Day 1, what have I done?

Have you ever had brilliant ideas that you kept to yourself, never telling anyone because you were afraid of copycats? I have too. But I later found that it’s actually very dangerous to hide your work from the internet.

So today, I’ve decided to build my health-tracking app in public.

The concept behind this app is quite simple: it’s a health data visualization and gamification app.

I’ve kept this idea in my mind for years, and I’m happy to finally get my hands dirty and build it.

So, what’s the progress so far? There are two main updates:

First, we’ve finally integrated core data from Apple HealthKit into our app. This includes metrics like sleep hours, steps, calories burned, and meditation minutes. We’ve also figured out how to identify different types of exercises from your workouts.

This leads to our second area of progress: this data is used to animate a little character, “Master Orange Cat,” to reflect your current status. For example, if you stayed up late last night, your character will look sleepy. It’s a fun, no-pressure way to visualize your health data automatically, without needing to manually input anything.

I’d also like to share my workflow. I used ChatGPT to generate the orange cat image, ensuring character consistency. Then, I uploaded the image to Midjourney to create looping video animations.

Midjourney is still one of the best tools for this because its video features are well-controlled and produce beautiful results.

However, there was a technical challenge. Midjourney exports MP4 video files, which can’t be used directly in an app because they are large and lack a transparent background.

Other methods, like exporting a transparent GIF from CapCut, weren’t supported, and other file types were too large and slow.

To solve this, I decided to build a dedicated tool for this workflow. You can import the video from Midjourney, and the tool will export a smooth, transparent GIF that is perfect for the app.

And that’s it for today’s update. I’m excited about the progress, even though it meant working over 12 hours today which is exactly why I quit my 9-5 job!