How-To: CamTwist & iCam - Receive Push Notifications For Just About Anything
by Rob M
May 8, 2011
Want to learn how to leverage push notifications to do things like monitor your Mac, your webcam, and more?
Let's say you're on your computer, and you have a download in progress. Maybe it's a movie, a software update, or a large app. You want to know when it's done downloading, and you don't want to hang around staring at the computer the whole time. Or, if you think someone might be using your computer while you're away, you want to know when they use it, and what they use it for. If this describes you, iCam is your solution.
iCam is an app that lets you view your computer's webcam and receive push notifications on your iOS device when motion is detected. But, by using CamTwist, you can also use iCam to monitor your computer's screen. If something moves on your screen, you can get a push notification, and then view the video feed. So, if you think someone is using your computer, you can not only know when they do it, but also what they are doing.
Here's the step by step guide on how to do just that:
That's it! Any changes that happen in your selection will send you a push notification!
- Download iCam from the App Store.
- Download iCamSource here.
- Open the downloaded disk image and move iCamSource into your applications folder.
- Download CamTwist here.
- Open the downloaded disk image, and install CamTwist on your Mac by running the package.
- Open CamTwist.
- Now, here is where you choose what you want to monitor. You can choose to monitor a webcam, a portion of your computer screen, a slideshow, a movie, or a flickr set. Whatever you choose, you will be able to monitor it live from your iOS device and even get push notifications if motion is detected.
- To monitor a portion of your screen, select Desktop+
- If you have multiple screens, you can choose which screen to monitor. You can also choose whether to monitor the whole screen, a portion of the screen, or even just an application. I'm going to demo this with selecting a section of the screen. You can do this to monitor the loading bar progress of a large download or a big install.
- Open iCamSource
- In the Video field, select CamTwist.
- Enter a username and password. You don't have to create an account. Just type in your username/password right there.
- Click "Start"
- Open the feed on your iOS device to make sure everything is working. To do this, open the iCam app, enter your username and password, and hit done. You should see the portion of your screen (or whatever is was that you set in CamTwist) in iCamSource on your Mac, and in iCam on your iOS device.
- At this point, if you only want to monitor your Mac remotely, you're done. But, you can also enable push notifications for any changes that happen to your output from CamTwist. To enable push notifications, just check the box in iCamSource, and set the sensitivity. I would set the sensitivity very high; changes on a computer screen are usually very small compared to the total pixels of the screen. Keep in mind, if your computer sleeps or starts the screensaver, it will send a push notification. Also, the mouse pointer does not register as a change on the screen.
