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?

* ’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.

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 ;).

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.

- 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…