Few initial questions and issues

Durzel
Durzel
in SecuritySpy

Hi

Have recently got SecuritySpy on a trial to hopefully replace Blue Iris on a PC. I've got a few growing pains I was hoping to get some advice on:

1) Am I right in thinking there's no configuration setting to open the app as "hidden" ? macOS Ventura removed the option to add an app in Login Items to open hidden. I've managed to fix this with a command I found randomly online, but I just wanted to make sure this was the only way.

2) The "Lock screen" applet provided on this page (https://www.bensoftware.com/securityspy/helpfaq.html#RunBehindLoginScreen) doesn't work on Sonoma. I've given it the privileges it asked for, but when double clicking it I just hear a beep and nothing actually happens - the computer doesn't lock, so I presume it won't do anything if added to Login Items.

3) Currently I have two users in the household that are going to use this newly bought Mac. It appears that each user of the app - if launched - has its own preferences, which seems illogical to me. Surely a household or whatever isn't going to have different camera configurations per user. Is there a reason this app doesn't run as a system-wide service - like a virus scanner might - with a UI that interfaces with it? Currently I have it set up on one user, and have set them to auto-login (although this requires disablling FileVault - which is irritating) but this feels like a really odd way to run an integral piece of software.

Thanks very much :)

Comments

  • Ben
    Ben

    1) Yes, you are correct that Apple has unfortunately removed the "hide" option for startup items. But, according to this page, it is still possible to achieve this using an AppleScript command to add an application to the list, as follows:

    osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to make login item at end with properties {path:"/Applications/SecuritySpy.app", hidden:true}'

    Please let me know if this works for you or not.

    2) It seems that Sonoma has broken this, we'll take a look and see if we can make a version that works under Sonoma.

    3) SecuritySpy runs within a user account like a normal application, and this means that its settings are user-specific. One reason for this is that applications with user interfaces need to run within user accounts. The other reason is that users would normally have a dedicated Mac set up for SecuritySpy (perhaps acting as a server for other things as well, but not in use as a regular Mac for normal tasks), so it's unusual for SecuritySpy to encounter an environment that has multiple users.

    It's fine to run SecuritySpy on a Mac that is being used for regular tasks, but then you do run into the problem that you have encountered, if you need multiple users on the same machine. The solution is set to set up a specific user account just for SecuritySpy, and leave this running in the background at all times.

  • Durzel
    Durzel

    Thanks a lot Ben.

    You're right - that command does work, that is what I used to get it to start up as hidden. Perhaps it is something that could be added to the application settings in a future update? If not that, then perhaps open the app minimised?

    I hadn't thought about setting up a specific user for SecuritySpy.. that makes a lot of sense :)

  • Ben
    Ben

    I agree that it would be nice to be able to provide a solution in SecuritySpy as a substitute for the "hide" option. Perhaps we can simply have an option in SecuritySpy to always open without windows - would this have solved your problem? Unfortunately it's not really possible for SecuritySpy to detect if it was opened automatically via the login items vs. opened manually by the user, so we can't offer different behaviour for these two cases.

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