It’s never been easier to keep an eye on your home or business remotely. There are dozens of security camera systems available, many of which run on your Mac and can be monitored remotely from another computer or even your phone. Fancy keeping an eye on the cleaner, or checking that the kids have got home safely? Or perhaps you’ve gone away for a few days and want to check on your house occasionally. We’ve listed 10 apps below which are all available in the Mac App Store.
Many make use of your Mac’s built-in camera (or an external USB one) so you can check what’s going on while you’re away. ISentry Price: £FREE Link: iSentry is another simple (and free!) app that uses your webcam record what’s going on.
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Mac System summary, Battery information, Network activity, Temperature Sensors. Unlike many other system monitoring apps for Mac, both status bar menu. Mac cpu monitor featuring top 3 processes; iOS devices support (trusted.
Just like Home Watch, it can be triggered to send you a video or photo whenever motion is detected. There are also various settings to control the activation time, sounds, alerts and email notifications. Images can be uploaded to various hosting sites, so you can view them from literally anywhere. Any movement near your Mac triggers a photo or video 3. IWatchU Price: £5.49 Links:, iWatchU is one of the most feature-rich of the surveillance applications we’ve covered, and just like most of them, it features some pretty advanced motion detection algorithms and can record video whenever an intrusion is detected, and let you know by sending an email. Every event is recorded to its history so you can easily look through all the events, which can be saved as either images or movies.
The app supports unlimited USB or Firewire cameras simultaneously – handy if you want to monitor multiple rooms at once. Perhaps it’s best feature (and something the other apps don’t seem to offer) is that you can stream live video of the action! View everything on your iPhone and iPad too with the freely available companion apps. IWatchU certainly provides all the features you could ever need to make sure your Mac is safe and sound! One of the most advanced and feature-rich surveillance apps we've seen, including streaming 4. My Webcam Broadcaster Price: £FREE Links:, My Webcam Broadcaster is another pretty decent free app, but it doesn’t have very many features – however the basics are covered well. It’s compatible with the built-in Mac iSight camera and many external USB ones, and can its snaps be viewed on the web, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch (you need to download the iOS app first).
It takes regular snapshots to create a time-lapse video, which you can make public or keep private. Simple features but the time-lapse video lets you see everything that's been going on 5. OpenEye Remote Price: £FREE Links:, OpenEye Remote is a little different to the other apps listed, because you need to have one of the remote controlled OpenEye professional cameras for it to work. Check out the OpenEye website for the full range of cameras – once you’ve got the correct one, you can view them remotely even pan, zoom and tilt! The app is free but of course you need to splash out on the hardware A brilliant app to monitor multiple cameras - however you have to buy an OpenEye camera first! Security Camera Price: £2.99 Links:, Security Camera is another basic app, but it’s simple to use and setup is a breeze. Every time your computer wakes, it silently takes a pic and saves the photo into the folder of your choice.
You’ll be able to see who’s been using your Mac without your knowledge with this little app installed Pictures can be uploaded to a Dropbox account for remote viewing, so even if somebody steals your Mac you’ll probably have a picture of the thief. It’s password protected, so nobody can disable it or delete the photos.
Who's been using your Mac whilst you've been away? Spy Cam Price: £6.99 Links:, Another app by Alice Dev Team, Spy Cam has more advanced features and capabilities than Security Camera. Videos are saved in 320 x 240 resolution, and can be triggered at intervals between 1 and 30 minutes with video lengths of between 5 and 60 seconds. Every video is compressed to save space on your Mac’s disk, and the developers claim that it doesn’t take up much system resources as it quietly runs in the background. Like most of the others apps, a password ensures that nobody can interfere with it, and videos are automatically sent to your Dropbox account. Not bad for just £6.99 and greater peace of mind that your beloved Mac is safe Save videos and photos to find out who's been rummaging through your Mac. Tattletale Price: £2.99 Link: Tattletale only works with the Mac’s iSight camera, but most Macs (except the Mini and desktop Pro) have one built-in anyway.
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The app silently runs in the background and takes snapshots whenever someone logs onto your account, or wakes up your computer. Images can be saved to any folder and sent by email, and location information is included (such as the IP address and Internet Service Provider), which could be quite useful to help recovering your Mac. If there’s any built-in positioning capabilities (which required Wi-Fi), these details are also used to pinpoint your computer’s location even further. Caught in the act!
Third EYE Price: £3.99 Link: Third EYE uses advanced motion detection to determine whenever somebody moving is near your Mac. Most of the apps use similar principles (a combination of image processing and the Mac’s ambient light sensor), but Third EYE claims their system is particularly advanced – the benefit of better motion detection is that you videos and photos are only activated when there really is movement in the room. Third EYE includes two modes – either continuous recording of photos and videos which can be sent by email, or it can record them only at the time of intrusion – the output can be sent by email to a mobile phone or computer.
Monitor several rooms at once with Third EYE 10. Who’s Looking Price: £2.99 Link: Who’s Looking also has two modes – continuous pictures taken at defined intervals (it has a built-in thumbnail image viewer so you can browse them quickly), or it will take a snap when your Mac wakes up. Every image is only accessible within the application (which is password protected) so nobody disable it or delete vital evidence! Dropbox is supported and it’s one of the few apps that supports external USB cameras in addition to the default iSight camera – great for multiple room monitoring. Upload the pictures to Dropbox and check remotely who's been on your computer.
Advertisement Activity Monitor is a If you want to be a fairly proficient Mac user, it is necessary to know what Activity Monitor is, and how to read and use it. As usual, that's where we come in. It monitors all of the running programs and processes, let you know where all your processing power and RAM is going, and provides enough useful information to diagnose many problems your Mac may be having. But as useful as Activity Monitor is, there are many more monitoring apps made by third-party developers that can be of use to the discerning Mac user. Each has something to make it stand out from the rest.
Some are free, some are not. Here’s the cream of the crop. The Free Ones The first thing I should point out is that MenuMeters is not compatible with the While the changes don't seem that big on the surface, there's a lot going on under the hood that could make this incremental upgrade one of the most significant to date.
– and when it comes out of beta, the developers say MenuMeters may never be compatible. To quote: Due to new Apple-enforced code signature restrictions, MenuMeters is not compatible with the OS X 10.11 “El Capitan” public beta. Although the restriction is similar, this is not directly related to 10.11’s “System Integrity Protection” (SIP, aka “rootless”) feature and disabling SIP has no effect on MenuMeters. Unless Apple makes the signature restriction optional, it is not clear that MenuMeters in its present form can ever be made compatible with OS X 10.11. So MenuMeters is only suitable for those running Yosemite or older. I am including it in this list regardless, due to the high praise it is receiving from users everywhere and its wallet-friendly price point.
MenuMeters, as the name suggests, is an app which places a group of meters in your Mac menu bar. They can be customized to show whatever you want, and each element can be dragged into a different position to suit you. The monitor can quickly shows you CPU, Disk Activity, Memory, and Net activity at a glance. This is one that I really like.
Called XRG (X Resource Graph), it is a highly customizable dashboard, where you can see everything from the CPU usage to the weather. In fact I love it so much that it will now have permanent residency status on my desktop. And I don’t allow any old app to live there, you know. You can have it updating as fast as every 0.2 seconds, specify what you want to see and omit (so you don’t get overloaded with information), and you can even specify the appearance of the widget.
Oh and it’s free! Memory Clean is focused solely on your Mac’s memory usage. It was featured by Apple themselves last year as an “invaluable utility” during an App Store promotion, and Macworld declared it a. It only has one function — to optimize your Mac’s memory by purging inactive memory.
It is most effective after you have finished using a memory-intensive app or game (close Chrome and watch your memory amount surge). It also shows apps which are using significant memory, so you know which ones you should try to close to make your computer go a bit faster. Activity Monitor serves a similar purpose under the Memory tab, but Memory Clean provides a prettier interface and fast menu bar access, which makes it worth a download in our opinion.
This one only works if you have You might think Apple’s relatively small laptop selection would make choosing a model easy. For some people, that’s true, but for others the tight range of options and prices makes for a difficult choice. With dual GPUs, because these are the only users who would see any benefit. According to developers, gfxCardStatus “allows MacBook Pro users to see which apps are affecting their battery life by using the more power-hungry graphics”. So it’s an app which tells you your MacBook Pro is using (integrated “software” or discrete “hardware” acceleration). If you notice your Mac is using the “wrong” one, you can switch over to the one you want.
This enables you to improve system performance and battery life. In fact, that by using this, you can get as much as 8.5 hours of continuous use of your Mac, after some minor battery tweaks.
The Paid Ones Now that we have taken a look at the best free ones, let’s take a look at some paid ones. Obviously, being paid, these should be of slightly higher quality, though some of you may object to paying when there are four capable apps above. ($4.99) I really like this one, and $4.99 is not that unreasonable. Stater It's the primary way many users interact with Mac OS X, but a lot of people still don't know some of the most basic and useful things the dock is capable of.
As an icon and a menu. You just have to click the icon depending on what you want to see. You can choose from combined and multi-core CPU usage, memory usage, and drive space. You can switch off any that you don’t need, and you even get six color schemes to match your desktop. ($2.99) If you are a big With Mountain Lion came the introduction to the desktop of the familiar Notification Center, ported from its iOS origins.
It’s brought even more unity between the desktop and mobile OS, and essentially replicates functionality that’s. Fan, then Monity will appeal to you, as it integrates excellently. After installing, just open Notification Center, click Edit at the bottom, and click the plus next to Monity. This should appeal to anyone who dislikes dock icons or items sitting in the menu bar. As well as the usual activity stats (CPU, memory, disk), it also tells you how much battery power you have left, how much space is left on your hard drive, and what’s going on in your network (such as your current internal and external IP, and incoming and outgoing traffic).
($4.99) Just like Memory Clean, Temperature Gauge has one purpose only — to provide every possible temperature your Mac has. It keeps tabs on every temperature sensor in your Mac and alerts you if something gets too hot. You can see how fast the fans are spinning, and all activity is logged to a.CSV file — handy for troubleshooting heat-related issues. ($18/$25) Fair warning – iStats Menu is the most expensive of the bunch here, clocking in at $18 for a single license and $25 for a “family license”. But everywhere I read, everyone had rave reviews for iStats Menu. They couldn’t get enough of it. And it’s not difficult to see why.
IStats has every conceivable stat about your Mac than you could hope to place on a chart. It digs down into the disk activity for every single app you have running to see which ones are the vampire apps sucking your Mac’s blood (cough Chrome cough).
There are far too many features for me to possibly list them all here, so head on over to the to see what you get for your $18 if you absolutely must monitor everything. ($4.99) System Monitor sits up in your menu bar (and takes up a lot of room by the looks of things), and gives you the usual computer activity. It provides useful stuff such as process load, CPU temperature, memory consumption, storage space, disk activity, and much more.
Happy Monitoring This is just a small selection of the Activity Monitors on offer, but based on our exhaustive research these are the best of the lot. While there are not many free possibilities, the paid ones, with the exception of iStat Menus, are reasonably well-priced and within the budgets of most people.
So — is Activity Monitor good enough for you, or do you use something else? Time to let us know! Explore more about:,.