With a little tuning, the Application restrictions were fine, except of course for the fact that I couldn’t use XCode, but I guess that developers aren’t really in the Parental Controls target audience.

I never really got into the time restrictions properly, whenever I exceeded my limits, I just typed in the admin password, and gave myself more time.  The system is entirely workable however, it just wasn’t the point of my experiment.

The Mail and I assume Chat restrictions worked quite well.  Despite the intrusive nature of the process, if we’re talking about managing a child online, then the system works exactly as I’d want it to.

Like all web filters, the content filters leave a little to be desired, I couldn’t read a page on the supposed dangers of Soy Milk, I assume, because it mentioned the effect Soy Milk is supposed to have on ones libido.  But I could successfully search for breast tattoos on google images, and get to see naked chicks, some were even goths as per my previous post.  What really let the content filtering down was it’s complete failure to handle SSL – All SSL sites are blocked by default, and the error messages and silent failures are anything but helpful.  Some more investigation is warranted here, I can’t help but think that the OS is running a transparent proxy to check the pages, which would mean that it would work with any installed browser, which would be a good thing (bring on Firefox or Opera) but makes handling SSL difficult.

Overall, the experience wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected if Apple can overcome the SSL problems, then I can see how Parental Controls could be a useful tool.  Of course, the experiment did reinforce something that I already new – It is only a tool, and no substitute for effective communication between the Parent and the Child.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Parental Controls and XCode
• Parental Controls – First Impressions
• OSX Parental Controls

I was able to create an XCode group as a member of Developer Tools and Developer Documentation.  Adding Loom at Work to that group got the XCode environment working for that user, even though the user is a managed user.

The Loom at Work account has no restrictions on aplication execution though, and that is more significant than I first realised.    I’ll go as far as saying it should have been obvious.  Loom is heavily restricted when compared to Loom at Work, so much so that even attempting to compile with XCode fails.  Loom can’t run any of the tools necessary to compile code.  Adding the tools progressively into the allowed applications list eventually gets a successful compile. But permission is needed to even run the new executable.

It seems that XCode and Application restrictions are not going to work nicely together – ever.  Like I said, it should have been obvious.

Until I can work out how to address the problem, it looks like no software development for Loom.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Parental Controls – Wrapping things up
• Parental Controls – First Impressions
• OSX Parental Controls