mac surveillance software

I’ve been trying to rewrite Sneaky Bastard as a Preference Pane bundle from time to time. Unfortunately, it’s been more trickier than I thought. I can’t quite get the right resource on how to make this kind of build in Xcode.

Deciding to go this direction is based on two goals: Give Sneaky Bastard an option to be hidden from the Menubar but still accessible to the user. And to get the issue of converting from application bundle to a preference pane bundle out of the way so I can finally integrate Sparkle framework.

There are some people who are really concerned about the ‘discreetness’ of the app with the icon sticking out of the menubar though. Martin Mark got creative with Automator and submitted his own solution: An Automator script that will quickly fire up and close Sneaky Bastard upon login. He also took it a step further and made an alternate transparent icon. You can download them here.

The Automator script is intended to be run from startup via Login Items. It will look for Sneaky in the Applications directory and run for 20 seconds before shutting down. All this will also be simple to customize in the Automator application.

After 3 (minor) version releases, around 6 months of dropping in and out of the code, I have already achieved what I initially set out to do. From herein my work in Sneaky will probably be fewer and far between. I have a few things remaining before I officially “hang the towel” on this little project. I’ve received some suggestions from users and most of them make a lot of sense.

So, here’s what’s coming in the next release(s).

Add option to grab Apple Mail’s SMTP settings. A couple of people have emailed me saying how it was not easy setting up Sneaky Bastard’s mail settings. A checkbox that would make it simple to copy Apple Mails settings should fix that.

Add option to hide it from Menu Bar. One of the earliest suggestions I got was that Sneaky Bastard should not be accessible from the Menu Bar, otherwise it can easily be disabled by a malicious user (well… provided he/she knows what it is). It’s true. The decision to make Sneaky accessible on the Menu bar was because it certainly wasn’t going to appear in the Dock or the Task Switcher. And the fact that it’s a more discreet place to be(add to the fact that it’s much more cooler to be up there ). To allow Sneaky to be hidden from the Menu bar while still making it accessible to users, I’d have to make it as a Preference Pane.

Add auto update. It’s really a shame when you’re distributing software and you have to ask previous users to remove the old version first before installing a new one. Fortunately there’s a popular open source framework that makes it easy to add an auto update feature to Cocoa apps: Sparkle. I’ll be integrating this into Sneaky on the next version.

Make “temp” folder hidden. This is something I should have done from the very beginning considering how easy it was to implement (making a file invisible in Unix is as simple as adding a ‘.’ at the beginning of the filename). I was just worried that casual users might not be able to locate the snapshots if they happen to try and look for it.