Customer Reviews

Learning Company Kid Pix Deluxe 4 [Old Version]

5 star:		(58)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(26)

 

 

When I saw the announcement I got excited, and purchased it right away because I had been using the excellent Kid Pix 3X developed by MacKiev, and I thought this will be even better. Once I installed it, I was terribly dissapointed with the quality of the graphics, cursors and other user interface elements. I did some research and found out that Broderbund licenses the Kidpix title to two different companies one the maker of this version Riverdeep and the other Mackiev. Mackiev has spent quite a bit of resources developing their version and it shows in the quality of their work. If you have Mac OSX you should buy KidPix 3X available at the Mac Store. It is more expensive but in this case you definetely get what you pay for. KidPix 3X not only runs on OSX but it is integrated with the ILife applications among many other incredible features. They won a best of show award on the MacWorld 2004 for their application.

I bought this because it is finally OS X native. Installed KPD4 in my account, but when my daughter opens KPD4 in her account, it will not save, no permission. Broderbund will not support, they redirect to encoreusa. Encoreusa has no support on their site for this product. Not covered in their knowledgebase, or forums. And they will not support by phone. No reponse to e-mails except form letters with no followup. There are permissions problems generated by this product, and they are unresolved.

Just don't buy KPD4 until it is supported.

I recently purchased two copies of this program, and am about to purchase two more for the homes of grandchildren and friends. The options for playing with the program seem to be endless. It encourages the young children to learn mouse skills, and how to operate a computer program while having LOTS of fun in creativity. Our 4 year old grandkids and 10 year olds and their friends spend many hours using this program and just having fun with it.
It's best if an adult can help the child know what options are available to them in the program. Very young children can use the program in a basic manner, and older children can learn the finer skills.
It's best to change the resolution on your monitor to 800 x 600 (75HZ refresh rate) BEFORE opening the program. That will open the program FULL SCREEN, instead of smaller if your resolution is normally set higher than 800 x 600.

I bought this for my son, since it is ostensibly the same program they use in his kindergarten. Unfortunately I made the mistake of buying the electronic download version, which requires a horrid program called appstream. The first problem I have is that this appstream program isn't just for the download, it installs itself to always be running, and is required to be running to use the Kid Pix application. Further, it also must be able to connect to the internet each time you want to use the program, so it is impossible to use it on a laptop in disconnected mode. This restriction alone (which is not mentioned during the purchasing process) was enough to make me decide to return it for the "normal" version on a CD.

But then I found that I could not even use the program. When I launch it, I find that the Kid Pix executable completely saturates the CPU on my fairly fast laptop, and takes more than 5 minutes to fully load. And when it does finally come up, it has a constant CPU load of 85-95% for just this one executable, which makes it unusable. So I sent a simple support request to Broderbund, which was to ask them if it was a known issue, and was I likely to see the same thing with the version on CD. (In essence, asking if it was the very same program on CD.)

I won't go into the screen resolution issue that others describe, but of course I was affected by that as well. As it was running on a laptop, changing to a non-native resolution isn't an option. This will be true for LCD monitors as well, where non-native resolutions have horrible viewability. The is presumably because this application has an archaic interface based on fixed size bitmaps, and they can neither scale their user interface nor display it in a window.

What I got back was a useless response telling me to defragment my hard disk. Clearly they aren't willing to support this product. Perhaps its modest level of quality and low price point make real support not cost effective. Nonetheless, I'm off to find a better alternative for my son. For now he can go "old school" and use crayons. :-)

UPDATE: And to top off all of that, I just got a solicitation call based on my registration information I had provided.

It's hard to believe that anyone selling home Windows software wouldn't support Windows Vista in some shape or form, but for Encore's (Broderbund) KidPix 4 this appears to be the case. Oh it installs, but doesn't run in full screen mode that allows it to be usable by any young kid like version 3 did under XP. Your only choice is to manually set your screen resolution to 800x600 and then reset it when you're finished.

An e-mail to Encore support simply stated: "Unfortunately this program is not supported on Microsoft's New operating system Windows Vista. If it is still within the time frame of a refund please follow the instructions below." No statement about planned support, no work-around, just an offer to refund if I'd just purchased it. None of this is helpful to me. We have a new PC with Vista on it. My kids need KidPix to do some of their school work projects since that is the software package they are required to use at school.

So if you have a new PC with Vista, or if you are considering getting a new machine and your kids use this software package, beware, because you'll get no help from Encore or Broderbund to get it working.

I was concerned about it running properly after reading a lot of the reviews. But I went ahead and purchased it and deluxe 4 version 2 runs fine (though it seems to be version 4.1 so I'm not sure where the "2" comes from). On the package, it says OS10.2-10.5.5 and copyright 2008 so I think a lot of the reviews were an older version. I'm running 10.5.6 on a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac; it doesn't mention Intel hardware on the box so I guess it is running under Rosetta.

I did run into a problem getting it to run with my daughter's account, as someone had mentioned in a review. I first installed it under my admin account and then gave her access in parental controls but it would not launch when she was logged in to her account. I then deleted it and tried to install it while within her account. It kept coming up that the install failed. I then check the permissions on the "applications" folder (do a "get info" on the folder). It showed that the permissions were set to read only. I clicked on the lock, typed in admin name and password, and changed to permissions for everyone to read and write. I could then install the software while still in my daughter's account and she can now run the software, though I did have to allow another app that was apparently not allowed under parental controls.

My daughter loves the software (she had been using it at school). I'm dropping a star due to the permissions issue and two other things. First, when I first installed it it wanted to take me on-line to registration. Fine, except the webpage came up as no longer existing. Nice going, webmaster. Secondly, the program is set to run at 800 x 600. Pretty small considering we are running it on a 24" iMac. I turned the menu bar displays on and showed her how to change it to 1280 x 800; still leaves a lot of blank real estate and just makes everything bigger but not the actual working space. I think the MacKiev - Kid Pix Deluxe 3X version doesn't have this problem (or probably any of the other ones) but Amazon was out of it and it cost twice as much. If you don't know what this is, there is actually another company that makes Kid Pix as well, it is a Mac only version that integrates with many of the Mac apps such as iPhoto and has gotten a lot of great reviews. Between the bad reviews for 4/2 and the fact that there are two companies making software under the Kid Pix name, it was a complicated buying decision!

We have Kid Pix 3 and my kids (4 & 6) played it all the time. We just "upgraded" to Kid Pix 4, and my initial experience has prompted me to write this warning.

Kid Pix 4 runs in 800x600 resolution BUT it won't force your screen resolution to match that when it runs. Kid Pix 3, of course, did. As we are using a LCD monitor with native resolution of 1280 x 1024, we obviously want to keep the desktop running in this resolution. So now we are faced with 2 options: 1) Use Kid Pix 4 with a drastically reduced window (the drawing and toolbars are in a box surrounded by a huge black screen with the file menus at the very top) or 2) adjust the resolution manually every time someone wants to run or exit the program.

I find this unacceptable. Customer support is non-existent: if you bought it retail, The Learning Company won't answer your questions and refers you to Encore's website. No patches are available and Encore has no way to actually contact them. Their FAQ simply explains how to go to your desktop and adjust your screen resolution to 800x600.

I think this huge oversight and lack of any patch to simply fix the problem speaks volumes for the quality of this release.

Boo to Encore, boo to TLC for allowing their "brand" to be junked, boo to Broderbund. Don't waste your time.

I bought this for my kids. They have a 21" lcd monitor which normally uses a 1600x1200 resolution. Within seconds of starting the software there was huge disappointment to see a tiny little window half the size of the screen which was the drawing area. Ok, I thought you should be able to resize it like most modern windows programs. It turns out you can't which I find amazing. 800x600 was the standard nearly 10 years ago. Things have moved on since. Ok, you can change the monitor resolution but this is a pain for my kids to do and frankly it looks terrible - the text is almost unreadable. They should really point out that the resolution can not be changed. I would not have bought this if I had known this before hand. Very disappointed.

Right along with the Giggles software this is the highest ranking software for my 3-year-old daughter. As Giggles taught her mouse movement and clicks, Kid Pix Delux has given her a new freedom of interactivity. While she can drag and drop amazing backgrounds, she loves to create lines and circles as they stretch and make goofy sounds. I set this program to automatically start when she turns on her computer. For some reason she loves to exit out of Kid Pix Delux first, go to Giggles (search Amazon for this product,) giggle at the cutest giggles when this program starts, and then comes right back to Kid Pix Delux to do her art work. The CD I bought is for Windows.

I bought this for my child who uses it at school and loves it. I have a Mac Pro running the latest version of Mac OS. I installed it and it needs to run on 800x600 resolution, which is kind of silly in this day-and-age, but that works OK. What does not work is that it crashes about every 5 minutes. Pretty unworkable. Don't bother buying this for a Mac.