and begins the narration unprompted. Narration is a calm-sounding woman that we all want to sound like when reading to our kids.
Pages are turned by pushing arrows and readers can go forward or backward at any time to pages. There is a button at the top that opens the page selection, settings, information and mute. Settings include the options to turn off or on all sound, button tap sound, animation sound, narration, menus fade-out or hints.
Interactive elements are present on each page and can be discovered by chance or by following the hints if they are set to "on". Pressing areas shows fish jumping out of the water, making Nolan fall or speak or jump, and even revealing the true nature of the monsters that have been chasing Nolan through his dream.
The simplicity of this app is what makes it very good. The developers have chosen to tell a story to children under five and they have excelled with that goal. There are no additions like puzzles and coloring books. No ads, no additional apps to look at in iTunes. They have created a short, sweet story with attractive, computer graphics, appropriate background music that is calming and then sprinkled appropriate interactive elements to top off the whole thing. They have even made sure that there are zero ads, in-app purchases or external links so kids can play to their hearts' content without needing mom to redirect.
Since it's my job to find ways to improve on an existing app, my only recommendations for making this a five star app would be to highlight words as they are narrated and allow a simple touch for them to be repeated instead of having to leave the page and come back. I would also really and truly love for them to add one last page that says, "The End". It was such a cute little story to read to my kiddo that it just felt like it needed to be there.
Overall, I think parents that are looking to add a new app book to their children's iOS libraries will do well with this app and I am looking forward to what the developer comes up with next.