Obligatory May post.

I didn’t really pick out any images out of this one, so it could contain violently graphic images of my life. Uh, not really. But it may contain things I don’t want you to see, in a third of a second. Just tell me if that’s the case, will you?

iSight Expert has competition.

Freeverse came out with Periscope, an application that, does the following;

* ’scope your home when you’re out of town.
* ’scope for intruders with motion detection.
* ’scope the kids when you’re at the office.
* ’scope a time-lapse movie of your workday.
* ’scope for security.
* ’scope for fun!

So, one could say this could make potential buyers or testers of iSight Expert compare the two. Before the speculation starts (and it’s bound to, since my app’s not out); there is a major difference between iSight Expert and Periscope’s design philosophy.

My application is focused on giving you control over what your iSight does; bascially, you could say it personifies a piece of hardware to do whatever the hell you want it to do; schedule it’s settings, take images on a very broad range of conditions. Perhaps the intended group of users is also different; my application has intermediate Mac users in mind with the urge to unlock their hardware potential, while Periscope looks a bit less like an application, and a bit more like a ‘game’.

In the mean time, I am in no hurry to release iSight Expert over increasing ‘competition’ — Praetorian is the application I will roll out first, and it will be followed by iSight Expert.

iSight Expert; March in Pictures.

I made it generate at 6 fps. With Quicktime’s current API, it was a pain to code, so I used a PyObjC snippet to generate this movie. In it’s current state, iSight Expert doesn’t generate proper .mov’s, for some reason. It’s censored ;).

I’m sorry, Dave…

As someone pointed out on Ars Technica, it’s an almost spooky idea to have a program that can act on you appearing. As OS X already has a built-in functionality to just speak your alerts aloud (on my laptop, it regularly has a ‘discourse’ with me about my battery being empty), the added functionality of the speech synthesis in OS X makes it easier for developers (like me) to add more of those spooky features. With motion-detection now out of the box, and face feature recognition around the corner for iSight Expert, I’ve done a bit of work to let it do a saved Quicksilver action when I appear. Now, without further ado, here’s the HALbook.

As you can see, it’s an… er, out of the studio session, and it’s sensitivity can be set lower so ‘accidental’ motion (which I tested here with the TV) isn’t picked up. More to come as the app progresses.

Personal Productivity Update.

In the vein of a special day, the CS3 Suite will most likely get released and I was planning some big updates on my work in Cocoa (yeah, ‘Expert and Praetorian), I wanted to do a little post to tell everyone what I’m up to right now, and what helps me get the job done faster. First of all, a brilliant article, really the eye-opener of the day. I encourage you to digg the article. It’s about Quicksilver, my favorite productivity application. I never even figured, that you can store Quicksilver actions, and using the comma switch (you can add multiple items into a selection that way) you can actually run all those actions parallel! I’ve got a few personal uses for this, like;

- Make an action that opens my blog’s control panel, MarsEdit (I post with MarsEdit) and the main Yojimbo view (for my blog snippets). Open in one click.
- Open my incoming torrent folder, open Azureus, and make Quicksilver open Finder and do a (CMD+3) to get a convienient list view.
- Save my current working reference documents with comma, save the action to open them with preview on my desktop.
- Open xCode with GrowlCode and Interface Builder, all one one desktop (VirtueDesktops PyObjc plugin).

and those are just the few I just made. I can probably find some more innovative methods with the image actions, like scaling and reformatting my images. Ankur, you’re a veritable genius.

Now, I just heard the nice words over at Surfbits’ Macreviewcast, and I am very flattered to have that much attention for my little app. The nice words are a real boost to my working drive. At the moment, I am considering an early preview version, but I really want to give my testers something very feature-rich and stable. I’ll lift a bit of the veil of things to come here…

Whazzallthisthen? Well, since I got more than just iSight Expert coming up, and I don’t have all the time in the world to organize reported issues, I decided to build a site that allows you to do just that. You will be able to report your issue, and back other issues so I can see how many people are experiencing the same problems.

Why am I so non-verbal about my applications right now? Well, I got website work to do, you know? I just finished the complete design of the two websites, (Praetorian and iSight Expert) and I’ll release them by the end of this month, also replacing my blog’s current header, and, by massive request, adding a black-on-white layout (comments ranged from “I’d prefer a black on white layout” to “AHH! My eyes are burning!”). So, design-wise, you’ll see a lot of changes. And then what?

I might start releasing the first béta of Praetorian before iSight Expert (Praetorian’s been in development and active testing for much longer than iSight Expert), and then giving out a limited promotional alpha for several reviewers, pod-casters, developers and academia, before the stable 0.5 public beta. Anyway, as it stands, I have less than a hundred béta testers, so there is room for more. You know the address, just let me know if you want to get in, and of course, any more comments on why, your hardware, are all welcome and encouraged.

I want to thank Ars Technica and Macreviewcast for the very nice words and publicity. I’ll be sure to keep you up to date…

iSight Expert Teaser

iSight Expert’s website is due to launch soon. I have some teaser material for all you béta-testers in anticipation. More details, on more apps, very soon.

iSight Expert. It kicks ass.

digg this!

It’s a mobile world, and your Macbook goes just about anywhere. Sometimes, you just leave it on the desk at your workplace, or at home. Sometimes, you leave it on. Sometimes you don’t. There is always some chance that your attention isn’t on your portable. Theft could easily occur.

iSight Expert isn’t a countermeasure for theft. It’s a range of tools anyone can use to their advantage. Many Macs come with a built-in iSight, but lack tools to use it in a more unorthodox way.

Want to use your iMac as a motion alarm?
- Want to keep a timelapse of how you look?
- Do you want to know where your employees are?
- Do you want a picture taken at a failed login?

iSight Expert can not only do all those things, but also export a customized application for you that you can install on any iSight-equipped Mac, and will function as you have defined it;

* Send Emails with it’s Geographic location and images.
* Securely upload recent images and data to a web server
* Make a movie of a month’s or week’s images
* Take images at startup, login, logout, wakeup, failed passwords, or motion.
* Act on a change of images or a face in the camera (e.g. run a script, play a song)

And there is much more. iSight Expert can organise the sent images of all your equipped Macs, put them online automatically for you, or print them. In it’s slick interface, you can see at what date, and at what location the image was taken. It’s Growl enabled, meaning you can get nifty little dialogues when you get a new image.

A beta-test is opening soon. Leave a comment, or email me to enter consideration. edit; I have had a lot of replies. I still need beta testers who have access to, and are able to test, a different application on OS X server. If you have both, be sure to email.