Lawrence Ingraham started developing iOS apps aimed at kids back in 2009, and his Tantrum Apps company has produced a plethora of child-centric applications in the past few years, specializing in everything from quizzes to zoo noises.
His latest effort is FirstCamera, a simple camera app built with unpredictable urchins in mind. “My daughter’s five now, and loves taking pictures, especially with my iPhone,” says Ingraham. “Unfortunately, this means I end up with the most random photos in my photo stream. Worse, she has access to all my photos and videos and can email them, tweet them, delete them…it’s really bad.”
So, Ingraham decided to build FirstCamera, which lets kids take as many pictures as they wish, saving the final product directly to the app rather than the camera roll. From within the app, Instagram-style filters can be applied and stickers can be added to spruce them up with humorous hats and glasses.
Crucially, it separates existing media content from the iOS device to avoid accidental deletion of other important photo and video files. And it keeps random cat photos away from your own files.
The app itself has been built with children in mind too, with a large button on the main capture screen. And if you trust your kids NOT to play havoc with your iPhone’s camera roll, you can actually enable a save option so that it will be stored to your device, though this is off by default.
Moreover, you can limit the number of photos saved to the app, and the delete option is off by default too, so that kids don’t lose their own creations by mistake.
FirstCamera is a nice, simple app that does what it professes to do and is just about worth the $0.99 asking price. Though all this raises one question – if you don’t trust your kids with your precious camera roll, would you trust them with your $500+ mobile device?
Image Credit: Dingadingdang
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