One thing that does show a bit of promise of working with the Mac is the CMUcam. From what I've seen the code is written all in JAVA and should be able to work just beautifully with your mac,
I think all that you would need is a USB to Serial converter. Then in would show in /dev/... and all should go well, but that's just to configure the camera and mess around with it. I feel your pain of being a mac user caught in a world of windows users... Like a jellyfish in the desert.
