I've spent the past couple weeks learning enough Cocoa / Objective-C to be dangerous, and here's my first attempt:

EyePatch is a menubar tool to easily enable / disable the built-in iSight cameras on modern Mac computers. This tool was influenced by the AppleScript based iSightDisabler tool released by Techslaves.org. I wrote it specifically to know the state of the camera at any point, especially before using web conferencing tools.

The code is hosted on github (http://github.com/mike/eyepatch/tree/v1) for any that want to modify / update / etc. I placed the code under an MIT License for free use by anyone. A binary version is attached below for convenience - otherwise you'll need XCode 3.1 or later to compile the source version.

Some notes about the tool and how it works -

• Makes changes to the permissions of the driver files for the iSight to enable / disable access
• Applications using the iSight must be restarted to see the effects
• The tool will ask for admin privilege whenever you change the state of the drivers - this is expected and normal. It will drop privilege immediately after each use
• Basic testing on my machine works well, but I have not tested widely. As such, to reiterate the license, no warranty
• Requires Mac OS X 10.5 or Later - the source code uses methods not present in previous versions
• The first version of the code uses an arguably unsafe method for gaining privilege - this is due the relative simplicity of EyePatch and my newness with Mac development. I plan to consider how to modify this safely in the future
• This binary is a debug version - if you have problems there should be some logging information in the console log

This is definitely a first version so comments would be appreciated.

EyePatch-v1.zip (34.00 kb)