Doozla Review: great fun for young creative minds

Developer plasq, creator of many fine applications such as Comic Life and Skitch, recently introduced a truly revolutionary piece of software called Doozla (currently version 1.1). 

This app helps young minds from as young as 3 years and onwards to explore their creativity on a mac and it does so in a beautiful and strikingly easy way. 

First of course it’s up to the parents to get this app running and to set some basic rules.

This program is nearly completely child safe and lets you set restrictions to prevent your children from unnecessary printing and sneaking out of the program. Once started in full screen mode a very simple to use desktop is presented to the child and the time has come for you to sit back & relax and let your kids get to work.

As you can see above there are only four categories to choose from

• free hand drawing (just a blank screen with several painting tools at the bottom)
• coloring in (some very nice pics here which are also nice to color in as print outs with crayons)
• drawing on the included backgrounds (which are beautifully designed)
• and finally webcam drawing, which lets you take a picture via webcam which is then used as a background picture

As you can see here at the bottom of the screen the tool palette offers quite a variety of possibilities while still remaining very easy to comprehend. This palette is the same for all four categories and should be mastered by a four year old child within half an hour of practice.

The beauty of this app is not only in it’s terrific interface and simple usability, it’s the peace of mind it brings to you as a parent. Once started your kids can do literally nothing wrong. They may click anywhere on the screen and try out as much as they like, your system remains safe.

This app will teach your kids how to operate a mouse with precision, how to navigate through a simple computer menu and most importantly helps them to explore their creativity in a fascinating environment.

This app is so much fun, you might find yourself spending some time with Doozla.

I can honestly say that this is the best piece of child suitable software I have ever seen on any computer. It wouldn’t surprise me if this application will soon be the talk of town around Kindergartens and primary schools anywhere. It therefore truly deserves the Macology-Award as currently “best creative child software”.

I should mention that while Dozla runs flawless under Leopard, it did crash on me once under Tiger with an older Mac Mini after half an hour. Nevertheless after restarting it ran without incidents ever since.

Download the trial version here: http://plasq.com/doozla