Personal Software

The Need: Other People Wanted It Too A few days after I put the church directory into my own Bible app, people at church heard about it. They asked if everyone could use it. A photo directory is only useful if the other members have it too, and a printed booklet gets lost. But the directory has photos, names and home addresses of about 140 families. I could not just put it on the internet. And I did not want to make 140 accounts or remember who forgot a password. ...

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? ...

The Need: A Paper Directory Does Not Remember Anything Every year my church prints a small booklet with a photo of each family. Under each photo there are the names, a short address, and a mark next to each name: br for brother or si for sister. In my church the mark is not about being male or female. It means the person has been saved and baptized. A husband who has not been baptized has no mark, even when his wife has si next to her name, and in church we call that family by the wife’s name. ...

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. ...

The Need: Every Verse Cost Me My Place I prepare short talks for a Bible study. My routine is simple. I read a passage in my Bible app, add the verses I want to my notes, and write a few lines under them. Then I go back to read the next verse. That last step was the problem. The app has one screen at a time. To read the next verse, I left the notes, opened the viewer, and found my place again. Sometimes the next verse was in a completely different book, so there was no place to go back to. Finding it again took longer than writing the note. ...

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. ...

This is a small bug with a nice reason behind it. I speak Korean, so I will explain the Korean part first. In a Korean Bible, most books are divided into 장 (jang, “chapters”). The Book of Psalms is the exception. Its sections are called 편 (pyeon), and people say “Psalms 23 pyeon”, not “Psalms chapter 23”. Both words are in normal use. A person might say either one, depending on habit. ...