Posts tagged with "mac"

Witness Remotely Locks Your Mac, Detects Motion, Sends You Mugshots

Developed by Orbicule, the creators of computer-tracking utility Undercover, Witness is a new application that’s aimed at remotely locking your Mac, and detecting motion in front of your computer’s camera. Let’s face it: every time we’re away from our Macs, we think about what could ever happen if someone broke into our house or office and stole them. Whilst data protection is essential and there many things you can do to hide critical information stored on your machine (such as disabling automatic login, choose a strong system password or keep everything safe into 1Password, possibly synced with Dropbox), knowing the identity of the person that actually took possession of your computer – or entered your office without authorization – is a whole different story. Unless you’re planning on setting up a relatively expensive home monitoring security system (even with DIY sets, you’re still going to spend a couple of hundred bucks + software to monitor everything) or just carrying your MacBook away with you all the time, there’s no easy to know what’s happening in front of your computer’s screen, and take action at the same time. Orbicule wants to provide an easy and powerful solution to remotely lock a Mac from virtually anywhere, detect motion and be notified with photos and video of who’s doing what in your house.

There are many tweaks and hacks available online to turn your iSight into a security system, as well as utilities to lock your Mac from an iPhone or iPad while on the go. I bet many of you have heard of these methods or at least tried to follow one of those tutorials once. Witness, however, does exactly what a great app has to do: it combines multiple functionalities into a beautiful, easy to use and full-featured package that requires minimal setup and just works. Witness can lock and unlock your Mac from an iPhone, an iPad or the web browser thanks to a system that’s based on an account you’ll have to create on Orbicule’s website. Once authenticated with the account on your Mac, iOS devices and browser, you’ll be ready to start using Witness and be alerted of activity in front of your Mac’s iSight. Witness also requires a desktop companion app that comes as an installer and will restart your computer upon successful installation. The Mac app handles the location of your computer, your account’s credentials, and also lets you decide whether Witness itself or the screensaver should be used to lock OS X. If you choose Witness, a panel will come in the foreground asking for your system’s password. If you don’t want to use the iSight and you have configured other cameras with your Mac, you can choose a different capturing device from the Preferences.

On the iOS side of things, Witness comes with a free remote app that runs universally on iPhones and iPads. The UI is gorgeous, and the app provides a set of functionalities to lock a Mac with a simple swipe, monitor your various machines associated with a Witness account, and browse the history of alerts you’ve received. Being heavily based on the cloud, Witness for iOS will constantly check for updates, pulling images and videos from the Internet if they’re available (meaning: you’ve locked your Mac and something’s going on). If an alert comes in via push notification, you’ll be able to see pictures and videos recorded by your iSight (audio is supported, too). You can email photos directly within the app, and delete alerts you’re no longer interested in. All these features are available on the web counterpart as well.

In my tests, Witness has been very reliable and quite fast both on WiFi and 3G. I was able to lock / unlock my iMac in seconds, receive push notifications moments after motion was detected and download full sets of photos and videos shot through my iSight. A Witness account will cost you $39 as a one-time fee (student licenses available) and gives you access to OS X, iOS and web tools. I highly recommend Witness not only because of the beautiful interface approach and usability – it’s the “just works” factor that combines a utility to lock a computer and turn it into a home alarm system that truly impressed me. You can create a Witness account here, and check out more screenshots below. Read more

#MacStoriesDeals - Thursday

If you didn’t already know, we’ve set up a new twitter account for Deals, it’s @MacStoriesDeals. We’ll tweet the daily deals there as well as exclusive weekend deals too. Help spread the word! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

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#MacStoriesDeals - Wednesday

If you didn’t already know, we’ve set up a new twitter account for Deals, it’s @MacStoriesDeals. We’ll tweet the daily deals there as well as exclusive weekend deals too. Help spread the word! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

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Kickstarter Project - Tweet Land: Playing With Reality

I hope you don’t get tired of reading about Kickstarter projects because I enjoy writing posts about very cool ideas. A new project I found today is called Tweet Land. Tweet Land is the idea of six Costa Ricans that believe it’s “possible to reinvent the way video games are created. We believe in opportunity, that’s why we believe in Tweet Land.” Tweet Land is one of the world’s first video game platforms that plays with reality, or “Real Time Gaming.”

What would happen if people’s social networks effected what happens in a video game? If you like the idea of the twittersphere becoming a virtual universe, this is for you.

Video after the break. Read more

#MacStoriesDeals - Tuesday

If you didn’t already know, we’ve set up a new twitter account for Deals, it’s @MacStoriesDeals. We’ll tweet the daily deals there as well as exclusive weekend deals too. Help spread the word! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

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MailTabs Brings Safari-like Tabs to Mail.app

If you use Mail.app on your Mac desktop to stay on top of your inboxes and messages and you’re that kind of user who opens a lot of Mail windows to navigate between accounts, folders and new messages, perhaps you’ve thought about getting a new email client with support for tabs. In web browsers, tabs are the best way to open multiple links at once without being forced to clutter your screen with dozens of standalone windows (although some people still prefer to keep separate sets of tabs organized in different windows); furthermore, new solutions like Mozilla’s Panorama for Firefox enable us to literally open hundreds of tabs and visually switch between them retaining some free space in the toolbar. Tabs have basically changed the way we browse. How about enabling them in Mail.app now?

That’s what a new plugin called MailTabs does. Available for free and supporting auto-updates (that means you won’t have to download a new version every time), once installed MailTabs will put Safari-like tabs in Mail for OS X. New messages, conversations and inboxes will open in a new tab sitting below the top toolbar instead of a new Mail window. The UI is far from perfect in this first release, but tabs really work and sessions are even restored when you close Mail.app and open it again. When you send a new message from within a tab, the tab is automatically closed as soon as you hit Send. The plugin has no other configuration options available in the Settings, and I’m hoping the developers will add further customization possibilities in the future updates. MailTabs also seems to have a small footprint on CPU resources and RAM.

If you’re a fan of plugins like TotalFinder and, overall, tabs for web browsers, you should try MailTabs. It’s a free download here.

Prycast: Pandora Radio Player Review & Giveaway

While I don’t think Pandora itself needs any introduction, you may not be familiar with one of the latest Mac Apps to bring your Pandora account to your desktop. Pyrcast is a menu bar radio player for your Pandora stations, allotting access to all of your favorite music and controls that can be tucked away into a standalone player, or via a drop-down menu. Pyrcast allows for global keyboard shortcuts for restarting the song, liking and disliking the current track, and for play/pausing. Additionally accessibility has been added with Growl support, though I found the Rate Up and Rate Down icons to be unintuitive in the player (just bring over the thumbs up and thumbs down guys). Pyrcast looks similar to Ecoute in terms of navigation, though you can just quickly jump to another station by clicking “Stations” at any time. Pyrcast is $4.99 in the App Store, and we’re giving away three copies in a quick giveaway to a few lucky readers. Jump past the break for contest rules.

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#MacStoriesDeals - Monday

If you didn’t already know, we’ve set up a new twitter account for Deals, it’s @MacStoriesDeals. We’ll tweet the daily deals there as well as exclusive weekend deals too. Help spread the word! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

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The Spotify Box

Spotify Box: Package Contents

Spotify Box: Package Contents

Occasionally minds more creative than mine combine technologies physical and virtual to create delightful products that make radio nerds like me ooze with excitement. If the fat grin on my face isn’t enough to show you just how much I enjoy this particular concept, then you must clearly be an American (at least we still have Rdio) or perhaps you can’t appreciate the simpler times when wood vinyl FM/AM radios played fuzzy music from our bedroom dressers. The concept – evolved through research and development from Jordi Parra – bonds RFID tags (which look kind of like poker chips) with a Spotify URL that when attached to the radio playback a playlist or radio station over WiFi. While the radio itself stores the information you assign from Spotify over USB, the RFID tags are nothing more than the “on switches” that relate to the stored playlists. These playlists are associated with colors, thus to play a particular sample of songs you’d simply attach a red RFID tag to the radio for example. The beauty of a concept like this is that it maintains the simplicity of a manual radio, while introducing and integrating with modern and intuitive technologies. The world may be going digital, but there’s still something about being able to touch music with your fingers that emotionally makes the analog experience so much more palatable and personal. Parra’s prototype doesn’t have a name, but the Spotify Box as it’s dubbed on Vimeo is a great reminder that good design doesn’t always have to have a touchscreen, or even an LCD display. It’s a return to the basics, and while I understand a student project such as this would take a considerable amount of effort to produce, I do wish Jordi and his team all the best if something like this gets off the ground. If you do start a Kickstarter, you’ve got my support.

Past the break we’ve embedded the concept video, and you can also check out the project in it’s entirety on Zenona. There’s a Flickr group if you want to see the project from draft to inception, but I have to say: having this much access to the workings of the prototype Spotify Box can drive an author to be a little too giddy, don’t you think?

[Zenona via TNW]

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