Oculus has lots of features that you may never need to use. These are all optional, but some of them might be of use to your in your particular situation.

The Script Dialog

Oculus can execute AppleScripts that you have placed into the Oculus Scripts folder located in the same folder as the Oculus Application at certain times. You can select these scripts from the Scripts item of the Settings menu. Here are the specifics about when each script will be used:

After opening document	This script is executed right after the document is opened, but before any pictures are be taken.
Before taking picture	This script is executed just before a picture is taken. You can use this to play a sound such as "Say Cheese!"
After taking picture	This script is executed just after the picture has been taken, but before any uploading of the data has started. You might, for example, play the sound of a camera's shutter.
After uploading picture	This script is executed after the upload (or local save) of the picture is complete. This is often a good time to execute scripts having to do with closing PPP connections.
When motion is detected	This script is executed when motion has been detected. You might use this to send yourself and email or page. When you receive this notification, you would then check your webcam to see what is happening.
When sound is detected	This script is executed when the sound in the room is louder than the threshold you have set. Once again, this is useful if you want to notify yourself via paging or email.

In addition to being able to execute AppleScripts when certain actions take place, portions of Oculus can be scripted via AppleScript. We've tried to make scriptable all of the things we thought would be useful. As with most AppleScripts, the best way to learn the details is to open the Oculus Dictionary from Script Editor. You can use AppleScript to:

• Change the contents of any text caption
• Change the QuickCaption
• Change the name of named captions
• Change the value of captions (such as the Gauge plug-ins)
• Perform these changes on the inactive or active captions
• Refer to captions by name or number
• Take a picture
• Put a given window online or offline

Here's some examples of changing captions using AppleScript (both with and without updating right away).

tell application "Oculus" set value of caption "temperature" of window "mycam" to 50 end tell tell application "Oculus" set value of caption 1 of window "mycam" to "Hi mom!" takepicture of window "mycam" end tell

Is there something in Oculus you'd like to script but can't? Let us know!

The Toolbar

The Toolbar

Many of the common operations of Oculus can be accessed via the toolbar. You can show or hide the Toolbar by using the menu item in the Webcam menu. Oculus remembers your toolbar location and preference so the next time you run Oculus it will be configured the way you like. The items in the tool bar are as follows:

• Document settings
• Schedule settings
• FTP settings
• Trigger settings
• Photo settings
• Movie settings
• Script settings
• Crop
• New text caption
• New picture caption
• Manually take picture
• Upload current movie now

Oculus logs all FTP transactions into memory. This can be useful for debugging a new webcam, or detecting errors in an existing one due to failed internet connections. You can display the log window by selecting Show Log from the Webcam menu. You can use your mouse to select text in the Log window and copy it to the clipboard. You can also use Select All from the Edit menu to select the most recent log contents. The log keeps up to 20K worth of information. If you need more logging, use the Preferences menu to save the log information into a text file.

Log window

When critical FTP errors happen, you will see "Error!" in the status area of the main window. Clicking on this status will also open up the Log window. The location and display state of the log window is remembered by Oculus, and will come back with that same state the next time you run the application.

If you are having trouble with your FTP setup, and wish to send email asking questions, it's very helpful if you include a log demonstrating the error you are seeing.

Oculus has some preferences that are global to the application and not saved with each document. These include the Camera settings as well as your Registration information and the information set in Preferences dialog.

Preferences dialog

The Preferences dialog lets you configure the Language, whether to show the actual font in the Font menu, whether to timestamp the Log entries and whether to Log to a file.

By clicking on the Language popup, you can select from one of the following languages that Oculus has been localized to:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish

Interested in helping with localization? Let us know!

Oculus can display the font selection menu in the Text Caption editing dialog in the actual font used. For users with large numbers of fonts, however, this may make this dialog quite slow to draw. You can control this option here.

You can also select if you would like Log information to have timestamps next to each entry (the default is to do this), and if you would like Log information written out to a file rather than just kept in memory.

Logs can get quite large over a period of time, so you may need to throw this file away once in awhile to avoid using large portions of your hard disk for the log.

Sometimes, you don't want to use the same name for each file captured by Oculus. You may want to name your time-lapsed movie files with the day of the week so that you can have a weekly record of what your webcam has seen. You may even want to save a record of images or movies and never have them overwritten to allow you to later check for events that may have happened.

You can do this by adding Wildcards to the names that you have given your files. These wildcards can be used for captions, QuickCaptions, FTP Path names, and file names.

Any file that Oculus saves or uploads can contain wildcards that will will be replaced with the appropriate information. For some wildcards, this may include the time or date. In the past, Oculus provided some very simple time and date stamping, but by using wildcards, you can now specify the format more exactly.

Previous versions of Oculus had a Timestamp and Datestamp option for Photo and Movie destination. The naming format can be exactly the same if you use the following wildcards: Datestamp: %y%0M%0x name Timestamp: %H%m%s name Combination: %y%0M%0x %H%m%s name For the Datestamp, this will print the two digit year, followed by a zero-led month number, followed by a zero-led day of the month. For the Timestamp, this will print the 24 hour time, followed by the minutes and the seconds.

Here's the meaning of each of the wildcards:

For example, you might put "Capture %d %T" as a file name to capture images into a sequence of files from your webcam. Using the examples above, the file would be named "Capture 8-7-00 2.03.06 PM". It is important to note that unless you delete these files, the storage space required for them will continue to rise. This is because Oculus will be creating new files for each of the images captured.

Many FTP Servers assume that the slash / designates a new directory. This would cause the upload to fail because it would not find the directory to store the file in. Similarly, the MacOS can not handle colons : as they designate a new directory. Oculus resolves this problem by converting slashes to dashes - and colons to periods .

If you use wildcards, it can be unlikely that the Cycle last [n] pictures will make sense. If you use the Time wildcard, you will not have the same name to cycle through.

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