Ultimate Dinopedia: The Most Complete Dinosaur Reference Ever ($5.99) is packed with all the dinosaur information you could possibly want to know. With full-screen color images, animated videos and audio narration, it really looks great on the iPad.
The app reads much like a digital magazine that allows you to flip through each page of content. Some pages contain articles of information and small supplemental photos. Other pages are full-screen illustrations of the dinosaurs. The pages of illustrations usually also have buttons at the bottom of the screen that contain additional information, such as statistics, fun facts, picture descriptions and audio clips. The audio clips are professionally narrated, and tell a brief story about a particular dinosaur.
This application really does contain a ton of information about dinosaurs. There are so many dinosaurs that it would take an awfully long time to read about each one. Ultimate Dinopedia absolutely delivers on content. However, it lacks a bit in the interactivity department. For example, the illustrations are beautiful, but you can’t interact with them. Touching the pictures does absolutely nothing, except bring up the “Navigation” menu. It would be great if you could tap on the illustration and hear the dinosaur’s sound or see the dinosaur move. Also, the few videos that are included don’t contain any audio. Children want to be able to hear the dinosaurs’ footsteps on the ground, not just watch their movement. When creating applications for the iPad, developers need to be innovative and take full advantage of its touch capabilities.
I must report that I did experience a few crashes when attempting to directly navigate to a specific dinosaur using the “Dino Profiles” list. However, this is an easy fix that I’m sure will come with the next update. Other than these few crashes, the app was mostly smooth, and ran very well.
Overall, Ultimate Dinopedia is a fantastic app for educating students about dinosaurs. There really is a ton of content to read about and explore. I’d like to see more interactive content, but as is, it’s still worth the purchase.
