Pirates appear to be one of the themes of new children’s apps this week, what with Playmobil Pirates and now Toontastic Jr. Pirates. While the former is a game, the latter is more of a story-creation tool for kids.

The idea: make your own pirate cartoons. “Pick a beginning, middle, and ending - then animate your story just like a puppet show, recording your voice while you move the characters onscreen.”

We’ve written about the more general Toontastic app before, which includes a number of themed ‘playsets’ to create stories with, including pirates. This release focuses on pure swashbuckling though, with 12 videos and lots of characters to use.

It’s also got a very interesting feature called StoryShare, which lets your child connect over the internet to make stories with someone else: not strangers, but relatives or trusted friends. It works by sending an email and getting the other person to launch the app on their own device.

It’s all very intriguing. Toontastic Jr .Pirates is available in two versions: one for iPhone costing £1.49, and one for iPad at the same price. Yo ho ho. Here’s a video demo: