Bartleby’s Second Book Featured by Apple
It was over a year ago when “Bartleby’s Book of Buttons,” a delightful digital storybook for iPad, hit Apple’s App Store. Created by Hawaii-born artist Henrik Van Ryzin and his wife Denise, I found the app to be a delightful, wonderful digital storybook for the iPad. That first release was dubbed “Volume I: The Far Away Island,” promising future chapters in the story.
Well, now there’s “Bartleby’s Book of Buttons Vol. 2: The Button at the Bottom of the Sea.” It offers a whole new adventure through 18 richly illustrated, interactive pages.
Even better? The new app has just received the highest honor for iOS apps, being named the “iPhone App of the Week.” It’s now front and center on the App Store, with this review:Â “We’ve set our sites on this smashing adventure book. It’s beautiful, engaging, and enhanced for iOS 5.”
That Apple loves Bartleby’s latest chapter is perhaps no surprise. According to Denise, a lot of the enhancements were suggested by fans in Cupertino.
“It’s been a long road, but Apple was very interested, and many of the features of Vol. 2 are direct requests from Apple,” she says. “This made development time quite long, but we feel the final app is amazing!”
While the first app was available only on the iPad, the new app is built for both the iPad and the iPhone. It also has Game Center support, adding a social layer and the ability to earn stickers. Thanks to iPrint, you can even print those stickers. And thanks to iOS5, you can post your accomplishments to Twitter, and save your progress to iCloud to pick up where you left off across your devices.
But one of the key new features is support for AirPlay” and Apple TV. While “Bartleby’s Book of Buttons” looks great on the large screen of the iPad or the retina display of the iPhone 4, it looks even better on a big-screen TV.
Congratulations to Denise, Henrik, and the whole Monster Costume team!
