Mac Surveillance From Altomac

Being an employee, it happens to be monitored by the company you work for in some cases. Nothing bad here, as long as they tell you about it first. While this is a two headed monster, since it can increase productivity, but it can also kill it, it's not only companies that need Mac surveillance. After all, it gets harder with each day for kids to be safe in the online labyrinth... but before moving on, I have to tell you this: surveillance is OK, but only as long as the one being targeted knows about it!

The Mac surveillance tool we have here today comes from Altomac, and has just made its debut on the Mac software market, being labeled as version 1.0. Its name is User Monitor, and acts like a surveillance camera pointed straight at the desktop of any Mac, but with a lot of smart features, especially the ability to record user activity based on the application running at a certain time, for example only when he/she goes online using Safari.

While being focused on being easy to use and non-intrusive, as any Mac surveillance tool should be, User Monitor takes screenshots while working silently in the background, and I think this isn't the best approach to user surveillance, especially since it could end up filling all the available hard drive space with screen captures, and - because I am sure some people/companies will use it without telling the one(s) being watched - a smart user will surely figure out what's happening, sooner or later.

The feature highlights go below:

- Real Monitoring - Monitors the use of the computer by taking screen shots
- Easy to use - No special skills are required
- Password protected - No one can run User Monitor other than the administrator
- Nonintrusive - Doesn't interfere with other running applications
- Built-in Image Viewer - The Administrator can save on-disk images they need to keep
- Easy to install - Requires no special skills to set up

The minimum requirements of this program aren't scary at all, the producer only naming Mac OS X Version 10.5 Leopard or later, 3.5 MB Hard Drive space, and (a lot of) disk space needed to store screenshots, but from my own experience with such programs, I can also tell that you need a pretty fast Mac. Taking screenshots and saving them to the disk doesn't just happen without any CPU/disk activity, that's obvious, so...

... I think that $47.95 is a bit too much for such a basic Mac surveillance tool, but if you really think there's no other way than this, you should first talk to the naughty users in your company/school/etc., and only after that, move on and buy User Monitor.