Yesterday I was looking after my daughter, which sometimes can be sort of boring. She’s playing happily with her toys, but what do I do? I pulled out my phone and started playing around with Google’s Gemini AI. I discovered that it can program web apps for you extremely fast. So at first I had it build a drum machine, but that quickly became too complicated for the AI and it started to get hung up, which was rather frustrating. I then asked myself, “what other problems can I solve with this?”. So I thought about my woodworking shop and how it sometimes takes me quite a while to add fractional inches together.
I asked the AI if it could program me a fractional inches calculator and it did! I’m going to put the button presses in quotations its more clear what’s going on. You can press “1” “space” “5” “/” “16” “plus” “2” “space” “3” “/” “4” and it will do one and five sixteenths inches plus two and three quarters and give you the answer in fractional inches! I was very excited not only to have this tool for myself but I got to thinking that it might help someone else out there. I’ve looked for these on the app store before but they’re usually behind a rather large paywall or in need of a subscription.
My next question to the AI was how do I put this on the app store? That answer was rather tricky, because you had to adjust the code to work in apple’s landscape. Apple’s landscape and the AI’s landscape are wildly different so the AI kept getting hung up trying to make the code work in both. The code will never work in both so this was rather frustrating. I was able to extract working code, though, and was able to simulate the WoodworkingCalc app on my MacBook. I based the color palette on maple, cherry and walnut wood tones so it sort of fits the environment it’s supposed to be in. I got majorly side tracked doing this yesterday, so who knows where it will go.
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