AutoBooks (formerly known as Spookreads) is an iOS/iPadOS app for generating books (or stories) using AI, built for Hack Club's Siege Week 9, and has now been updated for Hack Club's Flavortown! It supports iPhone and iPad, as well as Mac and Apple Vision Pro using Designed for iPad!
If the API requests fail for some reason, you are actually connected to the internet, and you have tried all of the regular troubleshooting steps (including turning it off and on again), then ping me on Slack or email me at apps@consciousb.one and I'll get it working again ASAP!
The backend to this is powered by Nginx, and is the same backend as Leafy, my Siege Week 8 project that logs and identifies leaves found by the user. It's still all hosted locally at my house and running on Ubuntu Desktop 25.04 inside of Proxmox!
Since it is the exact same backend that Leafy (another one of my Siege projects) used, a more detailed explanation of it can be found over at Leafy's GitHub repo.
Or for more information, see the repo for the backend here.
Click here to download AutoBooks through TestFlight!
This is the way I recommend; it's so much easier than sideloading.
This is left over from Siege, but if you feel like sideloading it, and/or don't want to use TestFlight, then follow this guide to manually sideload the IPA of AutoBooks.
- Install Sideloadly and its dependencies; if I remember correctly macOS has none but Windows needs iTunes and iCloud not from the Microsoft Store!. The Sideloadly website will link you to the requirements for your OS.
- From the Releases tab, find the latest release - it should be the first one at the top - and download the attached
AutoBooks.ipafile. - Using a cable that supports both charging and data transfer, connect your device (iPhone or iPad, the sideloading process for Macs and AVPs is different) to your computer, select
Trustand enter your passcode if prompted, and open Sideloadly. - In Sideloadly, click the file icon with the
IPAtext amd select the previously downloadedAutoBooks.ipafile. - Select your device in the
iDevicedropdown, and make sure the name matches with the device you wish to sideload Spookreads to. - Enter your Apple Account/ID's email into the
Apple IDtext field. If you are using a free developer account, you will have to resign/reinstall the app every 7 days, but if you use a paid developer account this goes up to a very nice 365 days! - Click the
Startbutton, and enter your Apple Account/ID's password when prompted to. This password goes straight to Apple and no one else apart from you and Apple ever see it; not the Sideloadly developers and not me. - Wait for the app to install, and then launch it! If you are prompted to enable Developer Mode or trust the app, do so.
I have always thought that AI can write decently well - albeit that it shouldn't really ever be used to write stuff outside of anything for personal use - and with my previous project requiring me to purchase a total of £10 of OpenAI credits, I figured I may as well put them to good use and make yet another AI based app for week 9; combine that with the theme being Spooky (because it was Halloween recently) and boom, AI spooky story generator!
Once I realised Flavortown had been extended, I picked this up again with the intension of transforming it into an app that isn't just stuck in one season/holiday, but an app that can be used whenever. Alongside that, I also felt that the UI and UX was lacking, so I took this opportunity to give the app a fresh coat of paint, making it (at least in my opinion) have the quality of an app seen on the App Store.
- Swift (what practically every modern iOS/iPadOS app is written in)
- SwiftUI (for the whole of the app's UI, also the best UI framework I've ever used)
- SwiftData (to store the books, kinda useful...)
- OpenAI API (on the backend, actually writes the stories and sends them back to us! I'm using
gpt-4o-minifor Spookreads because it's cheap and also pretty fast) - Nginx (on the backend, proxies the requests from my server to OpenAI so I don't leak my API key)