"Mum, I want to listen to the music with the ice bear".
Only minutes later.
"And now the story of the man and his cat".
If this situation is familiar to you, you need an iPod application for children.

For children who prefer "grid view" over "cover flow", the "Kids' Playlists" App offers grid view based album browsing on the iPhone.

A lot of children find it easier to browse through a grid. Being able to see a lot of albums at once helps them find their preferred music more easily.

You only need to maintain your iTunes library and provide covers for your albums. That's all. If no cover is attached to an album within iTunes, a template is displayed.

Your child can select its favourite albums visually. The first tap only selects the album and moves it into the center of the screen. A voice over feature can be enabled. The album artist and title will be read to the child.

Tapping on the cover art a second time will start playback in the iPod music player. The next tap will skip to the next song.

Parents can specify which playlist will be shown. If an unknown playlist is set in the preferences, the App will show the selection control when it starts, allowing the user to select a playlist.

Up to 4 iTunes playlists can be selected by the child.
An icon can be mapped to each list so that the child knows how to distinguish between the playlists.

You can select from 20 different icons from glyphish.

Acknowledgments

Most of the credit goes to Nina Simon for her phantastic graphic design and feedback during the development.

Thanks to Sam Foster who wrote a wrapper around flite from the Carnegie Mellon University.

In the beginning, I found an article in the internet from Matt Drance and Paul Warren about a wallpaper of iTunes album arts. It was so easy to deploy that I instantly bought their book iOS Recipes.