Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

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CHAPTER 4 SYSTEM PREFERENCES
Parental Controls
The parental controls allow an administrator to put in place a number of restrictions upon a
user. These are generally thought of as a way for parents to limit the computing activities of their
children, but could be used in any situation in which you want to restrict or monitor a user’s
activity on the computer. The Parental Controls preference pane lets you tailor the controls for
any user account that has parental controls enabled. To set the controls, first select the desired
user from the user list (if the list is empty, then you have no accounts with parental controls
enabled), and then you can work through the five tabs presented to configure them. The five tabs
in the preference pane are System, Content, Mail & iChat, Time Limits, and Logs (shown later
in Figure 4-51).
The System tab (Figure 4-46) provides options that control how a user can interact with the
system itself. The Use Simple Finder option will alter the Finder’s appearance (Figure 4-47),
removing many options and directories, and providing access only to a user’s allowed applications
and their documents. For old-school Macintosh users, this is similar to what At Ease used
to provide.
Figure 4-46. The Parental Controls preference pane with the System tab active
The “Only allow selected applications” option will only allow access to the applications (or
groups of applications) selected in the following list. If you are using the Simple Finder, then only
the selected applications will show up; otherwise, the user will be prompted for an administrator’s
password before launching an unselected application.