04 May 2011

Witness this!

If you follow us on Twitter or Facebook (and you should ;), you probably already know that last month we introduced Witness, our latest app. Witness turns your Mac into a home alarm system. As soon as your Mac detects motion, Witness sends a push notification to your iOS device, including mugshots of the thief, and even video.

Although we were pretty happy with the end result, we could have never imagined that in its first month, Witness would shatter the monthly Undercover sales record. That's quite a feat, given that Undercover is five years old now and is an extremely successful product. In fact, we have been so busy selling, supporting and updating Witness that we did not even manage to write a blog post about the 1.0 version!

In the meantime, Witness has been featured on or reviewed by Wired, TUAW, Mac360 and numerous other websites. Our favorite review, however, comes from MacStories:
There are many tweaks and hacks available online to turn your iSight into a security system, as well as utilities to lock your Mac from an iPhone or iPad while on the go. I bet many of you have heard of these methods or at least tried to follow one of those tutorials once. Witness, however, does exactly what a great app has to do: it combines multiple functionalities into a beautiful, easy to use and full-featured package that requires minimal setup and just works.
I highly recommend Witness not only because of the beautiful interface approach and usability — it’s the “just works” factor that combines a utility to lock a computer and turn it into a home alarm system that truly impressed me.

Today, we are introducing Witness 1.1, fixing some smaller issues that are inevitably part of a 1.0 release. If you haven't checked out Witness yet, now would be a good time to do so. With the 30-day money back guarantee, there is nothing to lose.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great to hear of your success, a solid product.

Being able to detect motion from multiple cameras would be huge. Is there any possibility of this in the future? I have a number of external USB cams that work great with my Mac (the Xbox camera for example works perfect); being able to monitor from more than one location/angle would increase the usefulness of the app a lot.

Is there a changelog for 1.1?

Keep up the good work!

Peter Schols said...

Thanks! Support for multiple cameras is something we are considering.

A list of changes can be found at:
http://www.orbicule.com/witness/changelog

Dee said...

would love to be able to adjust the sensitivity of movement. I'm picking up a lot of shadows from my window due to sun/clouds or a passing vehicle. I have no way of avoiding this, so I keep getting alerts.

This would be a great feature. I did like your FB page, however, posting would inform the household "perps" that I use this. Trying to catch "kids" coming into my bedroom.

Thanks for this! It's awesome!

Peter Schols said...

Dee, great to hear you love Witness! We will add a way to adjust motion detection sensitivity in an update.

Thierry said...

Peter,
A very nice article on Macworld: http://www.macworld.com/article/160872/2011/06/witness_for_mac_os_x.html

They have a couple of "cons" one of them you might want to tell them that is not accurate (the one about the timing of Witness being trigger, because the screensaver can do that) and the other one about "sniffing" the browser in order to play the H.264 encoded movies properly.

Other than that they like it, like me ;-)
Good job as usual.
Thierry

Peter Schols said...

Thanks Thierry!

I think they were aiming at automatically arming the alarm, which is not possible right now.

Peter

Thierry said...

Peter,
I reread the article and you are right but they did not mentioned the screensaver function.
Thanks for your great product.
Thierry