Peanuts: It's the Big Game Charlie Brown - Viva Media

Why do so many people love the Peanuts gang? It’s probably because unlike so many other cartoons of its time, the Peanuts stories always had a sense of poignancy to them. Charlie Brown never gets the red-haired girl. The Great Pumpkin continues to evade Linus. Snoopy loses another dogfight with the Red Baron. But through it all, the Peanuts gang, this bunch of kids with big aspirations and letdowns, seems to roll with the punches... read more at MacLife

iFamily for Tiger 2.2 - KS Wilson & Associates

iFamily for Tiger 2.2 is a sophisticated genealogy program that allows you to gather and organize information about your family in an easy-to-navigate, two-paned window. The top half of the window displays your family chart, with up to six levels of generational information. The bottom half of the window allows you to display and edit all the information about any individual... read more at Macworld

Heredis 10.2 - BSD Concept

Heredis 10.2.3 is a well-designed genealogy application that takes advantage of Apple’s iApps, has 10 customizable fields, and makes easy work of collecting and organizing data about your family. Heredis also allows you to collect and integrate multimedia files such as audio or video of your relatives... read more at Macworld

Chocolate Castle - Lexaloffle

Lexaloffle, a developer out of New Zealand, has introduced Chocolate Castle, a casual game chock full of fun and challenging puzzles.Each puzzle board is a grid that contains chocolate blocks in any of four colors, pink, light brown, dark brown, and white. The board also has tiny bears, in the same colors as the chocolate... read more at MacLife

Mathematica 6 - Wolfram Research

In celebration of Wolfram Research's 20th birthday, Mathematica 6 is billed as 'the most important advance in the 20-year history of Mathematica', with hyperbolic terms such as 'revolution' and 'reinvented' peppering its exhaustive list of functions and features... read more at MacUserUK

The Oregon Trail 5th Edition - The Learning Company

There seems to be a thin line between engaging your kids and just giving them something to stare at. The Oregon Trail encourages kids to do stuff - not just sit passively and watch - and it was especially apropos for our 9-year-old tester, who had just visited the Oregon Trail... read more at MacLife

The Geometer's Sketchpad - Key Curriculum Press

The problem with any kids' math software is the same one you run into with any math class for kids who aren't math prodigies: Making math exciting and nonthreatening is hard to do. And if we're talking about software that's supposed to be chosen voluntarily by your child, when there's no parent or teacher watching, the job is probably even harder... read more at MacLife

MicroWorlds EX - LCSI

Our 8- and 10-year-old testers glommed on to this one right away. They were both amused and entertained by the ability to create wholesale environments out of a wide variety of flora and fauna. The graphics were par for the course for kids' software (read: a bit low-end... read more at MacLife

Mia's Language Adventure - Kutoka

There was a time when certain adults might find themselves watching programs like the Teletubbies. For fun - hours and hours and hours of fun. We wouldn't be surprised at all if Mia's Language Adventure didn't spark that kind of devotion, with its hyperreal graphics... read more at MacLife

2007 World Book - Software MacKiev

Kids with native curiosity are a perfect match for World Book. The app's clean design makes using it a snap, and it covers a wide range of topics. It's still a more cumbersome than typing Joe Di Maggio into Google - especially since Google forgives common spelling errors... read more at MacLife

Thinkin' Science - Edmark

Apparently, science has become a subject that you have to trick kids into caring about. Up against the lure of video games, we can see how that might apply. But Thinkin' Science does a slick job teaching kids stuff about, say, fungi. And physics and weather... read more at MacLife

Destination Reading - River Deep

Offers kids a variety of activities to practice and improve reading skills and become familiar with language arts concepts. The interface is friendly enough, but our testers found the navigation a bit fuzzy at times. For example, in some of the modules, it wasn't always clear what to click... read more at MacLife

Trudy's Time & Place House - Edmark

Trudy's Time & Place House gives kids a foundation in telling time, reading maps, units of measure, and geography. Younger kids will need your help navigating at first... read more at MacLife

Sammy's Science House - Edmark

Sammy's Science House does an excellent job presenting thoroughly engaging activities while teaching about animals, recycling, nature, the environment, and more... read more at MacLife

Millie's Math House - Edmark

Millie's Math House makes learning basic arithmetic fun... read more at MacLife

Bailey's Book House - Edmark

Bailey's Book House focuses on language development - word and letter recognition, sounds, and so on... read more at MacLife

Dr. Seuss ABC - Software MacKiev

No childhood is complete without a healthy dose of Dr. Seuss. Digitally inclined kids are in luck, because Software MacKiev has made Seuss-ian tales available for onscreen consumption. Presented as an interactive book, Dr. Seuss ABC guides you through each page of the original story... read more at MacLife

Little Fingers Classroom - LittleFingers

The Classroom series covers a larger gamut and features learning games appropriate to specific age and grade levels, pre-K and kindergarten (Volume 1) through grades 4 and 5 (Volume 4)... read more at MacLife

LittleFingers Preschool - LittleFingers

LittleFingers Preschool is a set of educational games that get kids used to the concept of the Mac as a learning tool. Eschewing a complex backstory or flashy graphics, Preschool is a set of six straightforward games that help kids pick up or practice skills like the alphabet, color and shape recognition, puzzle solving, counting, and matching... read more at MacLife

Groovy Music Shapes - Sibelius

There's nothing down-market about this offering at all except for the price. Using kid-friendly icons and avatars to cover sound, pitch, composition, and more, Groovy Music Shapes and Groovy Music Jungle extend a music curriculum beyond what many kids are likely to get in school... read more at MacLife

Groovy Music Jungle - Sibelius

There's nothing down-market about this offering at all except for the price. Using kid-friendly icons and avatars to cover sound, pitch, composition, and more, Groovy Music Shapes and Groovy Music Jungle extend a music curriculum beyond what many kids are likely to get in school... read more at MacLife

Piano Wizard Easy Mode and Premier - Allegro Rainbow

The phenomenal Piano Wizard bridges the gap between music, notes, and colors with an interface that will seem familiar to kids. The near-full-size physical keyboard is mirrored by an onscreen keyboard, and as the musical cues move across the screen, kids try to "hit" them in time... read more at MacLife

Music Ace Deluxe - Harmonic Vision

Lots of music software for kids trades heavily on the fun factor. Music Ace Deluxe is no different, but underneath the whimsical little conductor avatar is some fairly serious instruction on reading music, musical notation, and the fundamentals of how to make music... read more at MacLife

Canvastic - Canvastic

Canvastic offers kids a leg up in future careers as marketers or digital designers, letting them design slideshows and other graphics projects. Our younger testers found the blank canvas baffling, but kids 8 and up got the hang of it quickly. Devoid of novelty "kid features," Canvastic offers serious functionality... read more at MacLife

KidPix 2007 Universal Edition - Software MacKiev

KidPix 2007 does two things at once: It helps your children create works of art while providing tons of entertainment. Junior can use one of thousands of art objects called stickers to make pictures, or he can use the freehand painting and drawing tools... read more at MacLife

Big Bang Brain Games - Freeverse

They say that people who do crossword puzzles and other brain-teasing games stay mentally alert longer into old age. That's the idea behind Big Bang Brain Games, a collection of five games for kids and adults that are probably more mentally stimulating than, say, Mortal Kombat, but also likely less thrilling... read more at MacLife

Smart-Bear Adventures - Leboe & Grice Multimedia

This series is filled with tons of bear-related facts. The software is more of an interactive book than a game, and as you progress through the story, you unlock new features. For example, in Smart-Bear Adventures 1, you get new image stamps for the creativity center every time you read a new section of the story... read more at MacLife

Didi & Ditto Kindergarten - Kutoka

Here's a kids' game done right. The artwork and animation are of a quality rarely seen in kids' software, and there's a good mix of fun puzzles that your child can do solo or with your help. Our testers had fun pointing and clicking around the landscape to find a puzzle or trigger amusing skits, jokes, or riddles from a colorful array of characters... read more at MacLife

Lua Lua - Phelios

There's no meandering storyline in Lua Lua: It cuts right to the games. Lua Lua packages seven games with colorful graphics and, shall we say, energetic music - as in, parents will be annoyed by it after 15 minutes. The games involve matching, pattern recognition, and puzzle solving, but Lua Lua doesn't provide any instructions... read more at MacLife

Giggles Computer Funtime for Baby - Leveractive

When your baby is having a mashing good time on your Mac, arms and hands flailing away at your keyboard, you might as well have Giggles Computer Funtime for Baby installed. The software reacts to your child's keyboard pounding based on a variety of themes that you select... read more at MacLife

FizzBall - Grubby Games

FizzBall successfully puts new spin on the Breakout style of game, where the object is to eliminate brick walls with a bouncing ball. As Professor Fizzwizzle, you use a fizzball to capture and save cute little animals that have been abandoned on an island. Using a steampunk-style paddle, the professor swats the fizzball at animals... read more at MacLife

Plopp - Planet Plopp

Plopp is a new drawing program for kids with a twist: draw anything you like and Plopp will turn it into a 3D object for you. Sounds impossible? Not quite, but it's fiendishly clever... read more at MacUserUK