About 20 years ago, my youngest daughter Emma, who was then about to turn 1, used to love to sit on my knee at my desk and pound away on the keyboard of my PC, watching the letters appear on the screen (in fabulous DOS black and white!).
So, I wrote her a short program in Basic to make the letters bigger, change the colours of the letters each time a key was hit, and play a different sound each time the keys were hit.
Recently, Emma suggested I write an updated version of the program she remembers so fondly, and Baby's First Editor is the result.
The default settings play a unique sound for each key that changes the text on the screen. If the noise gets too much for you, the Mute button (see Figure 1 below) will turn the sound off. Clicking it a second time turns it back on again. (Duh!) The Random Tones button switches from playing a unique sound for each key to randomly playing one of 18 tones each time a key is pressed. So, if the child likes to hold down one letter and watch as it fills the screen(!), you can click on the Random Tones button so each repeat of the key will produce a different tone.
In addition, you can change the font via the drop-down list, and you can make the text bold and/or italic. Note that while you can highlight text, a font change won't apply to the highlighted text (since that would change the text to all the same colour as well).
I hope your child enjoys Baby's First Editor as much as Emma did (and that you get as much pleasure from it as I did all those years ago). I would welcome any suggestions for improvement to john.petrie@gmail.com, or let me know if you run into any problems.
Please also read the licence terms.
Regards,
John Petrie
Melbourne,
March, 2007