MacCam

A lightweight macOS menu bar app that displays live webcam feeds from Bay Area mountaintop cameras and fog.today in a floating panel.

Features

• Menu bar app — lives in your menu bar, opens as a floating panel with a single click
• Local tab — fog.today satellite view alongside 4 key Bay Area cameras (Bolinas, Mission Peak, Mt Diablo, Mt Tam)
• More tab — 8 randomly selected cameras from a pool of 32+ AlertCalifornia cameras within 50 miles of San Francisco, shuffled each time you open the tab
• Timelapse playback — animates the last hour of frames for every camera
• Time travel — switch between live timelapse, current frame, and 1-hour-ago snapshot
• Background preloading — all camera data is fetched and cached at launch and refreshed every 60 seconds, so everything loads instantly
• Logo removal — on-device image cropping removes camera overlay logos
• Click-to-open — tap any camera to open its full AlertCalifornia page
• iOS-style UI — squircle (continuous corner radius) rounded rectangles on all image cells and the panel itself

Cameras

Pulls live feeds and timelapse data from:

• AlertCalifornia public camera network (UC San Diego / CAL FIRE)
• fog.today satellite imagery

Camera coverage spans SF, Peninsula, Marin, East Bay, South Bay, Santa Cruz Mountains, and Sonoma/Petaluma — all within roughly 50 miles of San Francisco.

Install

Download MacCam.dmg from Releases, open it, and drag MacCam to Applications.

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/ricburton/MacCam.git
cd MacCam
open MacCam.xcodeproj

Build and run in Xcode (macOS 13+).

Controls

Button	Action
Timelapse	Animate all frames from the last hour (default)
Now	Show the latest frame, static
1 Hour Ago	Show the oldest cached frame (~1 hour ago), static
Refresh	Re-fetch all camera data immediately

Tech

• Pure Swift + SwiftUI hosted in an AppKit NSPanel
• borderless + nonactivatingPanel style for menu bar popover behavior
• CALayer.cornerCurve = .continuous for iOS-style squircle on the panel
• Ephemeral URLSession with cache-busting for fresh frames
• AlertCalifornia timelapse API (1min/1-hour.json) for frame sequences
• CGImage cropping to remove camera logos (top 6%, bottom 3.5%)
• Singleton CameraCache with background preloading and 60s refresh timer

License

MIT