Little Bird

Available for pc on AppUp
Available for Android tablets on Amazon


Little Bird is longing for a home and family and makes his dreams come true by finding joy within himself. The program is a twenty page long illustrated book with simple animations on most every page. Many of the objects on the page can be colored in with the color of your choice. You can ‘look’ around the scene by clicking on objects and revolving the view around.

Benefits

  • Original story and illustration
  • No advertisements or distractions
  • Encourages experimentation
  • Retains colors on pages
  • Simple intro to the computer

Manual

There are two main modes of operation in the book.  The program starts in a viewing mode and you could read each page without making any changes if you want.  Certain items on the page can be colored in by pressing the “Pencil” icon to switch to coloring mode.  Once you’re done coloring, press the “eye” icon to see the results.  In this mode when you click on an item the camera will focus on the item and revolve around it when you move the mouse.  Click the mouse again to view the entire scene.  Click on “Little Bird” on the page to cause something to happen in the scene.

Details

In the coloring mode there is a palette containing some default colors with the last button allowing a custom color to be made.  When you select this color a dialog will come up with some additional colors you can select.  If you want you can even make up your own color by typing the color value in hexadecimal in at the top of the dialog box.

The program saves all the color changes in a file in the application data directory for each user when you exit it.  If it can’t find the file it will create a new blank file.  You could backup or copy this file to a new computer if you want to save your color changes or share them with someone else.  It is located (on Windows 7) at C:Users[user name]AppDataRoaminglsg.LittleBirdLocal StorePrefs_Colors.xml with [user name] being your user login name. Note that AppData is hidden under windows 7 by default.

The original “LittleBird.air” file used in the installation is not required after the installation; however it can be used to uninstall the application if you run it again.  The application may also be removed using “Add/Remove Programs” located under the control panel in a Windows machine.  By default the small color settings file will remain in the applications data directory and will need to be removed by hand if this is an issue.

I have made every effort to insure that this program is free of harmful computer code such as bugs, viruses or trojans.  It should install with “Light Splasher Graphics” as the verified publisher to insure that other parties have not made modifications.  However, I am not personally liable for any problems that may result from the use or installation of this program.  I cannot test on every possible configuration or go through every line of code in the libraries that support this program so please plan accordingly.

Credits

Credits are also listed on the last page of the book:

  • Softimage – primary modeling tool, geometry corrections.
  • Caligari – some sprite images were rendered from their models.
  • Away3D – software library for 3D.
  • Prefab3D – mesh adjustments and conversion to Away3D format
  • Tweener – software library for animation movement. http://code.google.com/p/tweener/wiki/License
  • Adobe – design software, coding resources, business support, etc.
  • Intel – funding support.
  • Daz3D – 3D models used for rendering sprites
  • Turbo Squid- low polygon 3D models were created from purchased models
  • Renderosity – 2D graphic resources
  • Font – Copyright (c) 2010, Kimberly Geswein (kimberlygeswein.com) licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1 see http://scripts.sil.org/OFL for license.