Hi hujbera,
We've spent a lot of time examining the built in OSX firewall. Unfortunately there seem to be a fair number of bugs (we've seen these with other applications as well). To name a few:
1) It isn't always allowing incoming traffic to signed applications when that option is selected. (Sighthound Video is signed with an apple issued certificate, this can be verified through the codesign application: "codesign -vvv /Applications/Sighthound\ Video.app" without quotes in Terminal).
2) Manually adding applications in the UI sometimes works and sometimes does not.
3) Manually adding applications using the command line interface will typically work, but will also typically not persist after a reboot despite continuing to be listed.
4) When the "allow incoming traffic" option is off, or on and still blocking, sometimes the firewall will display the "Allow or Deny" message box, and sometimes it will not (and sometimes it will auto dismiss, or flash, etc...). This behavior seems to vary between seemingly identical machines.
We believe we have a good workaround for this which will appear in the next version of Sighthound Video. In the meantime you have a few options -
* Turn off the apple firewall. If you are behind a router, your router is likely blocking all incoming traffic that hasn't been explicitly allowed anyway, so the apple firewall isn't doing you any good.
* Turn off the apple firewall, and replace it with a different one. The firewall exposed by the system preferences is an "application level firewall" rather than the more traditional port based firewall. This would be great for less techie users, assuming it didn't have the above bugs. OSX does include a different firewall, pfctl, which allows for systemwide creation of port and content based filtering. If you are ever interested in trying that, a helpful GUI can be found here:
http://www.hanynet.com/icefloor/index.htmlHope that helps,
- ryan
