Engine

My daughter got a new set of picture books. Each book came with an audio story and a short song. You had to use a code printed inside the book to unlock them. I have made something similar for her Kids Player three times before. This was the fourth time. It was also the fastest so far. And it had one new, unexpected twist. What I Needed: A New Bookshelf, The Same Old Problems The rest of my daughter’s Kids Player already works the way I want it to: You tap a cover to hear a story. There is no autoplay. There are no algorithms. Nothing plays that she did not choose. This new set of picture books deserved the same treatment. But on the vendor’s own web page, everything was set to video by default. Some of it was okay. It was not what I wanted for everything. ...

In an earlier post I described cloning an app — copying the audio player I’d built onto a tablet to give away. That was a copy: same content, same speaker, a second home. This post is about a step further. I took that same engine and pointed it at a different speaker, and then at a different kind of media — and it just worked. Each time, what should have been “build a whole new app” turned out to be “feed the engine something new.” ...