Tech Forum

You're right. One of my buddies confirmed that LDSTech isn't a thing anymore. I'm reaching out to some old collegues anyway. We'll see what they say.

sbradshaw wrote:I would love to see this become a full-fledged volunteer project, but I think we need official support from the Church for it to reach its full potential.

Getting access to LDS Account information is likely to be an issue. I'd suggest implementing bookmarks some other way for now.

I'd think getting access to scripture content would be much easier as the security concerns is far less. There may already be a process in place to do that.

My sense is that development in the church is handled by a very small group. They work on projects as directed by the Brethren and have very little to no time to work on side projects. Because of security concerns, control over what apps have access to LDS Account is very limited. As such, unless a GA gets interested, or there's another already authorized project that this could piggyback on, I doubt if you'll see much progress.

If you do develop with the idea of turning it over to the church, I'd suggest finding out what the church uses for development and use that. Otherwise, the code would probably be about as welcome as a bunch of Apple accessories for a Android user. The developers who would have to maintain it don't have time to learn a new environment.

I'm not trying to be a Debbie Downer here, but I've seen a number of good enthusiastic ideas die in disappointment. The best chance for a good outcome is to proceed with a realistic understanding of the issues.

that's exactly right. I wouldn't call it a very small group but it is certainly smaller than you might think. It's a team somewhere in ICS that's over the Gospel Library app. I suspect the support you get will depend a lot on how willing that team is to work with the community. As far as getting access to the LDS Account information I don't see how you'd have any more barriers to doing that than you already have getting the Gospel Library android app to work. Its very similar. If the church isn't willing to help us get this working I agree that it's probably not going to happen.

Doesn't hurt to ask though and I am sure that I will find the right person to talk to. Whether or not they will be willing/able to help me change anything might be a different matter but I guess we can go from there.

Tom Welch is the guy that initially was spear heading a lot of the LDSTech efforts and IIRC there was a fair amount of effort that went into that with a whole TON of additional problems that resulted that the development side was trying to cope with. I suspect when he moved on, the support for community dev efforts didn't really have a champion anymore and was allowed to drop back to minimal. anyway...

The problem is the number of committees that need to approve what you're trying to do and the nature of our passive-aggressive culture that just doesn't like to say no, we'd rather drag it out until it's just dropped. There was a very active developer in the area that attempted to lias with the church security on using LDS Access in app development, they were very amenable to his queries for months until it was just shut down. Don't go through the hassle you'll just waste months you could use developing the tool. You can't use LDS Account (though you might try the FamilySearch side of the house, they have api stuff that might be a 'work around'.

Don't develop it for the church to adopt, just do it.

This thread has died out, but heads up for anyone who's interested that I've gone ahead and launched a couple of music skills on Alexa... one each for playing Primary songs and hymns on demand.

Primary songs: https://skills-store.amazon.com/deeplin ... ix=ss_copy

Hymns: https://skills-store.amazon.com/deeplin ... ix=ss_copy

Would love to sync with anybody else doing work along these lines.

I'm working on creating an Alexa skill that reads out daily scriptures. I'll look into developing one that can play a General Conference talk.

Hey everyone. After a year of waiting I emailed my contacts at the church again. They said they thought they had resolved anything and told me to go forward with the project. They're going to look into fixing the certificate issue. I've lost a bit of steam on working on this but if they fix the certificate issue, I may pick it up again. I'll post here if I hear anything more.

Thank you so much for working on this. I am super excited to be able to put on the scriptures while I am doing dishes and sharing them with my younger kids who cannot read them for themselves. Thank you again, Mandi

chrisost wrote:Since there's no indication that the certificate issue is going to be resolved, I was able to set up an AWS API Gateway to proxy the CDN content and get it playing. For development work that (with a URL re-write to redirect the media2 content to the gateway) was enough for me to be able to experiment on my side.

Good news, media2.ldscdn.org now supports https:// !