July 5, 2025: Launched on Replit subdomain (deprecated)

I built this app to get my Mom moving more. I wanted it to be easy and fun. Because she loved playing Mahjong on her iPad, I also made the app look best on an iPad in landscape mode. All she needed to do was enter her age, then get exercise videos she could use.

After chatting with Gemini, I got a plan and prompt. I also had Gemini come up with the logo and generate a color scheme to be added to the prompt. Instead of trying to craft a search to be used on the YouTube API (in past failed attempts to build this app), I trusted Gemini to come up with a prompt to pass to Gemini, which would in turn craft the appropriate search based on the age input (e.g., adding “kids, teens” for ages 13-19 or “seniors” for ages 60+, for the YouTube API).

I pasted the prompt in Replit and it started generating the app. I also added API keys for Gemini and YouTube in a Secrets folder to keep them secure.

Tweaks

Obviously, there would need to be several adjustments made, like how many videos to show, and how to play them. I had to ask for things like:

• Having the videos play in an overlay instead of taking the user to YouTube.

• Getting the videos to autoplay as soon as they loaded in the overlay. This required extra coding for iOS, which is stricter with autoplay.

• Making a different search if the user wanted more videos for the same age, so that they got fresh content that kept them engaged

• Reducing hits on the YouTube API (there’s a daily limit) by streamlining the reducing the number of results fetched, caching content that could be reused instead of searching every time, batching requests, etc.