So today I took the webcam plunge again and picked up an iSight. I used to have an old QuickCam VC, the old one where you had to plug it into your keyboard and parallel port. It was a pain in the ass and never really worked that well. I got some video conferencing stuff to work at one point, but it was flakey as all heck. I think I might even still have it stashed in some box in my closet. I have to admit, the iSight is quite sexy, Apple did a really nice job designing it. I have it clipped to the screen of my laptop right now. Setup was easy. Had it wired up within minutes of opening the box. I'm actually waiting for someone to be available so I can try doing video chat.
Now for the part where I babble about how cool OS X is. One reason I wanted the iSight was to play with having a webcam. I looked into webcam software for OS X, but it was all lacking one feature I wanted. The ability to publish to a remote machine via scp (secure copy). Looking at the different software I noticed a few of the packages had AppleScript support. For those of you who aren't familiar with AppleScript, it is an English-like language used to write script files which can automate the actions of the computer and the applications which run on it. With OS X, Apple expanded the capabilities of AppleScript to allow it to run shell commands. That's the feature I was hoping to use.
In the end I chose EvoCam because it looked fairly easy to use and it would let me run an applescript script after it did an image capture. After a few false starts, I came up with a one line script:
do shell script "/usr/bin/scp /Users/gblake/webcam/webcam.jpg gblake@remotehost.com:~/public_html/webcam/"
That's all it took. I'm psyched that it was that easy to do. Add this to the list of reasons I really dig OS X. I'm going to have to play around with it some more.
