→ Home Zone beta 2

Thanks for your feedback on the first beta. Today I made Home Zone a lot more flexible:

• You can define enter and leave actions for multiple zones, which can be triggered my multiple networks (all of them or any of them)
• You can enter custom ESSID names to get your invisible Airport network working (I guess you’ll have to be connected to that network to enable that zone, though)
• You can select bluetooth devices as a zone trigger (only visible devices, I’ll see if I can support invisible but paired devices)
• Home Zone will leave all zones when terminating, thereby re-enabling your password no matter what networks are visible.

As always, I appreciate your feedback. There’s obviously room for adding lots of cool actions now (besides enabling or disabling the screen saver password) or refining the zone triggers (like checking the MAC address of the AP) and several other things… stay tuned.

The refresh interval is 15 seconds for Airport networks and 60 seconds for Bluetooth devices, BTW (check the small spinner in the configuration window). Oh, and the log window shows you when triggers and zones become (un-)available, so make sure to check this if something goes wrong.

Posted in Home Zone | 9 Comments »

Taking your MacBook with you wherever you go is convenient and makes you look good, but it’s also potentially dangerous. Anyone could just grab your notebook and play around with it when you don’t pay attention. That’s why someone invented the screen saver password lock (and FileVault), which keeps prying eyes away from your precious data. But back home, it can be quite annoying. Leave your notebook to get a beer from the fridge, come back, type your password. Over and over… (one beer doesn’t get you through the evening, does it?). Can’t your Mac notice that you’re home and turn off the password protection?

It can! Home Zone does exactly this, provided you got an Airport network at home. It lets you select any wireless network name, switches off password protection when this wireless network is available and switches protection back on when you’re back on the road.

Note that this is a beta release, though. I hacked this together in less than an hour this afternoon to solve the problem I described above, but there might be improvements that would make it work better for you. I totally appreciate your feedback here. I’m already thinking about letting the user define more that just one trusted network, maybe also using the proximity of Bluetooth devices and doing more than just switching the password protection on and off – user definable actions would be pretty cool, I think.

Oh, and I’d really love it if someone did a decent icon for this… my icon design skills are pretty bad, as you can see.

Posted in Home Zone | 11 Comments »