As your children get older and more tech-savvy, you’ll need to take things up a notch to keep your stuff, your Mac, and your kids safe. You can add third-party software like the child-friendly browser BumperCar ($29.95, freeverse.com) or the parental control system MacMinder ($29.95, bit.ly/pXFSC4), but if you’re running OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard, you already have some superb parental control features.
The child-friendly browser BumperCar is packed with filtering options to ensure your children don’t see any websites they shouldn’t.
Parental controls are on a per-account basis, which means you can have different levels of restrictions for each child. You can restrict how many hours per day each child can spend on the computer, lock them out altogether at specific times, limit which applications they use (something that’s particularly handy with older children who might want to use applications such as BitTorrent clients for dodgy downloads), and control the kinds of websites they can look at.
There’s more. You can put limits on whom your children may iChat with and send messages via Mail to on a per-contact basis, and you can even prevent them from seeing profanity in the OS X Dictionary—although the options to stop users from burning CDs and DVDs, changing the printer settings, or changing their login password seem more useful to us.
Parental controls can also log your children’s activities so you can keep an eye on what they’ve been doing—or attempting to do. If you click on the Apps, Web, or People tab in Parental Controls, you’ll see the Logs button at the bottom-right corner of the window. Click on Logs, and you’ll have four options to choose from: websites visited, websites blocked, applications, and iChat. You can then view logs from the last day, week, month, or since the day you first turned on Parental Controls.
It’s not all perfect, unfortunately. Creating a list of approved sites can take an eternity, and an old, unfixed bug means Parental Controls’ attempts to block adult sites also blocks some secure HTTP connections. That can prevent perfectly legitimate websites from working: we’ve encountered problems with Gmail and Facebook over secure HTTP, although of course Facebook isn’t supposed to be used by anybody under 13. If there are sites you really want the kids to access, you can override the block by adding their IP addresses to the Always Allow These Websites list. Remember too that if you enable Parental Controls on your own account, you can end up limiting your own internet connection, blocking your applications, and generally annoying yourself.
You can hide external drives by unticking them in Finder’s Preferences > General and Preferences > Sidebar, but if you’d like more robust protection, select the external drive on your Desktop and hit Command-I. Under Sharing and Permissions, you can now change what people can and can’t do with the drive, and you can do it per user—just click on the plus sign, select the person, and then specify whether they should get full access, read-only access, or write-only access. You can do the same with files and folders.
No matter how careful you are, accidents can and probably will happen—which is why we’d strongly recommend you get hold of an external hard disk and use it with OS X’s superb Time Machine, which has saved our necks on countless occasions. If a file or folder gets damaged or deleted, Time Machine allows you to travel back in time, find an intact copy, and bring it back to the present day.
Time Machine has another ace up its sleeve: you can restore your system from a Time Machine backup to a completely different Mac via the OS X Migration Assistant. That means if the worst happens and your Mac gets damaged or destroyed, you can get up and running on a different machine while you wait for your Mac to be repaired or for your new one to arrive.
We’ve explored various ways of keeping your children away from things, but what about the content you do want to share—the movies you’ve made, the photos you’ve taken, or the tunes you’re trying to force them to like? When you create multiple user accounts, everybody gets their own iLife libraries, so when your children open iPhoto for the first time, they’ll see a blank library, rather than your library. That’s very easy to change.
Sharing iPhoto and iTunes libraries is easy—go to Preferences > Sharing and select what you want to share.
For iLife sharing to work, you’ll need Fast User Switching enabled in System Preferences > Accounts > Login Options. This allows you to switch between user accounts without having to close your open applications and log out.
In iPhoto, click on Preferences > Sharing > Share My Photos and specify whether you want to share your whole library or specific albums. Leave iPhoto running, switch to your child’s account, and then launch iPhoto. In Preferences > Sharing, click on Look for shared photos. Your library or shared albums should now appear in the source panel, and you can drag images from the shared library to the local one.
The same trick works with iTunes. If you enable sharing in iTunes (Preferences > Sharing > Share my library on my local network), your children can access your shared music. If you’re sharing with younger children, you might want to share specific playlists rather than your entire library. Remember too that your iTunes library, if you share the whole thing, will include movies and TV shows.
The downside to iLife sharing is that you need to remain logged in with all the relevant applications running in order to share a few files. Another option is to store things in OS X’s Shared folder. Anything you save in Macintosh HD > Users > Shared is available to every user, which is useful for files that everybody wants or needs to access. It might be a good idea to stick your iTunes library in there. It’s easier to maintain, organize, and protect a single shared iTunes library than multiple individual ones.
Keep iMovie projects on an external drive so they’re accessible to all and don’t clog up your Mac’s hard disk.
The exception to all of this is iMovie. The easiest way to share iMovie projects is to save them on an external hard drive that everyone can access. You can also export projects to iTunes or the iLife Media Browser from iMovie’s Share menu.
Parental controls are tied to individual accounts, and you need at least one user account—excluding your own—before you can apply restrictions. Open System Preferences, select Parental Controls, and click the lock. Select the user account you’d like to change.
The first screen lets you control the apps a user can open. Ban App Store apps or limit them by age. You can use the Allowed Apps panel to specify which apps this person can access. Enabling Simple Finder makes the OS X Desktop friendlier for younger kids.
The Time Limits feature makes your Mac off-limits when your kids are supposed to be studying, sleeping, or walking the dog. The Time Limits tab lets you specify how many hours per day each user is allowed, and Bedtime blocks access at specific times.
