I want to explain how the song tab in my Kids Player came together — not just the build, but the reasons behind it. Some of those reasons are more about parenting than about code, and I found it easier to lay them out as straight questions and answers instead of one long story. This is part one of five.
Your daughter can’t read yet. How does she use an app that’s mostly lists and menus?
For most of it, she doesn’t. I bought two children’s audiobook sets, and I loaded the full content into Kids Player together with each book’s cover image, so she can look at the cover, tap the one she wants, and it plays.
She’s three. She’s been doing this for months. It’s as natural to her as flipping through a picture book.
So what was missing?
We own a nursery-song set with dozens of tracks on it. I added them all to a new song tab in Kids Player. Searchable, playable, everything worked.
But every song was just a title in a list. No picture. And a three-year-old who can’t read can’t pick a title from a list. So while she could drive the other two audiobook sets entirely by herself, using the cover images, this new tab was something only I could operate for her. The songs worked. She just couldn’t choose them herself.
Couldn’t you have just shown her a YouTube video instead? Plenty of nursery-song channels already have pictures moving on screen.
I could have. I didn’t want to, and that’s really the heart of it.
I don’t want my three-year-old spending time watching video yet. Not because video is bad, but because I’m not in a hurry to get her used to a screen that moves on its own and keeps pulling her attention forward. A picture she looks at once, taps, and then listens to asks for a completely different kind of attention than a video that autoplays into the next one.
But isn’t a still picture a weaker experience than a video?
I don’t think so, not for a three-year-old. A still image gives her something to look at and something to ask me about — “why is the acorn wearing a hat,” that sort of thing. It’s closer to a picture book than to television. I’d rather she build the habit of looking at one picture, listening, and maybe talking about it, than the habit of watching something scroll past her.
So the goal was really just: give this tab the same picture-based front door the other two sets already have.
That’s it, exactly. Not a bigger idea than that. One picture per song, and a three-year-old driving the whole thing herself.
I had no idea how to actually build that, though. I’m not a developer. So instead of designing anything myself, I did what I usually do: I opened Claude and described the problem in plain language, the way I’d explain it to another parent.
What came back — and why it turned into a whole separate tool — is part two.
