Show HN: Disco Fingers – Easily create funny beats

[baldfat]

I run a Technology lab for close to 300 3-5 year olds for Head Start. I also am the consultant on app purchases for our whole agency of over 1000 students in over 50 classrooms.

I think you may have made the app I have been searching for. Pre-school students needs apps that let them create and not just "glorified work sheets" or some story told to them. I will let you know in the next few weeks how it works in my classrooms :)

[DanBC]

An evidence based blog of useful or not so useful apps would be very interesting to me.

[mrborgen]

That's awesome, thank you! It will be very interesting to hear the results from you classrooms. My email is [e-mail].

Your students are a bit under our target group, I'll admit that. We've found that pre-school students might struggle with understanding the concept. But they still like to play with the characters and use the voice record functionallity.

[dagvonkr]

Wow thanks a lot! Would be great if you would give us some feedback from your classes. Just throw us a mail: [e-mail]

[ANH]

Nice. I'm going to put this in front of our resident toddler tonight.

Bit of feedback:

* I would have been willing to put down a couple of bucks up front just to try it out, even without the extras available in-app.

* How about "toddler resistant" mode that disables the sharing, feedback, social buttons? Kids tend to touch and drag all over the place, often seemingly at random. The less they end up in a strange place and are able to figure out the core interface, the better.

[dagvonkr]

Thanks for the feedback! The monetization is hard to solve. Only thing you can do in the end is to try it out. Thanks for the tip regarding the "toddler resistant" mode ! We'll consider that for a update.

[ntucker]

This is great. I laughed out loud when I discovered that notes you throw upward off the screen eventually come back down if you throw them straight up. Definitely getting my toddler to play with this.

I have two suggestions: one is a tool/mode that lets you remove a bunch of stuff quickly, and the other is a simple undo mechanism. Since there isn't much instruction, you need to explore by touching, and e.g. when you're testing to see if a three finger gesture does something, you tend to create a lot of unwanted notes and potentially accidentally remove stuff that you overwrite.

[MiguelHudnandez]

Toddler Mode:

For iPads able to run iOS 6+, you can activate "Guided Access" mode. Apps being run in this mode can have disabled hardware buttons and deactivate certain areas on-screen.

Once the global setting is enabled (Settings > General > Accessibility), triple-clicking the home button activates and deactivates the mode. There is a passcode, distinct from the unlock code, to exit "Guided Access."

I became familiar with this as part of an iPad kiosk project, and when my toddler discovered that iPads exist, it has been very valuable.

[jastanton]

Reading their launch diary is very interesting. Most notably they write down how many downloads, and how much revenue they have had and how much is in their bank. Having never done a startup by myself before and often wondering what it's like financially this is a very interesting reading. I will be checking back a day or two from now (their launch) to see what their numbers our.

Also fantastic looking app, if I had an iPad I would download it :)

[mrborgen]

Thanks! Part of the point with the blog was to show the frustrating situation of seeing the end of the runway come closer and closer, without knowing if the product will make enough money to finance the business by the end of the runway :)

[spdustin]

Cute and approachable app :) The music in first demo video, and the pattern-based sequencing reminds me of when I used to compose Mod files on an Amiga 500, which reminded me of Information Society (there as an Amiga on the cover of their "Hack" album), which brought back even more awesome memories.

Anyone else remember Mod files and the Amiga?

So, thanks!

[blacktar]

Great to see more startups coming out of my native Norway. Looks like a fun app. Looking forward to see where they are going with this one.

[kremlin]

just paid for full features; i've always loved stuff like this. There's a web app I always liked that was just a grid with one instrument only, just a reverby mallet-sounding instrument (looks like they added drums now) http://tonematrix.audiotool.com/

When you're restricted to just a scale rather than all 12 notes in the full octave available to you, it's just so surprisingly easy to come up with little riffs that sound good.

[kremlin]

feature request (hopefully this doesn't sound crazily absurd - also hopefully doesn't come across as rude) -- the ability to string saved tracks together. Run TrackA 4 times, TrackB 2, TrackC 1, TrackD 1, TrackA 4 again, etc. And even perhaps the ability to loop over and reuse arrangements of multiple tracks.

[zdmc]

Is the revenue plan based on a monthly subscription model? If not, then I don't know why you'd want to think in terms of "X USD per month"[1].

That being said, kudos, the app looks really fun. It seems to me that you should charge the one-time d/l fee ($0.99 USD)

1. "After 10 months of work, we have 100 days to get our unreleased app to 15K USD per month." [http://launchdiary.postagon.com/]

[mrborgen]

It's not a subscription no. But if our retention mechanism works, and the app is good enough, people who really like it will be able to spend money in it regularly.

Our quote from the blog is more of a fact than a reference to our business model. Cause if we don't make 15K in per month in average by mid-February, we're out of business.

[fsqcds]

Android please!

[zrgiu_]

Android only recently released APIs for sound that are accurate enough for these kinds of applications. As the % of devices running Android 5.0 starts increasing, we'll see sound mixing (and similar) apps there too.

[ja27]

As an indie kid-friendly app developer with iOS and Android apps - don't do Android. You'd be much better off financially doing another iOS app.

[dagvonkr]

We've found a bug on iPad4: we're having trouble playing shared beats in the web browser :´( We'll fix it tomorrow!!

[thewarrior]

Do you restrict notes to the pentatonic scale like many such apps do so that you always get pleasant sounding results ?

[dagvonkr]

Yes you are correct! We are gonna continue to come up with more concepts for easily and fun composition tools. This was the first step:)

[Pistus]

Fun app, got into it immediately. Will test it on my niece in the weekend

[niix]

Really want to try this, when is the iPhone version coming? :)

[dagvonkr]

That's next! We hope to make enough money to make the iPhone version. Follow our launch diary to see what happens:)

[defied]

Looks great! This is only available in the US app store?

[mrborgen]

Thanks, no it's world wide. You can't find it? Should be able to be downloaded through this link anywhere in the world: https://itunes.apple.com/app/disco-fingers/id809680953

Would really like to hear it if you're having troubles downloading it.

[theMagicalKarp]

It is, however it's iPad only.

[hilem]

Sharing songs isn't working and I would seriously reconsider limiting it to iPad only. Offering an interface for iPhone would greatly increase downloads.

[hk__2]

They plan to release an iPhone version [1]

[1]: http://launchdiary.postagon.com/7wc9au7y1

[dagvonkr]

What iPad do you have, and are you connected to internet? You can send feedback to [e-mail] Thanks for letting us know!

[rglover]

That lonesome cowboy video is great :)