Gulangyu The Musical Rescue - Interview with the developer of a fantastic app

Did you have any prior development or coding experience?

Yes, 'Gulangyu The Musical Rescue' is our seventh e-book app.

What was the most challenging aspect of developing mobile app?

Syncing VO, visual and text.

_{Shirley Choi}

Shirley is a versatile award winning songwriter, children book author and musician. Shirley founded 'Happy Diamond Music' studio in 2005. At the age of 4, Shirley started piano lessons and won numerous awards in England. She studied orchestration, film scoring and music production with Emmy and Grammy Award Winners at UCLA. Shirley is also an accomplished bassist. Her band's ("So What") first single "War Monkey" ranked no.1 on the Hong Kong Indie Music Chart. She performed her own song "Under the Blue Sky" on Chinese Central Television. In Nov 2008, Shirley became the first female bassist to perform at the Chinese National Indoor Olympic Stadium.

Shirley's song “Hope” won 2nd runner-up at 'CASH' songwriting competition. Shirley performed her symphonic work “Happy Diamond” with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. In November 2011, Shirley was nominated and became the finalist for "Golden Sail Music Awards" - "Serious Music Category". In 2012, Shirley's music "Voor Robert" won the best "Bandstand" music for a composition competition in London, England. In 2015 and 2017, her app “Migalolo” was ranked no.4 worldwide on the iOS book chart. In 2017, Shirley's app "Miniwalla the forest story" made the top 5 finalists round at the "App Growth Awards" in Germany for "Best App Store Listing".

Name a few of your favorite apps and reason you love them.

'Kakamega The Rainforest Story', 'Migalolo: The Ocean Musical' and 'Miniwalla the forest story'. All these apps are free and touch on the topic of conservation and climate change. The music is also fun and catchy.

How long have you been working on this app?

Six months for the coding part. Project wise for one year.

What need of the user did you have in mind when developing this app?

Fun and educating stories while learning important messages - what causes climate change and what we can do to save the planet from global warming.

In what way do you think your app is better than similar apps on the market? Please describe in detail what innovation you think you bring and what you are proud of in your app.

The app is 90 minutes long with 8 chapters. Children can learn about different facet of climate change through Xiao Rui's (a young Chinese girl) journey with her baby dragon and multilingual parrot around the world. The story, music, lyric are all original content developed by Shirley Choi - the founder of 'Happy Diamond Music'. All of our apps are completely free, as we believe that it is very important to educate children about conservation at young age, and we want to do our part to save the Earth from global warming.

What are your future plans and expected features of the coming new versions of this app?

We are planning to develop a game app based on the 'Gulangyu The Musical Rescue' e-book.

Assuming new users of your app are reading this page. What do you want to ask them to do (contact you about X, Share the app, etc.)?

Help spread the word about our apps. They are free, fun and educational. We are also looking for partners to help us for funding our future apps.