Zoneminder Skin

ZoneMinder is an open source software project for video cameras. The main feature is its ability to detect motion and alert you via email or text message. It is a very capable piece of software, and I have grown to really like it. A major shortcoming is in its user interface. It is not the slickest thing to look at, but that is not the part of the user interface that matters to me. What matters is the cumbersome navigation I have to do for the way I use it on a day-to-day basis. Thus, ZoneMinder has all the features I want, but I want these features organized and intergrated in a different way.

Luckily, the ZoneMinder author organized the code in a way that makes it relatively easy to build new "skins" on top of the core engine. It requires coding in PHP/HTML for the most part, and Javascript/CSS if you want to do anything dynamic and fancy (which of course I would need). I spent a few days designing and coding this new ZoneMinder skin and was very happy with the end result: it is a piece of software that will be immediately and continuously useful for me. I call it the Active Response Camera Console, or abbreviated as the "ARC Console".

Visit the ZoneMinder ARC Console Page to see full explanations of the features and to download the code.

For the use cases I was trying to address, I wanted a touch screen, wall mounted tablet as a monitor and control device. What better timing could I have since the world is now full of touch screen tablets. For this reason, I began to try to implement this new interface as an Android application. After a few days of frustration with the limits and disorganization that is Android development, I explored the ZoneMinder code a little deeper and found that it would be orders of magnitude easier to get what I wanted by adding a new ZoneMinder skin.