April 15, 2026. About 9:30 p.m. to after midnight.
Three improvements
Tonight I worked on the Personal Best Tracker app. I used Claude to improve on the personal best app that I created for my gym personal bests. I only need the app to record my personal bests, so I asked Claude to improve it in three different ways.
By 10:00 p.m. it gave me the next iteration, and I uploaded it to the server. I made a few more changes, namely to improve the look of the category filter. Originally you could see all the main body parts in mini rectangles in one line across the top of the screen, but I made them wrap down the screen to form three lines.
I also improved the look of each row of information. It was showing the sets and reps as well as the date it was added. I don’t need any of that, only the exercise type and the personal best value.
Finally I added weight history. Every time a personal best is saved, it is recorded in a new exercise history tab. You tap on the exercise in personal bests and it gives you a pop-up with the history drill-down.
No more notepad at the gym
I’ve got a working version of an app that I think is actually quite beneficial. I don’t have to carry a notepad around the gym anymore. I go to the exercise, tap on the personal best value, and a window pops up that lets me increase or decrease it by one kilo, 2.5 kilos, or five kilos.
If the new personal best is lower, it says, “Are you sure?” If it’s higher, it shows me a green icon and the new personal best.
Saving to a server
I also asked the app to save not just to local storage, but to a database on a server. That was the part that took a long time. I had to download Node.js so that I could upload it to the server, and the server had been set up to serve static files, not JavaScript files. I had to run a few different tests.
After midnight I came back to the computer, made more adjustments, and deployed the new iterations. I got it to work better, but it wasn’t a complete success. It’s already good enough to take to the gym with a local storage version of my database.
App Features Log: April 15, 2026
- Category filter wraps onto three lines
- Rows show only the exercise and the personal best value
- Tap a value to adjust by 1, 2.5 or 5 kilos, with an “Are you sure?” check when going lower
- New exercise history pop-up for every saved personal best
- First attempt at saving to a server database as well as local storage
Photos from today
Read what happens next in the dev diary: the next entry.
Log your personal bests, plan your weekly routine and build a workout streak you will not want to break. Download the app on Google Play.
Diary Of A Mad Chaos is a daily diary written from March 1996 until today, of which individual books and book series have been created, namely “The Lost Years” an exploration of young, entwined love, the “Wubao In China (猎艳奇缘)” book series which provides an extensive comparative analysis of the cultural differences between Eastern and Western societies, and the book titled “Foreigner (华人)” an exploration of race relations in Australia.
