Building Cozy Crafter
My wife doesn’t only read. She crochets, knits, sews, builds LEGO, and does diamond painting. After Cozy Reader, I wanted to make her a second app for her crafts.
Cozy Crafter keeps each project’s supplies, checklist, notes, and photo in one place, and a Shopping tab gathers everything she still needs to buy. I built it with Claude, and a lot of it came from what we’d already worked out for Cozy Reader.
Starting from Cozy Reader
With Gamelog and Cozy Reader, I asked for a scope before any code. This time Cozy Reader had already answered the big questions: her data stays on her phone, with no accounts and no server. What was left was what a crafter needs: notes for each project, what she has versus what she needs to buy, checklists, a way to add crafts as she goes, and cute, quirky icons.
It also borrowed Cozy Reader’s forty themes, plus a custom theme she builds from a color, a gradient, or a photo, and Fern, Finn, and Frank, our three cats, who now walk along the top of both apps.
Making, Dreaming, Napping
The statuses are my favorite detail. A project she’s working on is Making, one she wants to start is Dreaming, and one on hold is Napping. Finished sets off confetti. Behind the scenes, the app stores plain values like “active” and “paused,” so I can rename a status later without touching her projects.
Stickers drawn in code
The icons mattered most to me, because they make the app feel like hers. We ended up with sixteen stickers with little faces, from a yarn ball to a toy brick to an embroidery hoop. A short Python script draws each one as vector art, so changing a sticker means changing a few lines of code. After the first version, I added room for her own taste: a craft can use an emoji or one of her photos as its icon.
What testing turned up
In the simulator, I couldn’t type an emoji, because it uses the Mac’s keyboard. The fix was a row of emoji to tap in the craft editor, which is easier for her too.
The first TestFlight upload failed because the app’s ID had never been registered with Apple. Claude’s reply started with “That’s my mistake,” then explained why and how to fix it. In support, that’s what I want on an escalation: what went wrong, why, and the next step, without hedging.
Claude also found a theme bug in Cozy Crafter and pointed out that Cozy Reader was built the same way and might have it too. A good bug report covers where else the problem might be, not just where you saw it.
What’s next
Cozy Crafter now runs on a real phone, and the beta is open. The next changes will come from her using it, the way swipe to delete and a quicker way to add a new craft already did. Syncing between devices can come later, as it did for Cozy Reader.
If you’d like to try it, email zachvivierdev@gmail.com. The Cozy Crafter page has the details.