Iris Makes Your iSight Fun Again!

For almost 2 years now, Apple has been shipping many of their computers with a built in iSight and PhotoBooth. You’ll find these goodies on all the new iMacs and Apple notebooks. While PhotoBooth is all right, and can be a bit of fun at times, it is very limited.

That’s where Iris comes in. This app does everything that Photobooth does, but it comes with loads of great, extra features clamped on.

Firstly, there are the same features as PhotoBooth, but vastly improved. You can take pictures from your internal or external iSight, from a selection of 26 different filters. Some of the filters are really good for making funky photos. My personal favorite is Kaleidoscope. Others include OpTile, Dots, Crystals and EdgeWork; some are more impressive than others, but they’re all a bit of fun!

Now onto the interesting bits. Firstly: Movie Capture. This one is kind of self explanatory; you can save in about every format that QuickTime supports, including MPEG-4 and H.264 up to the resolution of your iSight, which is 640×480. You can also tell it to record for a specific number of hours, seconds or minutes, making it a nice, small app to quickly capture a short video on your iSight. Notably missing are filter effects for video; this is unfortunate, but these may be added in later releases as this is a beta product.

The next feature it has over PhotoBooth is TimeLapse recording. It has the same video options as above, but lets you take a reduced number of frames per second, which is then sped up, e.g. you record one frame per second, but then play them at 15 frames per second. This makes a really cool effect, and is generally just another nice feature to play with!

Next up, Security. This one’s nice. It makes your iSight a motion detector going off when someone or something moves within your iSight frame. The sensitivity can be tailored, so an alert is only set off with a certain amount of movement. It can also be locked so that when activated, the settings can’t be changed and the app can’t be quit.

When something triggers the app, it can play a sound (or message!), record a movie (of a user specified length), a TimeLapse movie, or just take mug shot of the person using your Mac! These mug-shots can then be e-mailed. This is a great feature, that is used by certain other apps, however it’s nice to have in in a lovely ‘all-in-one’ app!

Impressively, it also has a ‘Webcam’ feature. This essentially publishes your iSight to your Mac’s built in web server (yes, every mac has a web server built in). It can also be viewed outside your local network, if you’ve set up your Mac and router correctly (details in an article soon!). Again, Webcam has many of the same options as the other video portions of the App, however as a default it is set to have less frames per second, so you don’t use all your bandwidth.

Iris already has a fairly impressive feature set, but it has one more, fairly big, trick up its sleeve. It has a built-in Gallery, with the ability to view and send any of the recorded material you have made. It can mail it, send it to Flickr, or export it to your iPod, iPhone or Apple TV. This is an excellent touch, giving the app a more rounded feel, allowing you to make and publish content all in the same, simplistic app.

Iris does have a few problems, performance can be poor when in photos, with the filter selector on, and while I was testing it, it crashed once or twice. However, Iris is still in beta, and development is active, so most bugs should be ironed out in the coming months.

Iris is a great app. It’s fun and has some productive bits as well. The gallery is a great idea, as is the ‘Security’ feature. There are no major bugs that I could find and is well worth downloading to try it out.

Iris is available from MildMannered Industries and the software is currently in a free, public beta. Grab it quick because it will be $30 when it goes on sale in the near future.

share permalink ping 2 Comments