Kids Player

I built the Mother Goose tab on 13 October 2026. This happened on 21 October, eight days later. The Need: One Book Without a Song The tab holds 19 songs, one for each board book in a set we were given. Each book has a cover, a video, an audio-only mode, synced lyrics, and a photo of the book’s translation page. The physical set has 20 books. My daughter is three. She can’t read the titles. But she told her mother that the Muffin Man book was in the pile and had no song in the tab. Her mother was surprised. Out of 20 books, how did she know which one was missing? ...

This is another tab in my daughter’s media player. The last two posts were about an English song tab. This one is about English stories. The Need: The Stories Only Live on the Device We have a set of eight English picture books about a cartoon pig family. It comes with a small talking reader. The device has eight book icons down the left and right edges. You press a book icon, then press one of ten buttons in the middle, and it reads that page out loud. ...

This is part two. In the first post I turned 19 free English board books into a tab in my daughter’s media player. The tab worked. Then I used it with her for one evening and found three things that bothered me. The Need: Three Small Annoyances Every video started with a roughly 10-second channel intro and ended with a promo card for other videos. In a song tab, that is a jolt every time. My wife and I had agreed she shouldn’t watch video yet, but the tab played video by default. The lyrics and translation were below the picture. To read them I had to scroll. And my daughter doesn’t like it when “her” picture shrinks or disappears off the top of her phone. None of these is a big problem. All three would have stopped us using the tab. ...

I bought some picture books for my three-year-old on a Korean secondhand marketplace app. The seller added 19 English board books for free, as a bonus. I said thank you, took them home, and put them on a shelf. I had no idea how to use them, and she was too young for English anyway. That was a few months ago. This post is about how those books went from a shelf to a tab in her media player, and about the one thing that made it possible: I let the AI look at the books before I decided anything. ...

Most weeks, the work on my daughter’s media player is not coding. It is adding things she asked for. This is a small post about two such additions, because each one hit a snag, and the snags are the useful part. The Need: She Asks for a Song, and It Isn’t There Yet My daughter is three. She decides what she wants to hear, and the answer changes every week. If the player doesn’t have it, I need to add it in a few minutes, or the moment is gone. So adding content has to be boring and fast. ...

In the last Kids Player post, I made the matched song’s cover fill the whole screen after a voice search. It looked good. Then I used it for a week and found what it was missing. The Need: The Picture Stayed the Same While the Song Changed When a song ends, my daughter’s player moves to the next one. With normal tapping, the big cover changes with it. After a voice search, it did not. The new song played under the old picture. ...

Two weeks ago I wrote about adding voice commands to my daughter’s media player, so a parent in the car can say “[tab name] [song title]” instead of scrolling a phone screen while driving. In that post I said a few tabs were left out on purpose. One of them was a math picture-book tab: 42 books, each with a story audio track and a song. At the time, the reason sounded sensible. The reason didn’t hold up for long. ...

My daughter’s media player has several tabs now — a general folder of nursery rhymes, hymns, classical pieces and kids’ pop songs; a folder of folk songs I made pictures for myself; a Bible-verse song folder; and a couple of separately purchased audiobook and story collections. On her own device, she picks what she wants by tapping a cover picture, the same as always. That device is Wi-Fi only, though, and it stays home — it isn’t a phone with its own data plan, so it never comes along in the car. The problem was everywhere outside our own Wi-Fi. ...

My daughter’s nursery-rhyme tab gives every song a picture instead of a title, so she can tap a cover without reading a word she doesn’t know yet. Most of those pictures are AI-drawn. Last week I swapped one of them for a plain photo — acorns I’d picked up on a hike that same afternoon — and she noticed before I said anything about it. The Need: A Picture Has to Match Something She Knows This tab works the way I’ve written about before: one still picture per song, tap it, hear it. No scrolling list of titles she can’t read. For most songs, an AI-drawn illustration is enough — a frog on a lily pad, a rabbit under the moon. She matches the picture to a song she already half-remembers from bedtime. ...

I scan my daughter’s picture books, page by page, so she can flip through them on a tablet the same way she flips through the paper ones. Turning a folder of page photos into something that reads like an actual book means two things: straightening out crooked, badly cropped scans, and getting the pages into the right order — cover first, then left-right spreads, back cover last. I asked Claude Code to do both. It could do both. But doing both, every time, on every new book, was burning through my usage far faster than the work seemed to justify. ...