My five year old son is participating in the Advanced Reader program at school and in the Your Baby Can Read program. We bought the program for our pre-born child but we figured we would try it out with Lucas first. Plus, we have him learn and read from Dolch word lists so that he can increase his vocabulary and reading skills.
Well to manage all of these words I had planned on using one of the many flash cards app for the iPhone. Unfortunately most of the apps are not very good and the better ones are quite expensive, especially when you throw in the cost of the desktop editions. I looked at them all and actually started to use one called Study Aid. It’s good but it doesn’t support landscape mode and there’s no way to change the font size for the card.
Just when I had given up hope of having flash cards for my son’s words lists, I realized that the iPhone’s Photo library would work just fine if I could make images of all the words. Well, that would have been a pain in Photoshop or iPhoto so I came up with a little something to speed things up.
I wrote an AppleScript bundle that implements the ‘convert’ command from ImageMagick that creates iPhone-and-kid friendly images from a comma delimited list of words.
I created over two hundred images in about a minute and half. They’re easy to read and my son has a great time flicking through them on the iPhone.
Here are some examples:


Here are the links to download the Word lists:
Dolch 2.zip
Dolch 3.zip
YBCAN-Starter.zip
YBCAN-Volume 1.zip
YBCAN-Volume 2.zip
YBCAN-Volume 3.zip
You can also take a look at the words on my gallery at:
http://catholicplumey.smugmug.com/School
Finally, here is the app bundle. I don’t have the time just yet to post instructions on how to use it, but if you have a Mac and have ImageMagick installed, you can use it to create your own word images.
Create Word Cards.app.zip
Here’s the code:
–By Javier Plumey for www.javierplumey.com
property folder : “/Users/family/Documents/flash/”
property IM_BIN_FOLDER : “/opt/local/bin/”
–Change your options for the conversion command here.
property CONVERT_COMMAND : “convert -size 480X320 -gravity Center -background black -fill white”
–I found this replaceText script on the web somewhere but can’t remember where. If this is yours, let me know and I’ll give you credit.
on replaceText(find, replace, subject)
set prevTIDs to text item delimiters of AppleScript
set text item delimiters of AppleScript to find
set subject to text items of subject
set text item delimiters of AppleScript to replace
set subject to “” & subject
set text item delimiters of AppleScript to prevTIDs
return subject
end replaceText
set theWords to {}
set savedTextItemDelimiters to AppleScript’s text item delimiters
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to {“,”}
–Here’s your dialog where you enter in the comma delimited strings.
display dialog “Enter the words you want, separated by commas: ” & return default answer (theWords as string)
set theWords to text items of the (text returned of the result)
set theCount to length of theWords
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to savedTextItemDelimiters
if theCount is 0 then return
set theFolder to POSIX path of ((choose folder) as string)
repeat with theWord in theWords
–Yes Mac OS X supports spaces in file names but I was having a hard time getting the spaces to work with the shell script execute.
set theFilename to (get replaceText(” “, “_”, theWord)) & “.png”
do shell script “printf ” & quoted form of (theWord) & ” | ” & IM_BIN_FOLDER & CONVERT_COMMAND & ” label:@- ” & quoted form of (theFolder & theFilename)
end repeat