Yesterday I was nervous enough about kid.studio to wonder if I should just scrap it. Today I locked the form: a small boombox. Two speaker grilles either side of a knob, a fixed handle on top, and nothing else on the front.
The reasoning fits in a line. Toniebox owns soft and fabric. Yoto owns the card slot. The boombox shape and the red knob can belong to kid.studio. For a parent, the first impression should be a small, well-made retro boombox. For a kid, it’s the handle, because that’s what gets picked up.
The body is bone white (#F7F3ED). Red (#FF1F1C) goes on exactly two things, the knob and the handle, and the grilles are a warm dark gray (#3C3A37). The knob does almost everything: turn for volume, press to play or pause, hold to shut down. Previous and next move to small, flush buttons on the sides, findable by a parent or an older kid and not inviting to a toddler. Next will be a short press for the next track and a long press for the next show, and previous will work the same way. The handle is fixed, part of the body, with nothing that folds and could pinch a finger. It’s how the player gets carried, and a loop at its base can take a neck strap, like the one on my son’s camera when we go out taking photos together.
Open: which computer goes inside. The Raspberry Pi makes a tall stack for a small body. A smaller chip would fit better, but it would give up what the Raspberry Pi keeps: a player that stays easy for makers to build on.
For the record, the shapes that lost: the portrait rectangle from June, a pebble, a two-by-two grid, a flat cylinder and a long thin box. Nine months of shapes, one survivor.
How the work gets done changed this week too. The issues I filed in January are getting done: Claude works through them on its own now, straight from GitHub, and I review what comes back. Writing is the exception. Claude is a poor first drafter and a good editor, so anything that’s words on a page starts with me. The website also got rewritten for where the project actually is: every button that said “shop” now says “join the waitlist.”
Next: print it. Bone white, if the right spool is loaded.
Nine days later, on the printer camera: the first boombox print. Not bone white. The wrong spool was loaded.