The Mobile Ping

App Store on Shuffle is a weekly feature where The Mobile Ping finds, through highly scientific methods, a random iPhone app for review.

This time around, the random word generator gave me chills when it provided me with the word “refrigerator”.  What the App Store recommended was surprising.

Adam’s Art Coloring Book

$0.99

This little program is at it’s basic level a “paint” app. It comes with ten different crayons: 9 colors and 1 “rainbow”. I’ve seen many of these before, including some that are free, so at first I was feeling pretty disappointed with the 99 cent price tag. This disappointment quickly faded away as I played around.

First and foremost, I noticed that the responsiveness was really clean. Unlike my experience with many other paint apps, Adam’s Art put the color right where I intended it to. Also, there was no lag at all when I drew a line across the screen. All this alone does not a 99 cent app make however. Oh no, this needs to give me a bit more to warrant my purchase.

If you tap onto the top of the board, three little dongles fall down to reveal a white pull chord, a black pull chord and a smiley-face pull chord in between. I tapped the white chord and my page cleared, giving me a fresh white backdrop with which to color on. I then tapped the black one, giving me the expected black backdrop. The rainbow crayon looks especially nice in this mode, I might add.  The smiley-face really did it for me, however.

Stencils! It really is a coloring book. I can’t explain it, but there is something so satisfying to my deeply untalented creative core to color in simple stencils. And these are good! A computer, a wrench, a birthday cake, a family. Something about them compels me to breathe life into them with my crayons.

Unfortunately, some of the stencils are rather… unfortunate. Maybe the developer felt he needed to throw more variety into the mix, but I can’t fathom how he came to some of these. I did have a bit of fun with them, anyway.

With any of these creations, you can go to your fridge (Ha! You where wondering how “refrigerator” came into this…) and review your work.

These creations can also be dragged towards the little heart magnet in the middle and the app will copy the picture into your photo album.

I may sound a little over enthusiastic, and because of this you may think that I am being sarcastic. I assure you that I am nothing but sincere when I say that this little gem, discovered from a random word of frigid origin, has warmed my heart. If you have kids, or if you have any sort of soul, pick this up.

Result: 4/5 *Thumbs Up*