DetectX Swift History

BackupCam – a dash cam for your mac

The initial release of BackupCam has just gone live over on sqwarq.com.

The idea behind BackupCam is to keep a continuous, rolling video of the last few minutes of activity on your mac, in just the same way as dash cams in cars work.

There’s a couple of scenarios where this might be useful. If you’re working on a project where ‘undo’ doesn’t always work reliably or when you most need it to – Xcode, for example, can often let you get your project in a mess without offering you a clear path as to how you got there or how to get back, short of discarding all changes in a particular file – with BackupCam you’ll be able to see exactly how you got to where you are.

Similarly, BackupCam can also help you to review changes that you may not have noticed at the time – perhaps if you were distracted by something else happening, either on screen or off. This can help both as a security and a troubleshooting tool

BackupCam can record up to the previous 30 minutes activity, so may help you recover something that is missed even by Time Machine or other traditional file backup mechanism.

More details are over on the BackupCam webpage, but I’ll just note here that BackupCam can also be controlled by AppleScript, with all the flexibility that that offers. Here’s a sample script that checks whether the last recording was longer ago than the time interval set in BackupCam. If it is, it kicks off a new recording session:

BackupCam is still in the early stages of development (we’re calling v1 a beta), so please feel free to report any bugs or enhancments you’d like to see. At the moment, it requires 10.11.6 or higher and only records the main display. I plan to add support for multiple displays in a future update.

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news: DetectX v2.18 released

We’ve had a bit of a mad day here at Sqwarq and Applehelpwriter, releasing three updates within a few hours of each other for DetectX.

It all started with 2.16, which introduced some changes to the licensing and user interface. All well and good, until we noticed a serious security issue with Microsoft Silverlight had recently surfaced, and we didn’t want to wait to address it.

That resulted in 2.17, which added a Silverlight check to the detector Search function. If you have a version of MS Silverlight that is not the currently patched version, you’ll see a warning in the log drawer when you run a search. In 2.17 we also fixed a false positive in the Keylogger detector and updated some search definitions.

Alas, we’d inadvertantly let a bug slip in with v2.16 that prevented DetectX from quitting in certain situations. Luckily that report came in pretty quick (many thanks to Al), and we were able to address the bug with a simple code tweak (if you got bit by that bug, please open and then close the Licensing window before attempting to update to v2.18).

So, here we are at version 2.18 … we’re a bit breathless, so it’s time for a sit-down and a nice cup of tea!

Enjoy 🙂

news: DetectX v2.15 released

An update to DetectX is now available that makes some under-the-hood improvements and updates the user guide. The release notes are here.

news: DetectX v2.14 released

Yes, two in two days! We’ve added a Preference Pane since yesterday, and improved the performance of the search function. Note that the new Sparkle Vulnerability check we introduced in v2.13 is now off by default. It can be turned on from the Preference Pane (see above).

Other changes are listed in the release notes.

DetectX is still free, fully-functional, and without time-limit for home users. Available for download from here.

🙂

 

news: FastTasks v2.7 released

An update to FastTasks 2 has just been released. The app is free for home use and available from here. The release notes are here.

 

🙂

news: DetectX 2.13 released

We just released an update to DetectX, available for free download from here. The release notes are here.

news: FastTasks v2.6 released

An update to FastTasks 2 was released earlier today adding further adware definitions to the Analyser function. FT2 is available for free from here. Requires OS X 10.9 or higher.

news: DetectX for Snow Leopard update released

We’ve just released DetectX for Snow Leopard v2.1 (DetectXSL), a long-awaited update that fixes, among other things, the bug in the updater mechanism.

If you have problems either downloading or installing the update from within DetectXSL*, please delete the DetectXSL.app (v2.0) from your mac and download and install v2.1 directly from here (direct download).

Now that we’ve got a working install of 10.6.8 again in the Sqwarq office, we’re planning on updating DetectXSL a bit more frequently, though working in Xcode 3 again is proving to be a bit of a memory challenge!

(and for you more up-to-date folks, don’t forget DetectX runs on everything from OSX 10.7 thru 10.11).

🙂

*requires 10.6.8, Intel, 64-bit architecture

news: FastTasks v2.4 update released

FT2 v2.4 is now available from sqwarq.com.

This update includes a new ‘delete’ button in the Analyser and an auto-kill feature which searches for and kills MacKeeper processes running in the background when the Analyser is run.

The release notes are here.