So over the past few months I've been working on like these different small apps for studying. Things like quizzing yourself on different materials, taking notes over videos, asking questions to PDFs, and stuff like that.
I'm not 100% sure why I've been doing this, part of it is just a geeky desire to explore 'better ways to learn' whatever that means, and part of it is just due to the fact that with AI now, vibe coding these tools is so easy that it makes you want to experiment with different ways of consuming information.
(also part of it is just some creative procrastination habits I've been developing inadvertently).
The Apps¶
Video Note Taker¶
This app allows you to take notes about the contents of a video and link it together with like screenshots attached to the timestamp where you take the note, which I thought was kind of cool.
This idea was born out of the necessity of taking notes over about different video submissions that I had to review for a context engineering event I was hosting for O'Reilly Media. I had this idea, I opened up Claude Code and then, in a couple of minutes, it was in front of me.
Video Quiz AI¶
Now this app I do actually kind of use more for entertainment purposes than anything else. But the idea is that you feed it a video along with a transcription of that video generated with this open source tool called whisper-cpp, and it allows you to create a custom quiz of however many questions in different difficulty levels about the contents of that video.
The cool thing about it is that when you answer a question, you can see an explanation for the answer attached to a clickable button associated with the timestamp of the video that contains the source for the answer. That was generated by AI.
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I wanted to have something that would do this kind of stuff, and I didn't want to use options that did not allow me to upload my own videos. didn't want to get caught into like endless subscriptions that charge you per video or per transcription length, stuff like that. So I built it, and honestly, I kind of love it.
I don't use it a lot for learning though, which was the intended purpose initially, I have though, used it a lot to test how much I know about the show "The Office", which is kind of hilarious when I think about it.
Simple Quiz App in Plain HTML/JS¶
I wanted to have something that would allow me to quiz myself on a bunch of content quickly and easily. So I created this simple app in plain HTML where essentially I can upload a JSON file containing AI generated quiz questions in a specific format which I can upload into the app, and then the app just gives me a simple quiz interface to answer the questions. And at the end, I can export them as Anki cards or to a CSV file if I want to do some sort of tracking of performance of sorts (a feature that I actually never use).
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What I kind of love about this app is that it's a single HTML that does one powerful thing well. It doesn't change. It has nothing else to do besides quizzes. I can host this thing anywhere and quiz myself on anything I want.
Funny enough, my most famous use of this app was to prepare for a trivia content about (again I know) the show 'The Office' (i'm making this show my entire personality and something needs to change, lol).
PDF Chat¶
Now finally, this is a common concept in the era of AI, which is chatting with a PDF. And I was originally really in love with the concept of this application as seen on that famous website, ChatPDF, one of the first to come out, where they would give you a chat interface. to go ahead and chat with the PDF and it would allow you to ask questions that are answered by AI using the PDF as a source where the answers come with clickable buttons that go to the specific part of the PDF that was used to provide that answer, which makes it for a perfect study companion. I just really love the concept and I wanted to have something simple for myself that does something similar.
The problem is that PDFs are more challenging than I thought and the highlighting over the PDF feature is something more difficult than I initially considered.
I ended up settling for just a simple chat interface powered by the Claude API that has AI answer the questions about the PDF and then directs me to the page in the PDF where those answers were obtained from, and I use the Ctrl-F search feature of the browser itself just to find the specific portion inside of the PDF so I can read it on the source.
It's not as awesome as the real chatpdf app, but it does the job.
But Why Study Apps¶
I have this sort of 'meta-workflow' obsession, which makes me particularly interested in these kinds of apps, but I hope to one day have a system of apps I've built that I can use for these different purposes, similar to what this guy did for himself.
I have this weird unspoken dream inspired by technologists like Brett Victor or Michael Nielsen of one day building out my own environment for learning anything I want in the deepest and most engaging way possible while being efficient and completely immersed in the activity. Some sort of merger between compute and thought where you're in this super cool, seamless experience that is just as enjoyable as traditionally rewarding activities like playing video games, while also being timeless (like Scrolling on the phone).
Honestly, I think the experience of learning new things becomes a bit more enjoyable when I can leverage technology to reduce all the little frictions that happen in the process of accessing information, you know, all those little gaps.
I know I have a lot of things I want to learn still, and for a long time I've felt like the current tools I have don't align perfectly with how my brain fucntions, and deep inside I hold a belief that all of these things I'm doing are not just productivie procrastination, but they're actually setting me up for a future where I'll move beyong these distributed, isolated applications, and will move inside this new environment that I'll partially help to create where I can learn anything I want without any kind of blockage, mental friction etc...
The only danger is that this sometimes becomes it's own way of procrastinating, where you're stuck in an endless loop of optimization instead of actually sitting down and learning the thing, which is the biggest true about learning at the end of the day, where you like it or not you can't get away from having to sit down and focus intentionally, which is the hardest part every time, and there is no app for that.