Review: Coloring Fun

Published by Steve Litchfield at 7:55 UTC, February 2nd 2012

Summary:

Way back in the last decade, around 2003 or 2004, with a creative four year old daughter who was just taking her first steps on one of my PCs, I discovered a wonderful application, Electronic Colouring Book, an old DOS application, I believe, which kept her happy for ages. Rather than requiring super-precise mouse skills for proper computer artwork, the idea was to present line drawings and have the painter pick which colour to fill each enclosed section with. Worked a treat, and now today's four year olds can do the same with their parent's Symbian smartphone, thanks to Coloring Fun.

In short, the idea is to keep things really simple, really colourful and yet allow the creation of little pieces of art that can be proudly shown to the parent sitting nearby (or driving, perhaps - this app could be a good way of keeping a son or daughter quiet on a long car journey).

If the graphics below seem over-simplistic to you then think again - they're deliberately pitched at four and five year olds and might even be a nice diversion for six and seven year olds, too.

I was looking at the free sampler application, with five line drawings to endow with colour, but if the app is a hit with your small ones, then you'll want to grab either (or both of) Pack 1 Coloring Fun and Christmas Pack Coloring Fun, each of which has fifteen images for your £1 purchase price.

 

The interface (as you'd hope, given the target audience) is simple. Pick the drawing you want from an initial carousel and then you're off and colouring. The right hand side crayons are part of a vertical carousel - although it's not obvious at first that there are more colours available, the very first flick or drag gives the colourer an immediate grasp of how it works.

 

 

The drawing tools are kept similarly simple, with only two of note - one to perform the main 'filling' of enclosed sections with colour, as already eulogised, the other a brush to add extra strokes as needed, shown below:

 

 

The bottom tool (obviously) erases whatever the colourer rubs it over, while the dustbin tool reverts the image to black and white, ready for the child to start again.

The top 'back' icon returns the colourer to the image picking carousel, but the current image is saved, so no accidental returns followed by a "All my colours have gone!" cry. This also means that the child can be 'working' on more than one image at a time, which is a neat feature.

The (rather antiquated!) floppy disk icon is supposed to be for saving each masterpiece, not only internally, but also to a bitmap file that can be used elsewhere on the phone, such as emailing off to a proud grandparent:

 

 

At least, that's the theory - the quoted folder gets created but, on this free version of the application, no images actually appeared, no matter how hard I tried. Maybe this only works on the paid versions? The functionality's not a huge loss, but worth noting.

Although the limited (15 images each on the paid versions) 'canvases' may seem a problem, the very fact that a child can erase the colours from a drawing with one tap and have fun starting again with totally different colour scheme means that there's some extended value here - I'd even go so far as to suggest that you as a parent might like to go into each image and (ahem) accidentally wipe it of colour before a car journey: "Oh, dear, all the colours have gone, can you help colour all the pictures in again?", and so on!

We grabbed the free Coloring Fun because we were round at a relative's house, where there was a bored five year old (my own daughter is now way too old!) and it worked very well, installing in seconds and entertaining as needed. If my own kid(s) were at the right age, I'd have no problem paying a pound for each of the two paid image packs.

Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 2nd Feb 2012

 

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