EVERYTHING'S ROSIE BEDTIME APP

A none-too-interesting detour before bedtime, this app based on a British children's show exhibits frustrating navigation quirks and not nearly enough personality.

One of two apps simultaneously released featuring a ribbon-and-button–tressed little girl and her friends (some of whom happen to be animals), this one involves a disturbance at a slumber party. The coed/cospecies sleepover is interrupted by a loud moaning sound that Rosie and her friends investigate. Not to spoil the mystery, but the app could have been called, We Heard a Noise; It Was an Anthropomorphic Oak Tree That Was Drying Out. Complicating things is a fussy design that expects readers to remember what different kinds of icons do (a star versus a star with a circle around it, for instance) and to follow the dialogue by tapping on word balloons that appear as the next character is ready to speak. Some pages have big, gaudy borders around them, others don't. Some pages are fully animated, others are text-heavy. Sometimes there's a delay when a button is pressed, and sometimes virtual objects take too long to respond to touch, like a watering can that can take a few tries to pick up and use. Rosie's nighttime app is a rote story done no favors by very inconsistent design.

For fans, this could be a must-download, but for the uninitiated, there's not much in Rosie's bedtime adventure to make them curious for more.