Mini WebCam for iOS

Webcams are nothing new, but we were intrigued by the idea of one that delivers live video from our iPhone directly to the Web. Unfortunately, a poorly designed interface prevented us from fully experiencing Mini Webcam's potential.

Mini Webcam opened with a fairly straightforward display, at least at first glance. Your Webcam's name appears at the top and you have the option of changing it. In our case, it pulled our iPhone's name (which was our own) and displayed it. Swiping your finger pulls up the rest of the app's settings, which include adjusting the app's video quality; a slider bar lets you adjust from low to high quality, though the app warns you that the higher you go, the slower the capture. From there, Mini Webcam also lets you adjust the Update Frequency, Port, and Flash. After making our adjustments, we wanted to move on to test the Webcam, itself, but we couldn't get the QWERTY keyboard to disappear and it took up half the screen. What's more, even if we could get the keyboard to go away, there was no way to navigate back to the app's main page, which is where you start the Webcam. We had seen it when we first started the app, but could not figure out a way to get back to it from our current screen. Closing out of the app and getting back in just took us back to the screen we were on; we had to uninstall and reinstall to get back to the main page, but encountered the same issue when we updated the Webcam settings.

There are many great uses for Webcams, including, as the publisher points out, using it as a baby monitor. However, if you're looking for an easy way to watch live video, we do not recommend Mini Webcam.