TV Show Tracker: Never Miss an Episode (GenAI)

GenAI - Building a Custom, Lightweight TV Show Tracker

The Problem With so many streaming services and network schedules, keeping track of when new television serials drop is exhausting. Relying on heavy, ad-filled tracking websites or bloated third-party apps often feels like overkill just to answer one simple question: "Is the new episode out yet?"

The Solution To solve this, I built a lightweight, standalone Windows desktop application designed to do one thing perfectly: track television release schedules silently and visually, without requiring accounts, subscriptions, or background bloatware.

  TV show tracker!

Key Features & User Experience

• Visual Watchlist Grid: On launch, the app reads a simple, user-managed text file of followed shows and generates a clean, responsive grid of official cover art. Each poster features a badge indicating the current season.
• Instant Episode Intel: Hovering over any show’s poster reveals a quick tooltip with the release date of its most recent episode. Clicking the poster opens a detailed view where users can select any season from a dropdown to see a full list of episode titles, numbers, and airdates.
• The "Upcoming" Radar: A dedicated, permanent sidebar on the right aggregates the absolute next upcoming episode across the entire watchlist. It sorts them chronologically so the soonest releases are always at the top. It features a toggle to switch between a dense "Compact" view and a more spaced-out "Relaxed" view.
• Smart Archiving: Not currently watching a show, but want to know when it returns next year? The app features an "Archive" system. Archiving a show hides it from the main grid to reduce clutter, but keeps it active in the database. If an archived show suddenly announces a new episode, it still pops up in the Upcoming sidebar.
• On-the-Fly Management: Users can add new shows, permanently remove them, or send them to the archive directly from the UI. The app instantly updates the underlying local text files, ensuring the data is strictly saved to the user's hard drive.

Under the Hood (The Tech Stack)

• Language & UI: Written in Python using the PyQt/PySide6 framework for a native, responsive Windows desktop interface (complete with custom dark/high-contrast styling).
• Data Source: Powered by the free, authenticationless TVMaze API, utilizing asynchronous threading to fetch metadata and cover art without freezing the UI.
• Deployment: Compiled via PyInstaller into a single, portable .exe file with a custom retro-TV desktop icon. It runs completely on-demand, consuming zero system resources when closed.

Lightning-Fast Visual Browser: Taming 1,000+ PowerPoint Templates

Building a Lightning-Fast Visual Browser with GenAI

Introduction If you regularly put together presentations, you likely have a massive folder hoarding hundreds—or in my case, over 1,000—PowerPoint templates. The problem? Windows File Explorer isn't built to handle heavy .pptx previews gracefully. Finding the perfect template usually means suffering through the sluggish process of opening and closing multiple files in PowerPoint just to see what the inner slides look like.

I needed a better way to visualize my collection. Using Antigravity IDE and GenAI, I built a standalone Windows application that transforms a heavy folder of templates into a lightning-fast, highly responsive visual gallery.

The Solution: A Hybrid "Lazy-Cache" Gallery App The core challenge of rendering PowerPoint files programmatically is that converting vector slides to images is resource-heavy. If the app tried to generate preview images for all 20,000+ slides across 1,000 templates at once, it would take hours and consume gigabytes of space.

To solve this, the app utilizes a "Hybrid Lazy-Cache" architecture:

1. The Fast Index: On launch, a background thread silently uses Windows COM automation to extract only the first slide (the title slide) of each template. These are saved as lightweight thumbnails, populating a clean, dark-themed grid UI almost immediately.
2. On-Demand Extraction: The real magic happens when you click a thumbnail. Instead of pre-rendering everything, the app dynamically extracts the remaining inner slides for only that specific template in real-time, displaying them in a scrollable detail view.

Key Features

• Instant Visual Grid: Browse your entire template directory as a highly scannable masonry grid of title slides.
• Deep-Dive Detail View: Click any template to instantly reveal a gallery of its internal slide layouts without ever launching the MS Office UI.
• Seamless Workflow: Found the right design? A prominent "Open in PowerPoint" button launches the source .pptx file natively, ready for editing.
• Completely Standalone: Packaged as a single Windows .exe file, requiring no complex server setups or local host browsers.

Under the Hood (Tech Stack) Building this with GenAI assistance in Antigravity IDE allowed for rapid prototyping of some complex Windows interactions. The app is powered by:

• Python 3.10+ as the core engine.
• PySide6 (Qt6) for the modern, responsive, multi-threaded Graphical User Interface.
• PyWin32 (win32com.client) to run headless PowerPoint in the background, ensuring 100% accurate rendering of fonts and vector shapes.

Conclusion Automating this workflow has completely removed the friction of finding the right presentation layout. Instead of fighting with file explorers, I now have a dedicated digital asset manager tailored exactly to my needs.