Mo Free Apps blog

Gymini: 1,460 bad swaps

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 09:00:00 -0500

Swap one move was the number one ask in the 8,186 reviews I read, so it went into Gymini first and it shipped with its own tests, all green. Then I tried it. Upper-body workout, swapped the second row, got a glute bridge. That's a lower-body move with a name that gives it away.

HookPoint: three looks, and the one I picked

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 09:00:00 -0500

Same thing I did for Gymini, because it worked. Before anybody styles a screen, I get three real directions built as phone mocks of the actual screens, all on the same day and the same water so I'm comparing the look and not the data. This time it was Saturday October 10 at Seawolf Park in Galveston, a real new moon, with the fishing windows actually computed.

HookPoint day one: two AIs, one app

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:00:00 -0500

Starting the next app. HookPoint is a free shore fishing companion: the day's fishing windows, a go or no-go for your home water worked out on the phone, and a catch log with photos. Like everything else here, no account, no ads, free forever.

Gymini: what 8,186 reviews said

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 09:00:00 -0500

Something I should have done at the start. Before touching Gymini's screens again, I pulled 8,186 App Store reviews from twelve workout apps and sorted the one and two stars by what people were actually mad about.

Gymini: what broke in the coach voice

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 09:00:00 -0500

Gymini is getting a real coach voice. Two to pick from, a man and a woman, and every line is recorded ahead of time and shipped inside the app. No signal needed, it works on a plane. The whole bank, both voices, about 1,500 clips each, came to under a dollar.

Gymini: the figures for three dollars

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 09:00:00 -0500

This one's a little embarrassing, but it's a good lesson. Gymini needs a figure for every movement, 173 of them, all the same grey clay look so the app feels like one thing. I priced the render and it came back at 72 dollars. I nearly said yes.

Gymini step four: the platform

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 09:00:00 -0500

Step four on Gymini is the platform stuff: reminders, widgets, the Lock Screen timer, Shortcuts, Apple Health. And the one I cared about most, your old workouts from the paid app come across. The app reads them once, from a copy of the old database, never the file itself, so if you ever went back the old app would still open with everything in it.

Gymini step three: the look

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 16:00:00 -0500

Step three on Gymini is the look, and it finally looks like the thing I picked. A grey clay figure behind a countdown you can read with the phone on the floor. One green on a dark room, and nothing else is lit. Dark only, by the way. There is no light theme. The About screen says it in one line: Gymini is dark, it's a gym.

Gymini step two: the engine

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 10:00:00 -0500

Step two on Gymini is the engine, the part that actually builds you a workout. You tell it how long, what kind, what you have nearby and what hurts. It looks for a workout a person wrote first, one with a reason for its order. If nothing fits, it builds one: round robin across the kinds you asked for, drawn from a shuffled pool, with your gear woven into roughly one slot in three and anything that touches the part that hurts removed before the draw.

Gymini is dark. It's a gym.

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0500

Made a call on Gymini today that I'd normally argue with myself about for a week. There's no light mode. Only dark.

Gymini day two: the bank

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 19:00:00 -0500

Day two on Gymini was mostly writing. The exercise bank is at 134 movements and 43 workouts, each one with the steps and a cue or two you can hear with the phone on the floor. Every one of them gets read aloud before it ships, because that's where the phone is going to be.

Gymini: the grey figures

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 18:00:00 -0500

Two of the first eight Gymini figures came back with skin and a hoodie. The rest were grey clay, which is what I wanted. I'm rendering one figure per movement instead of drawing them, and the whole point is that sixty of them look like they came from the same hand. Two in eight that don't is a problem that gets worse, not better.

Gymini step one: the bones

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:00:00 -0500

Day one of the Gymini rebuild is done. Not the look yet, the bones. Pick a workout on Today, ten second lead-in, five movements with the instructions on screen, done, and it's in History with the minutes counted. Plain system styling on purpose. The look comes next.

What broke: the wizard screen vanished from the first commit. I'd put it in a folder called Build, and the repo ignores anything called build. Case-insensitive disk. Found it when the tab was empty. Renamed the folder, never naming one that again.

66 tests. I broke four of them on purpose to make sure they'd actually catch something. They did. One of them is the one that says a five minute workout is exactly five minutes. Take the rounding out and it comes up three seconds short, and the test goes red.

Something I found along the way: the old Gymini kept everything in one local database with no iCloud and no app group. So the new one writes its own file beside it and will read the old one once, on first launch, to carry your history over. Never migrate in place. That's how you lose people's data.

Gymini: picking the look before writing a line

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:00:00 -0500

Next app. Gymini is going free and getting rebuilt from the ground up, and I started with the look, because last time I started with the code and the look never caught up.

Three directions, same five minute workout on all three. A is a dark studio. B is white with the figure in a card. C is a poster, the figure full bleed with a big chartreuse countdown on top of it.

I'm leaning C. The first round of mocks before these was flat paper and little rows, and it looked like a form. These look like something I'd actually open at 4pm beside a desk, which is where this app gets used.

The figures are rendered, not photos. One per movement, same charcoal studio, same light from the upper left, so sixty of them read as one set. Still working out the exact wording that keeps the render from giving someone a face.