Chance to find best webcam

By FRANCIS TILL

If you already enjoy watching webcams, or just want to see what all the fuss is about, then Webcam Watcher is a dream tool.

Unfortunately, it's a dream that suffers if you haven't got broadband, but even dialup users will find it useful after a little tweaking.

In a nutshell, Webcam Watcher automatically trawls through lists of webcams, looking for the ones that are active and setting them up for display. Since webcam sites are notoriously erratic about updating, this can save considerable time and frustration.

The New Zealand-made software includes a downloadable index of 2600 cams and allows users to add others by a simple drag-and-drop process. A resizable panel on the left shows the selected webcam at its full size; the panel on the right contains resizable thumbnails of the last image shown on every webcam being trawled. When you click on a thumbnail, it becomes the full-sized picture.

Users can drag-and-drop webcams they like to a "cam bar" at the top of the screen and keep it active no matter what they're running. Great for keeping an eye on the dawn in Paris while you're working in Word.

All pretty neat, but one of the things that makes Webcam Watcher uniquely valuable is its growing index of webcam sites, almost all of which are family-friendly.

Unfortunately, on a dialup connection, the software can take 10-30 seconds (or more) per site to upload pictures, depending on congestion and other variables.

Cumulatively, that could mean the software takes over 50,000 seconds (14 hours) to cycle through all 2600 cams in the index - but that's not something most users will do more than a few times.

Once an index of cams is installed, it can be pared down and sorted several ways, to reduce the load.

Webcam Watcher has a nifty "auto update" feature that shows new pictures in slideshow rotation at full size as the software finds them while cycling through the index.

The software is, however, constantly downloading information, so it will impede your ability to quickly surf to other destinations, even while it is running in the background.

It can also hog your hard drive storage. When the software installs itself, it creates a main folder on your hard drive that contains separate folders for every camera it tracks. If you opt to save pictures as they change, you can quickly eat up huge amounts of data storage. Should this happen, though, you can clean out the folders with a single button click.

Webcam watcher:

US$19.95 (no NZ dollar purchase option available online) www.webcam-watcher.com (1.2MB download, also available in boxed edition).

Pros: A dead simple way to keep track of (and sort) hundreds of webcams with easy access to the hosting websites. Clean interface, intuitive controls, good price.

Cons: Consumes too much bandwidth; surfing elsewhere is dramatically slowed while the software is trawling. Works best when monitoring only a few webcams.

Rating: 7/10