Feature: The Guest user accountHow it works: You've got a friend (well, probably more than one, but for the purposes of this example, just one). Your friend, a curious and look-through-your-medicine-cabinet sort, needs to check his email and get some driving directions on your computer. Don't want to give Nosy McSnoopsalot free rein to peek through your collection of model railroading websites? Just log in with the Guest account; a fresh, unimpaired new user for temporary access to your machine. As soon as he logs back out, the Guest settings vanish into the ether, and the next Guest who logs in gets the default settings, desktop, etc. as if the original guest had never been there.
Who will use it: Sooner or later, everyone, unless you have no friends -- or you don't care who gets their grubby mitts into your stuff.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-26-2007 @ 2:16PM
Brian E said...
As a developer, this is fantastic. I end up creating a new account and wiping it every so often when I'm testing.
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10-26-2007 @ 2:17PM
Johnny Thrash said...
Nosy McSnoopsalot LOL!!!
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10-26-2007 @ 2:18PM
Matt said...
yer your doing your countdown ... while i being a few hours ahead here in the UK, have my copy of leopard!!!
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10-26-2007 @ 2:28PM
John S. said...
But what if you are Nosy McSnoopsalot and want to see what kind of model railroading sites your friend is looking at while logged in to the guest account on your machine? Maybe you don't want that account to evaporate.
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10-26-2007 @ 2:30PM
RobD said...
The security implications for this make me very uneasy. You're trading better security on the workstation for the ability to track back if someone does something malicious on the net from your system.
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10-26-2007 @ 2:31PM
David said...
Wow. That's actually a really cool feature!
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10-26-2007 @ 3:11PM
kshackelford said...
Just found a funny feature in leopard, While looking at windows computers on the network, all windows computers have a blue screen of death icons! Its hard to see it unless your in cover flow :P
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10-26-2007 @ 3:55PM
Zisho said...
Neat!
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10-26-2007 @ 4:28PM
Fritz Laurel said...
@7 Zach -- I believe the difference is that its more of a "virtual" account and that the account's prefs, etc get wiped when the user logs out. A dedicated guest account would retain prefs, etc between logins. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
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10-26-2007 @ 4:28PM
Fritz Laurel said...
@7 Zach -- I believe the difference is that its more of a "virtual" account and that the account's prefs, etc get wiped when the user logs out. A dedicated guest account would retain prefs, etc between logins. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
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10-26-2007 @ 6:10PM
PSM said...
I like the sound of this. At my current job my desk has become the gathering place for anyone to check their e-mail, baseball scores, etc. and I don't mind that, except that my personal user account is set up with the idea that nobody uses my computer unsupervised, so all my passwords are automatic, etc. Logging into my spare account seemed like too much of a pain, but maybe if this process is more streamlined it would make me feel more comfortable to walk away while people are using my computer.
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10-27-2007 @ 2:08PM
Zach Everson said...
What's so different between this feature and just creating an dedicated guest account on Tiger and giving the account permission to do nothing? I've had such an account on my machine for years.
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10-29-2007 @ 5:28PM
sjk said...
Btw, I've noticed that referring to comments by numbers here often doesn't work well because those numbers seem sensitive to changing. For instance, Fritz's two posts refer to Zach's comment #7 though it really seems to be comment #12.
And when is this blog going to get comment previewing?
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12-20-2007 @ 9:53PM
wayne cabral said...
jumpingjack@cox.net
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