Our little one loves to grab anything shiny, but is especially attracted to LCD screens of any type. He loves the netbook, the MacBook, my desktop’s dual monitors, and of course the big TV, but most of all he loves the iPhone. I often activate the camera in reverse mode and let him play with it, but there’s always been a problem: while he manipulates the phone, he will push some control or other and stop the camera, go to the desktop and start pushing random icons. I was wishing for some sort of ‘baby mode’ where something neat would be happening on the screen, but controls would be disabled.

I decided to use the Sunday morning to dust off my Canvas, CSS and JavaScript skills to code, with Alba’s design input and feedback, a little BabySaver that could keep his attention with bright colors, and be impossible to quit for him. Click here to see its current form. Click on the “Endless” button to enable interactions, otherwise any clicks will take you to my homepage.

The conclusion? He is much more interested in the iPhone’s back, the plastic cover, and trying to eat them, than in watching the flying colors. And he still manages to open the iOS Notification Center pull-down, and from there go to the Message Center or some other app, in effect leaving the BabySaver. In typical “we know better than you” Apple style, the pull down can’t be disabled, not even inside native apps or as a global configuration setting.

As usual, getting the CSS and scaffolding to work properly across browsers (including mobile Safari) was much more time consuming than programming the actual effects. Particularly disturbing was when the iPhone didn’t like the ‘Style’ button in the upper left corner: it worked fine in the beginning, but after adding the other buttons and the button style, it became unclickable (almost! With lots of trying, I could manage to click it). I have no idea why, and I couldn’t figure out how to revert this behaviour. This, along with the Notification Center issue, is the reason the buttons are at the bottom.

I haven’t tried it on any Androids or Windows Phones, but I have high hopes. Now that all the boring pieces are in place I’ll probably try to write more effects and sounds to see how he likes them.

Feedback is welcome!