Building an MD viewer for iPad Mini, finding yourself with a project management tool in your hands: RetroMD
How AI can speed up project development
18/05/2026 | Claudio_VL | 0 comments
RetroMD was born yesterday, on a whim, one hour before dinner, with about 60 seconds of planning, as a way to use an obsolete 1st generation iPad Mini (from 2012) to read Git's README and other .md files from a single BitBucket project. And the planning was as detailed as "That iPad can't do much. I want to see my project's README.md and todo.md on the sofa, with a bigger screen than the smartphone's. Let's write something to do it!".
At dinner time the application was ready, with plenty of help from Google Gemini AI, with the complete functionality "planned" in its initial scope. And it's one of the few websites (see screenshot) that can be displayed perfectly by that old tablet. Then, after dinner, Gemini and I made some adjustments. The tool, whether on a computer, a smartphone or an obsolete Apple tablet, could do much more that we initially thought. Scope evolved. No, it was not a case of "scope creep", it was more like "scope evolution": like discovering that the coffee machine you just bought can also make tea. And soup. And milkshake, probably.
Less than 24 hours after its conception, RetroMD has evolved into a centralised, multi-repository tracking hub for Bitbucket. It acts as an automated command center that dynamically aggregates and audits scattered project roadmaps into a single, real-time master overview. Basically, it bridges the gap between passive, siloed documentation files dispersed across an enterprise workspace and a fast, unified tracking matrix.
The target hardware, that 2012 tablet, had been written off as dead more times than Kenny from South Park, so RetroMD relies on an automated background worker script that polls the remote workspace via API and scans project roots. Instead of forcing a low-powered client device to connect to a heavy remote API or parse complex layouts in the browser — which would make the 2012 iPad as hot and tired as you or I at the 41st km of a marathon - RetroMD processes all data server-side. It tokenizes uncompleted markdown checklists, converts standard and non-breaking string characters into clean bytes, and safely consolidates and writes data via JSON and caching.
By transforming static text files into a structured, self-compiling dataset, RetroMD eliminates N+1 web navigation latency on legacy hardware. This lightweight foundation opens up quite unexpected paths for near future scale: evolving the platform from a read-only workspace dashboard into an interactive project management tool. By integrating an API-driven generation module (a separate application that I developed with Gemini after dinner...), the system can eventually leverage this structured task matrix to act as a AI-powered rapid prototyping layer, automatically building the initial multi-file skeleton code for an application, thus delivering a working proof-of-concept application, by pulling data to build specifications directly from parsed todo lists.
Maybe RetroMD can make milkshake too...?
RetroMD will soon be available at Claudesign.com.
Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Apple, digital obsolescence, Google, programming, project management
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