This is a typical prompt in Wreck This App...I drew the colored parts...
The iOS App Store is flooded with book apps that present print book content in digital form–most are merely books you can read on a screen. Much rarer are apps that take the ideas, concepts or activities from a book and adapt them to the very different capabilities that exist on a smart phone or tablet. One such app is “Wreck this App” (iTunes link), coming out tomorrow from Penguin.
Using the smear tool feels just like smearing real ink.
The app is based on Wreck This Journal, the popular adult activity book by Keri Smith, published by Perigee. Wreck This Journal is a gussied up blank book, meaning you’re meant to fill it with your own stuff, but instead of blank pages, the book is full of prompts for writing and drawing and readers are supposed to draw and do other stuff all over the book. Keri Smith is kind of like SARK with an edge.
Wreck This App takes that idea–including many of Smith’s prompts from the book, plus some new ones–and applies it to the touch screen. As you can see, the app lets you draw all over the pages, and then export your work to email, Facebook and elsewhere. You can also pull in photos from your device’s camera role and make a mess with them. It’s pretty fun, even, if not especially, for grown-ups, though I bet the kids will love it too.
The app includes prompts and tools, like the ones in the screen shots in this post. My favorite is the “drop tool,” which, as you can see in the shot below, lets you drop a blob of virtual paint on the screen and then tilt your device to deliciously spread the paint across the screen. It’s hours of fun.
The drop tool: my favorite...
Wreck This App is a really successful example of an experience based on a book that includes things neither a print book nor an e-book could do. Of course, Wreck This Journal is an activity book, so it lends itself to becoming an activity app. But you should check it out–and the first three people who head over to our Facebook page can do just that:
Wreck this App will be released in the iOS App Store tomorrow (Tuesday), but we’ve got three promo codes, good for one free copy of the app each, available first-come-first-serve on our Facebook page, so head over and claim them now! (And we hope you’ll “like” our page while you’re over there.)
