Beau Workout Journal

Beau turns plain-language notes into structured workout logs instantly. No forms, no menus. Just say or jot what you trained in seconds and get structured entries you can use to track gym progress.

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🐈 Initial idea

I hate workout apps, so I used to just dump all my gym logs to a ginormous file in the notes app. It turned out I'm not the only one, so I built Beau. You can still type (or even dictate) your workout in natural language, and it logs everything on its own, so the only thing left for you is to track your progress.

How it works

You pop into the app and jot down the activity you want to log - there are hundreds of strength, cardio, and recreational activities you can log. The app turns your raw input into structured workout logs that allow for overtime progress tracking and (estimated) calorie expenditure counting. Faster and much more frictionless than traditional gym apps due to lack of heavy interfaces.

How I built it

The app itself is a native SwiftUI app sprinkled with custom drawings, animations, and funky UI components. The language processing is done through Google AI Labs' Gemini 3.1 Flash API with a large set of instructions and other optimizations that allow for speed and high precision.

Challenges we faced

First of all, I am BAD at drawing, so producing the various drawings and animating them was an.. insightful experience.

That said, challenge number one was getting the model to recognize different writing styles and shortcuts (e.g. 8-8-8 reps, 2x3 reps, etc.) based on the context. It consumed the most time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

On the technical side, I'm proud that, given such a small and relatively cheap model, we reached the point where the app can decompose and process even large multiple-paragraph chunks of text (like when the user copy-pastes the workout from the notes app) in under a few seconds.

On the front end side, I quite like the visual style and the micro interactions that were achieved here (especially the mascot artworks and animations).

What was learned

A LOT. It was the first iOS-native consumer app I ever developed, so pretty much the entirety of the late production stages were completely new to me.

What's next for Beau Workout Journal

I have been sharing every single day of development of Instagram, and the waitlist signups count just surpassed 50 people. So I expect a smooth launch in a month or so (if Apple ever approves my developer account at all, the process is extremely slow right now).

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