Problems with Java Card, PCSC lite, and Applet Playground

I've been trying to get started using Java Card. I downloaded and installed the repository at this link: https://github.com/martinpaljak/AppletPlayground/ with the hope of starting to develop and use applets, but as of yet I have had no success interacting with the card or reader in any way. Running

 "java -jar lib/openkms-globalplatform.jar -info" 

at the command line returns nothing - according the the GlobalPLatform site, https://github.com/martinpaljak/GlobalPlatform , it should return information about the card. Running "pcsctest" on the command line yields either

 "Testing SCardEstablishContext    : Service not available." or 
 "Testing SCardEstablishContext    : Command successful.
 Testing SCardGetStatusChange (and then doesn't do anything until I control Z)" 

depending on how long it has been since I plugged in the reader. If I run any command when the pcsctest returns "service not available" I get the error

java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException: Error constructing implementation (algorithm: PC/SC, provider: JNA2PCSC, class: jnasmartcardio.Smartcardio$JnaTerminalFactorySpi)....
    Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: jnasmartcardio.Smartcardio$JnaPCSCException: SCardEstablishContext got response 0x8010001d (SCARD_E_NO_SERVICE: The Smart card resource manager is not running.).

I'm using OS X. I've tried a couple different tools for interacting with Java Cards and I haven't got any of them to work. I would really appreciate it if somebody could show me what I might be doing wrong or suggest a better way to interact with Java Cards.