Lovely Interface, Lite on Features, Poor Performance…From the perspective that this is really a system and not just a single app, the system is disappointing. A great app if you want photos and videos of people's back-sides. (aka people leaving the scene)

Three components exist to this system, the iOS app, the computer app and the cloud server with a service cost of $40. The computer app manages the camera, detects the motion and pumps the photos and video to the server. The server then alerts the iOS device via notification that new data exists and the iOS app is used as a client to the server to view the data. In leu of using the iOS app, you can access the same information on the web interface. All in all, a decent design which keeps firewalls secure by negating the need for the iOS app to connect to the computer app. Both apps reach to the cloud. Of course, without the fee based cloud service, the apps non-functional.

Now if it only worked and worked reliability and accurately…

As a system, the operations are frustrating as performance is poor. Photos of one person have come in while videos of another are taken. Somehow the first person disappeared, replaced by the second and nobody was running. Initial snapshots when motion is detected are taken and by the time the video is activated people are easily out of camera view. Most of the time you get a video of people's backsides, and if you are into that sort of thing, this is definitely your app!

With two machines (two cameras) in the same room, rarely do both trigger on the same motion in the room; usually just one. This begs the question if there are times when neither detect motion and visitors go unnoticed.

Without live video capability, ad-hoc viewing of what the camera sees is relegated to asking for snapshots from the camera back to the iOS app. Such snapshots are frequently plagued with long delays do what appears to be Orbicule's server performance.

At the end of the day this is a $40 security solution which has a lovely interface, is light on features, has mediocre to poor performance and has questionable reliability. By contrast, I have SecuritySpy running in the same room on a different machine and it's operations are flawless…and it has live video on demand.

At a very minimum, until the performance issues are addressed, can't recommend this.

Some really great new features but the old nasty bugs remain and in some cases have gotten worse…

Love the ability to install the system very quickly from a thumb drive. Unfortunately you get stuck re-installing Lion with some regularity...

Apple Mail remains incredibly buggy: consumes CPU causing ½ life of battery, crashes, indexes corrupt, searching returns different results than Spotlight in Finder, very slow performance, beach ball lock ups, refuses to quit, outbound mail stalls for hours, sometimes days, outbound server availability detection fails,

Apple Calendar remains buggy: locks up, moving events to a new calendar re-invites everyone and reassigns events you accept as those you sent, stalls.

System corruption is occurs with regularity causing users to have to reinstall the OS.

I hope Mountain Lion fixes...

The main issue that has been encountered with 10.2 for us has been the corruption of system disks.

On a 15" MacBook Pro (unibody, 2010) and on a MacBook Air 13" (thunderbolt, SSD) we attempted to encrypt a fresh install of Lion 10.7.2). The encryption kicked off fine and everything looked normal. According to the documentation PGP 10.2 MP 1 should work and we expected the typical reboot after the disk was "instrumented" and clear sailing.

In both cases the reboot after the disk was encrypted ended up with an unbootable disk.

No attempt at recovery worked whether it was booting from another disk and attempt at decrypting nor attempting to use an older recovery tool built specifically by PGP for this sort of problem.

We are 2 for 2 and have no reason to expect anything but failure.

Ref
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/resources/sites/BUSINESS/content/live/DOCUMENTATION/4000/DOC4554/en_US/pgpDesktopMac_102MP1_releasenotes_en.pdf

Developer site and associated download link are dead.

Concerned... It apparently will not rip a video if prevented from calling home when it does the rip. I initiated a rip and my security software flagged RipIt calling home. First I denied the communication and RipIt just sat there not ripping until I quit. Tried again, same thing. Then I permitted the communication with the mothership and it allowed the rip. Is it storing my action on their server? Big Brother?

Having a problem with Chax during network transitions. If I change my Cisco VPN status (worse when connected going to not connected) Chax crashes iChat.

Otherwise it works rather nicely.


Process: iChat [258]
Path: /Applications/iChat.app/Contents/MacOS/iChat
Identifier: com.apple.iChat
Version: 5.0.3 (745)
Build Info: iChat-7450300~8
Code Type: X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [135]

PlugIn Path: /Users/WmCerniuk/Library/ScriptingAdditions/ChaxAddition.osax/Contents/Resources/ChaxLib.bundle/Contents/MacOS/ChaxLib
PlugIn Identifier: com.ksuther.chax.lib
PlugIn Version: 3.0.2 (15)

Date/Time: 2011-02-28 08:27:03.135 -0500
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.6.6 (10J567)
Report Version: 6

[snip]

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: 0x000000000000000d, 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Nothing but crashes under Snow Leopard 10.6

The download link times out after very little download. Additionally the server does not report the size of the download as it occurs which indicates that it is behind a (malfunctioning?) proxy.

This file can be found on the torrents but does raise the question, can it be trusted?

The problem is that since Cisco does not provide this software freely and IT shops are typically Mac-ignorant or Mac-hostile in the enterprise, users are relegated to creating security issues by going after these downloads from unknown and untrusted sources. Cisco actually creates the security problem with their approach to software distribution.

Ironically, the software is awful (poor interface, poor performance, buggy and causes kernel panics) and not something that anyone would want short of needing to connect to proprietary Cisco VPN concentrators (servers).