Category / Developer Journal

by jonathan

My Mac Web Dev Setup

The main reason for the following post is for my personal benefit, so I can reference it and remember exactly how I setup everything when I need to do it again. Hopefully someone else can get something useful from this article, but really, that’s just a bonus. With that said, enjoy.

Before doing all the terminal stuff, you probably want to start with downloading iTerm. This is one of the best Terminal alternatives for Mac.

://www.iterm2.com/

First (real) step, install Homebrew

Homebrew is an essential part of Mac development. It bills itself as “The missing package manager for macOS”. With … Read more

by jonathan

Kingdom Hall Specific Branch for PTZ Camera Control

Updated!

It was requested that, in addition to the generic version of the Camera Control app, I also provide the Kingdom Hall specific variant of the app. So, here it is: https://github.com/counteragent/KH-Camera-Control/releases. You can download the source or download the app/installer for MacOS or Windows respectively.

The main difference in the two branches of the app are the presets. In the normal version the presets are all just numbered buttons. The Kingdom Hall specific one uses various icons I created to show the general use cases for a meeting at a Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

You can still … Read more

by jonathan

PTZ Camera Control App

I was recently part of a team responsible for installing PTZ (pan, tilt, zoom) cameras at our local congregation. After looking long and hard for a quality and affordable solution, we ended up with two cameras from PTZOptics. One of the key features we needed in a PTZ camera was the IP stream and control. While the hardware for these cameras is great, the software left a lot to be desired.

The provided software was free and open source. That’s great, but it was a very old html and javascript app, all written with tables and inline css and … Read more

by jonathan

Open REST API for Trivia Questions

Just finished the first draft of a new open API I’ve been working on for access to trivia questions. If you want to signup for an account (all free and open, remember) you can then make calls to retrieve questions, tags, and categories. You can also post your own questions if you’ve got ’em.

Here’s a sample call to retrieve 20 Jeopardy style questions at an offset (basically pages) of 2:

GET http://trivia.propernerd.com/api/questions?limit=2&offset=2&style=jeopardy

Here’s the response (all responses are JSON):

[ { "id":"106", "user_key":"1", "style":"standard", "difficulty":"0", "category":"Firefly", "question":"From what facility did the ship's doctor Simon rescue his sister River from?",
… Read more
by jonathan

From Idea to App in One Week

I recently had an idea for an app. Something to help keep score while playing basketball. Great, not really a big deal, should be able to do this in a day or so. So, it took about a week once all was said and done, after which it sat in the Apple App Store queue for longer than it took to actually create.

The first thing I did was put together some rough designs in Photoshop. Initially I was thinking it would just be an iPad app, but after talking to some other people I decided to add the iPhone … Read more

by jonathan

Big Update to my Game Buzzer iPhone App

I’ve been working hard on adding new features to my connected game buzzer app for iPhone. It’s been on the app store for a little over a year now and I really haven’t done much with it. Once I started the update process, it quickly became much more of a complete overhaul.

There were so many things I wanted to do that just adding them felt like just as much work as redesigning completely, so, that’s what I did. It may have taken me a bit longer than I wanted it to, but I think it’s totally worth it now … Read more