Mac OS X Tiger was the first version of OS X to bring what could be considered a comprehensive set of parental controls to the Mac platform, but at last, Leopard goes all out to provide a wide array of parental controls in order to control what parents can do on the computer. Err, um, I mean to control what kids can do on the computer. 
Well, one significant piece of evidence that Leopard has many more Parental Controls is the fact that Parental Controls has now outgrown the Accounts system preference pane and now has its own pane. When you go to the Parental Controls pane and authenticate the screen, the list on the left shows all of the Standard user accounts that you have set up (other types of accounts don’t display). If you setup a Guest Account (see yesterday’s LFP), then that one will show up here as well.
If Parental Controls are currently disabled for the selected account, you will get a nice message letting you know that fact, and a big button that lets you enable them. (You can also enable them from within the Accounts pane too, although this pane is where you configure them.) Leopard now divides its parental controls among five different tabs: System, Content, Mail & iChat, Time Limits, and Logs.
The System tab doesn’t bring many new parental controls to the table. You can still choose to use the Simple Finder, which is a simplified version of the Finder for new users. You can also choose to only allow selected applications, however the selected applications list has now been nicely divided into a few various categories, and a search box is provided to let you filter the list.
The Content tab does have a few new things, however. Dictionary now lets you hide access to any profanity. I didn’t know that Apple’s Dictionary came with profanity, although with Wikipedia built into Dictionary, I can see how it would be useful. This tab also brings along a brand new, improved website filter. If all that a parent is concerned about is kids accessing adult websites, then they can turn on Leopard’s new automatic Internet Content Filter, which I’m told is pretty accurate at differentiating good sites from bad sites. (There is a Customize button which lets you setup a blacklist and whitelist to override the filter.) Or, you can simply choose to list the websites that they have access to. However, this is a lot easier to setup and manage than before, where the list of accessible sites was handled by adding approved sites to the Safari Bookmarks Bar via an administrator password.
The Mail & iChat panel lets you set up limits for, you guessed it, Mail and iChat. These pretty much work in tandem, by allowing you to setup a list of names and their respective e-mail, AIM, and Jabber accounts that can be approved (however there’s separate checkboxes for Mail and iChat so you can specify which one(s) to limit). However, there’s also an option where you can specify an e-mail address to send permission requests to. This way, if someone wants to correspond with your kid or vice-versa via Mail or iChat, an e-mail will get sent to your account where you can specify whether or not to allow or block the communication. I mean, that sounds like a pretty nice feature.
The Time Limits tab is a really useful, brand new set of options that I’m sure my parents will appreciate for my younger brother. This panel allows you to specify restrictions on when a particular account can even be used, and it nicely differentiates between weekdays and weekends. The time limits let you limit the amount of time per day that the computer may be used by a particular account. For example, on Monday-Friday, there may be a limit of 3 hours a day, whereas on Saturday and Sunday, there may be a limit of 5 hours a day. You can also specify a bedtime, which will disallow computer access during particular late-night hours. Again, you can specify different settings for school nights (Sunday-Thursday) and weekends (Friday-Saturday). However, these time limits can be made flexible. When you’re using an account which is about to have its time expire, Leopard will pop up a warning a few minutes in advance with a timer telling you how long you have. If you want to extend the time by a certain amount, you can do so by entering an administrator’s username and password. Similarly, if you try logging in after hours (and you get the red “do not enter” dot on the login screen), the administrator can similarly authorize a login for a certain amount of time.
And finally, the last tab, Logs, allows you to see logs of what websites have been visited by the user, what websites were blocked, what applications the user used, and any e-mail and iChat activity. Great for the parent who wants to have complete Big Brother-like control over their kids.
Although I am obviously not parentally controlled (currently), I will say that it’s nice to see Apple paying more attention to parents’ needs, because parental controls do ultimately make parents feel more comfortable about letting their kids be on the computer, and the computer is a good resource for kids to be able to interact with. The new Parental Controls in Leopard offer much more control and flexibility for parents who want to let their kids use the computer, albeit in a safe way, and for that, I say that Apple has done a pretty good job.
Feature Satisfaction Rating: 
Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.
Tags: accounts, feature, Leopard Feature Presentation, limits, Mac OS X Leopard, Parental Controls, review, System Preferences, users
