iSurveill

The advancement in technology helped develop modern tools for socializing, such as applications and even devices like microphones or webcams for an enhanced experience. On the other hand, webcams can also be used as a means of surveillance with fast and high-quality output, depending on your device. In this regard, iSurveill serves as a small utility that records webcam activity and is also equipped with a motion sensor feature.

Overall, the application is pretty lightweight, both in terms of systems resources used, as well as the set of features it comes equipped with. What you need to keep in mind though, is that you need to have Adobe AIR installed on your computer for proper deployment and usage.

The main window only comes in a fixed size and includes a decent preview area, as well as a set of options and controls. A disappointing aspect is that the application is only capable of capturing still images, with no support for clips.

Amongst the options you get to work with, you stumble upon a manual trigger for the recording session, a button to take a single snapshot, the possibility to have the capture task automated by enabling a motion sensor, toggle real a time preview and a few time management options.

Sadly, pictures are only taken at a minimum of 10000 ms, which represents 10 seconds, time in which a lot can happen. Further decreasing practicality is the lack of options to stop the recording session automatically. Unless the corresponding button is pressed, the specified folder to store images is filled with snapshots taken at the specified interval.

What's more, there are no quality settings to work with. The only file type generated is JPG so you need other applications for editing or enhancing. Moreover, webcam color tools need to be handled from the driver or operating system control panel, because of the lack of a quick access button. Output resolution also leaves something to be desired, pictures being saved at a maximum resolution of 640 x 480.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that iSurveill is not really what you'd expect from a surveillance application. The major disadvantage is the lack of support for video recording, further spiraling practicality downwards including missing options to make it run on startup, configure webcam color settings or even set the recording to end automatically.