I was trying to find a way to autostart iCamSource on a Mac OS X 10.6.4 guest account so that I could have my machine self-recover in case of temporary power outage and resume recording while I am away for extended periods. I managed to get it working, and thought I'd share.
To restart after power failure, open System Preferences > Energy Saver and select "Start up automatically after a power failure."
For auto-login, go to System Preferences > Accounts, enable the Guest Account, then select Login Options > Automatically login Guest Account. You may have to click the lock in the lower left to authenticate first.
Now, to get the Guest Account to launch iCamSource with the proper settings, you'll need to do a few things. Download the Server Admin Tools for 10.6.4 from Apple at
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1071, mount the image and run the installer. You don't need a Mac OS X server to run these tools. When done, you'll want to locate and launch /Applications/Server/Workgroup Manager.app. The Guest Account shouldn't be logged in for the next steps.
Within the dialog, enter "localhost" without quotes for the address and your admin username and password in the other fields, then click Connect. In Workgroup Manager, go to the application's View menu and select Show System Records. Click on the Guest Account (UID 201) in the list and then the Preferences icon in the top toolbar. With the Overview tab selected, chose Login from the list. In the Items tab, select Always and hit the "+" to add iCamSource from your Applications directory. Hit Done at the bottom of the view. Then click on the Details tab and hit the "+" at bottom, select iCamSource again, keeping "Import my preferences for this application" checked and "Manage" set to Always**. Click Add. Then verify some of the settings in the plist file by hitting the Edit button, then opening the Always disclosure triangle. AutoStart should be true, RecordMotionEvents might want to be set to true. Under Cameras should be another branch for your webcam(s), open it. Verify DetectMotion = true, RecordMotionEvents = true, SendMotionDetectionPushNotifications = true (if you choose to), and I created a folder in the Finder and changed the MotionEventsFolder to use "/Users/Shared/Pictures/iCamSource Motion Events" without quotes so that the saved images are not deleted if the Guest Account is restarted. You could probably extend this by adding Hazel, DropBox or a Folder Action to the login items and properly configuring them to move your images somewhere else. Hit Apply Now, quit Workgroup Manager and restart the computer.
Your mac should boot into the Guest Account and should be armed from that point forward. If you need to make adjustments, log out of Guest and back into your Admin account, run Workgroup Manager and edit the plist again.
** You can set Manage to "Often" instead of "Always" if you'd like to be able to edit the preferences while in the Guest Account.
Thanks SKJM for the killer applications.
