Red & Jim eat till they die
A Japan itinerary spreadsheet turned into a phone app: 27 themed days, every hotel on a map, walking directions, what's paid, and a morning briefing read out by the phone. Plus a progress bar to death.
What hooked me
Twenty-seven days in Japan, planned in a spreadsheet with colour-coded dinners: yellow for ramen, green for izakaya, blue for seafood, orange for wagyu. Hotels in dark green when paid, amber when booked. A second tab of trains and buses. It was all there, and it was useless on a phone in a station at 9 am.
What I built
An installable web app on Cloudflare that reads the spreadsheet (colours included) and lays each day out like a Japanese restaurant menu: ruled boxes, letter-spaced headers, a marquee of the day's eats, a kanji for the day. Each day has its own colour and sound effect: the airplane day whooshes, the Star Wars bar day hums, the dinosaur museum day roars. Swipe between days and the app cross-fades.
- Every place on a map, hotels marked paid or booked, with live walking directions that re-route when you drift, and nearby sights and ramen pulled in from the bikepacking planner and the Ramen War.
- Trains, buses and ferries with TO BOOK and BOOKED badges, every leg traced on the map, and each hotel marked paid or booked.
- A morning briefing the phone reads out: the date, how far through the trip you are, the weather, the plan, dinner, and a fact about the town.
- The death bar: one progress bar from the flight out to the flight home, skull at the end. There's a pretend-it's-day-X mode for trying the trip before it happens.
Edit the spreadsheet, run one command, and the app follows.
What I learned
Free geocoders know every hotel in Japan and almost no ramen shops. The phone's built-in voices are good enough that a server-side voice model would have been money for nothing. And a trip planned around dinner needs a very different app from a trip planned around kilometres.