michaelwschultz / timelapse-app

Tiny desktop app that creates timelapse videos using your built in desktop/laptop camera.

Hi, I'm Michael.

After designing public health tools at Iodine, and a quick dip into politics at Sidewire (RIP), I joined Newfront Insurance in December of 2017 to help design and build a modern insurance brokerage.

At Newfront, I designed and helped build tools that make life easier for brokers, their clients, and our account managers. Some of these tools include automation and others improve the communication process between each team.

In November of 2020, I left Newfront and after some time on personal projects like Hemolog, I joined Sensible to help get structured data out of phyiscal documents.

Most of my projects are hosted here on Github but others, my music mostly, are hosted elsewhere. Visit michaelschultz.com for the latest.

timelapse-app's Issues

Camera doesn't turn off enough, shouldn't be on if duration between photos is short

I believe at one point this was set to < 4 seconds.

Optimize CSS animations

Animations are pretty chopping right now especially on first load. Figure out how to smooth them out.

Improve progress bar feedback for last 75%

This is really only an issue for videos over ~30 photos.

Remove 'save on exit' feature for now

There is no way I'm going to be able to add this before 1.0. Might as well remove the feature for now.

Store and retrieve user data more easily

Was looking through https://github.com/sindresorhus/electron-store. But not completely sure it's necessary.

In general, I need to make sure that I'm storing enough info and that it's accessible enough to understand how people are using the app and if issues occur I'm notified of them with enough info to diagnose the issue.

Verify camera is on

I do this already, but maybe this is a better way of doing it since sometimes the current implementation feels flaky. https://github.com/sindresorhus/node-is-camera-on

Codesign app correctly

3rd Party Mac Developer Application: Michael Schultz (J7E3EF4F24)

$ codesign -s "3rd Party Mac Developer Application: Michael Schultz (J7E3EF4F24)" electron

If errors, some files may need to be cleaned of Finder data. Use:
$ xattr -c

speed up time before initial photo

The first photo seems to take extra long. Warming up the cam before counting down probably makes sense.

Include a menubar component

https://github.com/maxogden/menubar

Jesse Squires worked on a few menubar apps recently. Might be worth asking him some questions as well. - https://github.com/hexedbits/StatusItemController

Requirements

• Figma design file
• better understanding of how this will work

Research replacing ffmpeg module with fluent-ffmpeg

https://github.com/fluent-ffmpeg/node-fluent-ffmpeg

Build in upload to the cloud

Could start with Youtube support

Build in gif support

Convert videos to gifs, not just mp4

Complete controls for customizing how long and how often to take photos

Right now, the controls are pretty ugly. Not to mention they don't actually change their variable counterparts.

I've started adding some sliders to see if they make sense but I haven't decided yet if they are the way to go or not.

Remove update server functionality in favor of github releases

(https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Mac) & (https://www.electron.build/auto-update)

Using this server code
https://medium.com/heresy-dev/auto-updating-apps-for-windows-and-osx-using-electron-the-complete-guide-4aa7a50b904c

Implement new UI for timelapse options and hook up to variables

Figma Link

This is an extension of #2.

Replace camera logic with JpegCamera

Still not sure if I should do this but the API looks pretty clean.
https://github.com/amw/jpeg_camera

Documentation:
https://amw.github.io/jpeg_camera/doc/class/JpegCamera.html

Only display video if feed is ready

In testing, sometimes I see a green screen before the video is shown. I haven't seen this lately... maybe it's no longer an issue or only affects certain devices?

Default settings don't match settings in app

These settings also seem to change after a timelapse is started and stopped.

Move to Electron 12

Camera doesn't come back on when computer wakes from sleep

Probably need to run the initialization step again each time the window becomes active just in case.

Hook up 'Launch app on startup' functionality

The button is in the options panel but it doesn't do anything yet. I remember there being some issues with how OSX expects this to happen and how Electron can accomplish it. Will need to look into that before implementing.

Replace camera code with React-webcam (npm install react-webcam)

Looked this up a long time ago. Not sure if it's still worth pursuing. What are the benefits?

Package app using dmg creator for mac build

https://www.christianengvall.se/dmg-installer-electron-app/

Setup updates via github

Potentially a good example of how to get this setup https://github.com/iffy/electron-updater-example

Haven't verified it works though.

Check for internet connection ONLY when needing to download binaries

This is really the only time you would need internet now. Having this in place all the time would not allow you to use the app when you don't have internet.

Convert to React

This was a great prototype but this code is impossible to read and super unmaintainable. Breaking apart the app to be more functional will help a ton when it comes to adding new features.

userSettings and Binaries missing

These two separate line points to files/directories that does not exist, nor there is any information available for this.

let settingsFileLocation =  userDataPath + '/userSettings.json';
let binaryDest = userDataPath + '/Binaries';