Hey Peanut: A New App for the iPhone

I have spent the last couple of months working on a new app for the iPhone called Hey Peanut. Hey Peanut is a photo browser app with a twist for toddlers.

A while back my wife took pictures of family members and put them into a small photo album. Our son doesn’t see his extended family as much as we would like so from time to time we sit with him and browse the family photo album. This gives him a chance to learn the faces of his grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. One day I was watching my wife and son browse the photo album and I thought, “There should be an app for that.” Thus the idea for Hey Peanut was born.

Hey Peanut is based on the family photo album but, as I said before, with a twist. The twist is the recorded voice message. Using an iPhone and Hey Peanut a parent takes a picture of a family member then records a voice message from the family member. For instance, I can use Hey Peanut to take a picture of my mother and record a personal message from her like, “Hi Rowan! It’s GranMom. I love you.” My son can then browse the pictures and listen to the messages at any time.

Hey Peanut is a bit more than just a photo browser. It includes colorful “photo mats” with various sounds effects to keep the toddle engaged. Originally I was thinking of making Hey Peanut more game-like but decided it was not necessary.

Development on Hey Peanut is nearing completion. A lot of time has been spent on making a photo browser slash library manager for the parents. This mimics the photo app to some degree. I had hope to use Three20’s photo viewer for this but I ran into problems so I had to write my own. Over the last few weeks I have taken my code and created a new open source photo browser project called KTPhotoBrowser. The latest code is available on GitHub. The open source project is still work in progress but it is useable. I plan to complete KTPhotoBrowser once Hey Peanut is released.

Meanwhile, if you are a parent with a little one between the ages of 1 and 3 and you think he or she would like to play with Hey Peanut then send me a message and join the beta testing team.