isight posts

Filed under: Audio, Fun, Macintosh, Freeware

FluidTunes: when iTunes meets Minority Report

by Jay Hathaway Dec 1st 2008

FluidTunes is an app that lets you control iTunes from a webcam, using your hands, head or feet. The main screen looks like CoverFlow, with the image from your camera image lightly visible behind it. You can swipe across the album covers to navigate, or swipe the large forward and back buttons for finer control. Play is at the bottom of the screen, and stop is at the top. It reminds me a lot of the display from Minority Report.

FluidTunes can be a little bit difficult to control. It's quite responsive, but it's easy to hit a few buttons at once, or accidentally scroll past the song you wanted. Also, don't rock out too wildly in front of your camera, or you're liable to change songs with your head. For right now, Fluidtunes is an impressive showpiece, but it's not entirely practical for everyday music browsing.

Tags: coverflow, fluidtunes, isight, iTunes, minority-report, music, webcam

Filed under: Photo, Video, Macintosh

Teach your old iSight new tricks with Iris

by Jay Hathaway Sep 7th 2008

Iris is an OS X app that offers up some cool ways to use your iSight. Of course, it takes still photos and videos. That's useful, but Apple's built-in Photo Booth already offers those features. Iris goes a few steps further, offering a time lapse mode, a security mode (using motion-detection), and a webcam mode (for setting up live streaming).

Each mode is highly customizable. In security mode, you can set everything from the sensitivity of the motion detector to the actions Iris will take when it's set off. You can have it sound an alarm or just grab a movie or a stop-motion and email it to you. With time lapse, you can choose the interval for frame capture and playback. An amazing array of video codecs is available for recording, making the movies Iris produces suitable for playing on any screen or device.

The gallery feature ties all these modes together. It saves your shots and your videos in an iPhoto-style display that gives you easy access for exporting, e-mailing, or uploading to Flickr. It also plays nice with AppleTV. The bottom line: If you've used Photo Booth, Iris won't be difficult to learn, despite its large library of features.

Tags: Iris, iSight, osx, photo booth, PhotoBooth, security-camera, time-lapse, timelapse, webcam

Filed under: Internet, Photo, Utilities, Video, Macintosh

Gawk all day and all night long

by Drew Olanoff May 31st 2008

Gawker lets you do time-lapse photography with your Mac's iSight. You can share and record your streams with other people, and they can record as well.

That's awesome. And very scary. Don't forget to turn it off before you go to bed, or the world wide interwebs will know that you sing Barry Manilow in your sleep. It was just one time, ok?

There's a neat page of examples that you can check out here.

The newest release lets you password protect your streams, schedule a stream to start and end, and some cleaning up of the user interface.

Apparently the folks over at the co-working space IndyHall were using it, and their fearless leader Alex Hillman tweeted about it.

Thanks for the heads up! This is one to watch.

Hey...who left the camera on again?

Tags: apple, gawker, isight, mac, photo

Filed under: Design, Developer, Utilities, Video, Beta

Silverback brings advanced usability testing to the Mac

by Jay Hathaway May 12th 2008

Silverback, a new OS X application from the renowned UK-based design team Clearleft, was a mystery for quite a while. The app had a site with some neat visual tricks and a gorilla with a clipboard, and it said the application was for designers, but what did it do? The suspense was killing us! We finally had a chance to test Silverback this week, and if you design websites or application interfaces, this program is worth the wait.

Silverback basically turns your Mac into a full-featured usability testing station. Add a new project, add some users, and have them come sit down and test out your interface. Silverback hangs out unobtrusively in the background, capturing video of the the entire screen, including a cute (and useful) effect that marks where your tester is clicking. This in itself would be handy, but Silverback also takes advantage of your built-in iSight camera to include a picture-in-picture of the tester's reactions, on top of the screen capture.

This way, you can see everything the user is doing in real time, and they can speak comments aloud as they come up, rather than pausing to write them down. Usability testing the old-fashioned way generally involves expensive setups and lots of instructions, but Silverback is intuitive to use and provides straightforward and informative results. Silverback is currently in private beta, so some testers can test its testing functions (this makes our heads hurt a little bit.)

Tags: beta, clearleft, design, isight, os x, OsX, Silverback, ui, video

Filed under: Fun, Macintosh

iSight Screensavers does interactive video

by David Chartier Jul 23rd 2007

You can say what you want about the use or need for screensavers in today's computing world - but it won't effect the cool factor of these iSight Screensavers. Designed for Macs with iSight cameras (either built-in or otherwise), iSight Screensavers provides six different effects that can interact with video shot by an iSight, making for one cool screensaver. Effects like Fluid, Particles, Fire and Water are all sure to be a hit around the office and household, especially if your Mac is anywhere near a decent flow of traffic.

Check out the video for a full demo of what iSight Screensavers is capable of (note that some effects require dedicated graphics cards) or download a demo for yourself. A license costs a mere $10.

Tags: effects, interactive, isight, screensavers, video

Filed under: Fun, Kids, Photo, Video, Macintosh, Freeware

'Crazy Mirror' makes your iSight (more) fun

by Ted Wallingford Mar 22nd 2006

Remember those silly mirrors that you used to find inside those goofy fun-house carnival rides? The ones that gave you the figure of Grimace or a stretched-out face? Now, you can re-live those carnival mirror glory days with Crazy Mirror, the latest piece of Mac freeware from Tatsuo Unemi. The program boasts a number of distortion effects to make you look, well--crazy! You can record Quicktimes of your craziness, as well. If you have kids, they'll eat this up. And it's a universal binary, so it will run great on your new Intel-based Mac.

Tags: camera, isight, webcam

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