Welcome to Jinx Navigator, your one-stop navigator through every issue of The Jinx from the 1930s and 40s. Here you can browse by issue, search by keyword or author, tag your favorites, and even add notes and comments to each article.
The text of each article inside JinxNav was taken from Julien Losa’s The Jinx Experience, where he retyped every article in every issue, correcting things, fixing typos, etc. JinxNav would have taken much longer to create if that updated text hadn’t been available. Great job, Julien!
I hope JinxNav deepens your appreciation of these historical treasures—and maybe even sparks some new ideas for your own performances. If you run into any issues or have feedback, use the Contact Form. Enjoy!
Nerd Information
The iOS App
This is info about the tech behind the app — it’s only of interest to nerds and geeks.
JinxNav started as a MAUI Blazor Hybrid app because that’s what I use at work. But there were some tweaky UI things I kept having problems with and after switching from Syncfusion to Radzen, then to MudBlazor, I was about to switch to Microsoft’s FluentUI components when I just decided to bag it and not worry about cross-platform right now.
So I switched to SwiftUI and targeted only iPhone and iPad. The only problem was that I wasn’t a Swift programmer…
…but I was a guy with 35+ years programming professionally and a will to use AI. (Since 2010 I’ve put a half dozen games on Apple’s App Store and made my living with an IDE I wrote, but none of that was in Swift.)
In one weekend, with the help of ChatGPT, I made more progress than in several weeks with MAUI. After two weekends (and some evenings in between) I had JinxNav to the point where I could send it out via TestFlight to beta testers.
The database at the core of JinxNav is SQLite and has all the info for every article in The Jinx. All the info was entered by hand (hours and hours of copy/paste) but I did use AI for two things — creating the summary for each article, and then formatting the body of the article since copy/pasting the PDF files from The Jinx Experience didn’t carry over the font styling nor the paragraph breaks.
AI was pretty good at that, but I still had to go through every article afterwards and add missing line breaks, images, etc.
To help with that I created a utility in Xojo that allowed me to load the database an article at a time, add tags, the summary, put in the issue number, and all the other data about the article, and finally the original page number in The Jinx. Those I had to look up in the PDF copy of The Jinx from Lybrary.com.
The Web Version
I had many requests for an Android version of the app and actually had plans to give that a shot, but I was procrastinating because I’m not an Android developer and don’t even have a recent device to use for testing — only a decade only tablet. So I started thinking maybe a web-based Jinx Navigator would be good — as long as it worked will with mobile devices.
One day I had a brainstorm to use WordPress as the foundation, which would allow me to use the whole WP ecosystem, and then build some custom plug-ins that would let me use the iOS database to serve up the Jinx articles.
In the course of a weekend I had enough working that I knew that was the way to go. Over the course of the next few weeks I added more features to get it up to par with the iOS version.