How I Built an AI-Powered Digital Advent Calendar with Angular & Google Gemini

A developer built an AI-powered digital advent calendar called DailyReveal using Angular and Google Gemini, reducing creation time from 30 minutes to under 20 seconds. The tool integrates Gemini for content generation and Unsplash for images, and the interactive case builder component has been open-sourced on GitHub.

🎯 The Core Problem & Concept Traditional countdown tools are often static, tedious to fill out day-by-day, or lack engaging UI/UX. My goal was to combine: - Instant Content Generation : Using AI to generate 24+ daily unique surprises messages, riddles, quotes tailored to any topic. - Rich Visual Editor : Letting users design individual doors/cases with custom images, text, and password protection. 3. Cross-Platform Access : Web app + dedicated mobile viewer app. 🤖 1. Integrating Google Gemini for AI Content Generation Filling 24 calendar doors manually can be time-consuming. To solve this, I integrated Google Gemini AI into the creation workflow. How it works: - The user provides a theme e.g., "Romantic Holiday Quotes" , "Tech Trivia for Developers" , "Daily Wellness Tips" . - The prompt sent to Gemini specifies structured JSON output for each day 1 to 24 , containing a title, description, and keyword tags. - We query Unsplash API using these keyword tags to automatically suggest copyright-free background photos for each door This reduces calendar creation time from 30 minutes to under 20 seconds . --- 🎨 2. Open-Sourcing the Interactive Case Builder One of the biggest technical challenges was building an intuitive WYSIWYG editor for calendar doors — allowing users to customize text styles, image alignment, and secret unlock dates. Instead of keeping this proprietary, we decided to extract the core editor component and open-source it for the Angular community 👉 Check out the repository on GitHub : github.com/zhaynes067-web/case-builder https://github.com/zhaynes067-web/case-builder Key Features of Case Builder: - 📱 Fully responsive preview mode mobile & desktop views . - 🔒 Support for password-protected secret doors. - 🌐 Ready for i18n / multi-language support. Feel free to ⭐ star the repository if you're building interactive Angular tools --- 🚀 3. Tech Stack Summary - Frontend : Angular Standalone Components, RxJS, NgRx Signal Stores - Backend : Node.js / Express API - AI Integration : Google Gemini API - Image Integration : Unsplash API 💡 What's Next? Building DailyReveal has been an incredible journey of combining generative AI with interactive frontend experiences. If you’d like to try it out or create your own calendar: