Now that Apple has a patent on the slide-to-unlock feature on the iPhone’s screen, how will competitor’s phones be unlocked?

My guess is facial or maybe voice recognition or both. Why not have the same thing on your Mac? Instead of a password to unlock your Mac, wouldn’t it be even more cool if your Mac knew who you were just by you smiling into the camera? While I expect facial and voice recognition to be a feature in the future, there’s an app for that now (at least face recognition).

With the right mug you can lock or unlock your Mac.

3 Steps To Higher Security (kinda sorta)

Most Macs ship with a video camera (MacBook Air, Pro, iMac) which makes a good tool to help secure your Mac.

KeyLemon is the app that brings the added security of facial recognition to your Mac.

It’s simple. Download and install. Create a face model using your Mac’s camera. When you leave your Mac the screen goes into lock mode.

After that, getting back into your Mac requires your face to be the same as the snapshot on file with KeyLemon.

The app even takes a photo of anyone who pretends to be you and tries to login to your Mac. KeyLemon has three levels of security; high, medium, and low (useful when someone tries to login using a photo of you).

You can even take multiple photos in different lighting conditions (home, office, school, etc.) as facial recognition apps are sensitive to light and shadows.

Is your Mac completely protected from a hijacker? Nope. Any experienced Mac user who knows what he’s doing could easily bypass even facial or voice recognition to get at your files, but there’s extra effort involved.

KeyLemon works on Intel Macs using Lion and Snow Leopard.

Frankly, I’m surprised there are not more facial or voice recognition apps available for the Mac. I’d like to see voice recognition with a secret passcode.

Then I found this video of facial recognition being hacked the easy way on an Android Nexus smart phone.