Periscope is on ur Mac, monitorin ur kittehs. (Confused by the spelling? Check out icanhascheezburger.com.)

Need to catch your little sister borrowing your Members Only jacket? Do you suspect your cat of having cocktail parties while you’re at work? If you’ve got an iSight or other Mac-compatible webcam, Periscope can be your eyes and ears while you’re away from your Mac, capturing images like a security camera would and providing multiple options for sending the pictures to yourself. Just be wary of the manual, which is deceptive.

Periscope’s interface is simple enough. In the Capture tab, you configure the app to record for a set time, or to grab images when your iSight detects motion, when you press a button on the Apple Remote, or when you click the Capture Photo Now button onscreen. A preview window lets you see what the iSight will capture, but in our tests, the preview images were a bit grainy. In the Share tab, you can tell Periscope what to do with your images: email them, save them on your hard drive, or even post them online. Customization options include text, image, and timestamp overlays. The Review tab contains your image and lets you choose to save them, trash them, move them to Flickr, or even create a stop-motion movie with them.

Capturing images is a little tricky. There’s a status mode called On Air/Off Air, which Freeverse defines in the manual as the on-off switch for automatic sharing. According to the manual, when the status is Off Air, Periscope only captures images. When On Air, Periscope automatically shares the images too. But in our testing, the only image capture that could be used when Off Air status was engaged was Capture Photo Now. All of the other image-capture methods required On Air status.

Unfortunately, you can’t capture images from a camera on a different computer from the one Periscope is installed on. But Freeverse provides a one-household license, so you can install Periscope on multiple Macs in a single household. Don’t forget, you’re being watched!

Periscope provides a one-stop solution for relatively simple image capture and security review without the hassles of extraneous enhancements…but it would be nice if the manual was correct.

COMPANY: Freeverse
CONTACT: www.freeverse.com
PRICE: $39.95
REQUIREMENTS: 1GHz or faster G4, G5, or Intel processor; Mac OS 10.4.10 or later; 512MB RAM; 32MB VRAM; 500MB hard drive space; iSight camera or Mac-compatible webcam
Simple interface. Noise detection. Multiple ways to use and share images. Multiple image capture methods.
Status mode doesn’t work quite as defined. Images tend to be a bit grainy. Can’t access camera images from another computer.