The Need: a book you can read on a phone I had translated six old commentary volumes into Korean with an API. The first thing I made from one of them was a print-style PDF, and then a page-image viewer: 301 JPG files, 48 MB, one image per page. It looked fine on a tablet. On a phone held upright, the letters were tiny. Pinch-zooming a page image is not reading. ...
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. ...
I put my phone next to a TV playing a Kenyan news broadcast in Swahili, low volume. My translator picked up the sound and started speaking the English translation back to me as the newscaster kept talking. No 5-second wait. No 15-second wait. The words just kept coming. It’s a Progressive Web App: open the link on a phone, add it to the home screen, and it behaves like a native app, no App Store or Play Store involved. ...
Everything else in this pipeline runs by itself. This is the one part that needs me: looking at the day’s new files and choosing which ones are actually my daughter, worth keeping in her archive. For that I built a small browser gallery. It shows the files waiting on the cutting board, I tap the keepers, and press a button. That’s the whole job. But a few small choices made it pleasant enough to actually use every day. ...
Let me tell you about the bug that made me doubt myself more than any other in this series. I’d fix something — say, a misheard word in a transcript. I’d save the corrected file to the server. I’d open the app on my phone to admire the fix. And the old, wrong word would still be sitting there. So I’d fix it again. Save again. Still wrong. I started to wonder if I’d forgotten how to edit a text file. ...
My daughter is three. She loves one specific playlist of Korean children’s songs, and she likes it best when it plays from a small JBL Bluetooth speaker tucked under her stroller. We walk the neighborhood for about an hour most evenings. I put on her folder, the first song starts, and we go. Thirty seconds later, my phone screen goes off. One more song plays. Then it stops. I have to unlock the phone, tap the next song, put the phone back in my pocket, and keep walking. A minute later, same thing. ...
My wife has a habit I love. Every morning, before the day starts, she listens to a Bible teacher she has followed for years. It’s not the Sunday message from our church. It’s something quieter and more personal — a set of recordings she comes back to again and again. They calm her. There was one problem. To listen, she had to open the file manager on her phone, scroll through a long list of audio files with odd names, and tap the right one from memory. No order. No search. No “play the next one.” If she wanted a certain teaching, she usually couldn’t find it. ...
Every parent knows this feeling. You hand your child a tablet to show them one video you picked. One tap later, the app has carried them off somewhere else — loud videos, ads, and “recommended” clips chosen by an algorithm that doesn’t know or care about your child. I didn’t want that for my daughter. I also didn’t want to pay a monthly fee, make another account, or hand my child’s attention to another company. ...