As much as we love the built-in iSight that comes on most new Macs (it’s great for quick wacky pictures), it certainly has its share of shortcomings. For one thing, the controls for adjusting the image suffer from a severe case of non-existence. That’s kind of a mixed blessing, though, since it means that it leaves a gaping hole through which the folks over at Ecamm Network can stealthily slip their iGlasses software.
Thanks to Ken and Glen over at Ecamm (the brains behind the iPhone’s two-way video-conferencing hack), we’ve gotten an exclusive peek at the long-awaited iGlasses 2. Numero dos keeps the same great simple interface and all of the features you’ve become accustomed to, while adding some new functionality to give you even more control over tweaking your iSight (or the host of other cameras that version two now supports).
In the first version of iGlasses, you could choose from a variety of presets like Sepia, Black and White, Enhanced, Extra Bright, etc. iGlasses 2 takes things to the next level by letting you directly adjust things like your camera’s sharpness, contrast, brightness, and more. You can adjust an image exactly to your liking, then save a custom preset that you can choose from iGlasses’s pop-up menu in any supported application, of which there are now even more.
And my favorite feature: iGlasses 2 now supports digital pan and zoom of your camera, which allows for scary pictures like the one above. Finally, a one-stop shop for all of those alien horror movies that I’ve been longing to make (I think that picture above would make a great poster for the film I’m tentatively titling The Horror, about a giant radioactive eye that can incinerate people…over the Internet. Hollywood, if you’re reading: call me).
At what cost greatness, you ask? The original version of iGlasses cost just $8, but all good things must come to an end, and due to vagaries of inflation and the fall of subprime mortgages, they’ve had to raise the price to an astounding $9.95. Oh, unless you’re upgrading from version one, in which case that price looks a lot more like sweet, sweet free.
I should have a more detailed write-up of iGlasses 2 later this week over at Macworld, so stay-tuned for that.
