I was watching my children play with iGoodies, the other day, and I started thinking about how amazing Apple products are. Three years ago, no-one had heard of an iPod, iTouch, iPhone or an iPad, but there we all are (and there are a lot of us) using them as if we've never lived without them. It's clearly the ease of use that appeals. Grandpa thinks it will be too hard for him to use until you plonk your 2 1/2 year old daughter in front of him who is happily scrolling through the pages looking for a suitable game, selecting, adjusting the volume and playing for a minute until her attention span gets the better of her and she resets the screen and finds something else. Grandpa is left looking flabberghasted and ashamed to be trumped by a toddler!
Two years on, we have all manner of iGadgets in our home. The children play a variety of games which can only help to boost their latteral thinking and problem solving and they are not solitary games. The iPad allows them all to sit together and solve problems as a team. The children can often be found playing the same game on different devices but talking to each other about what level they're on, how they solved it and "why don't you try it this way?" I have caught up on programmes using on demand apps while cooking or the TV is occupied with Scooby Doo. The children watched a film I downloaded for them, on a long train journey, on the iPad. Homework is helped, recipes found, shopping done, all without setting up the laptop which grinds away, taking forever to boot and needing the power supply after 5 minutes.
The point of this blog? Well, hurrah for Apple and hurrah for Steve Jobs for being such a visionary for taking technology to the next level by boosting the complexity of the devices' capabilities but simplifying the usage to the point that a toddler can use them.