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AutoBooks

7 devlogs
7h 53m 4s

Updated Project: I pivoted this project from being a halloween themed app to not being themed after a specific season and just being an app for generating short stories/books. I have also refined the user experience to be, in my opinion, of such a…

Updated Project: I pivoted this project from being a halloween themed app to not being themed after a specific season and just being an app for generating short stories/books. I have also refined the user experience to be, in my opinion, of such a standard that would be expected from an app published on the App Store! These changes have made the app not just fit into a specific Siege week theme of “spooky”, but allow it to exist as an app that could be seen on the App Store year-round.

AutoBooks (formerly known as Spookreads) is an iOS/iPadOS app for generating short stories (or books) through the OpenAI API.

This project uses AI

Used Xcode code completion for line completion. Used ChatGPT for occasional debugging of a few errors and help with AVFoundation and speech synthesis.

Demo Repository

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Ezra

Shipped this project!

I continued work on my Siege Week 9 project, Spookreads, rebranded it to AutoBooks, and gave it a fresh coat of paint! Instead of being stuck in the Halloween season, it now fits into any season, any time of year, and has a massively improved user experience. I’m proud of how it all came together in the end to make something that I would personally be happy to submit to the App Store!

Ezra

Finalised everything before shipping, got the app on TestFlight (shockingly fast too!), updated the screenshots, edited the README, made a YouTube demo video, etc etc, we should be ready to ship!

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Oliver

Tagged your project as well cooked!

🔥 Oliver marked your project as well cooked! As a prize for your nicely cooked project, look out for a bonus prize in the mail :)

Ezra

Touched up some final little bits before getting ready to ship! I added some animations, hidden the options for generation when the book has been generated, fixed some titles being weirdly placed, and many more.

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Ezra

I added an audiobook mode, which uses AVFoundation and its speech synthesis feature to generate TTS on device! I also added share buttons to the newest book and random book seen in the home tab.

Considering the time left in Flavortown and my current experience and skills with AVFoundation, I’m going to abandon the Subway Surfers Reddit story video generator thing idea, and save it for the next project (SoM v2 maybe??) as I would rather learn more about how to do it then execute it without over-reliance on AI, than do it now sloppily and half vibe-coded.

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Ezra

Made a new app icon finally! Also added share functionality letting the user share the books they make (damn this was easier than i was expecting), fixed some left over text from Spookreads, and made the environment and theme random every time the creation sheet appears!

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Ezra

I added a field for specifying a characters pronouns after seeing how AI can occasionally misgender people, added a field for choosing the length of a book, and cleaned up left over references to “story” and “stories” from Spookreads!

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Ezra

I’ve started to finish separating this from the spooky theme, the old halloween style themes are hidden under a toggle in the app’s settings now, same with the jump scares toggle!
New themes and environments have been added, along with some more debug buttons and info, which can now be shown and hidden by a toggle in the settings too!
I still have to design the new app icon, although I’m probably going to just work on the actual app itself for now though. There’s a decent chunk of work set out for me if I go ahead and add one of the features I’m thinking of (auto-generated Subway Surfers Reddit story style videos, the ones that go viral on platforms like TikTok)!

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Ezra

Starting to rebrand away from Spookreads into AutoBooks, and added an About page in the settings!
I still need to make a new app icon, I’m away from home at the moment and brought my iPad but forgot the Apple Pencil :hs:

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