News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

December 13, 2007

troubleshooting

Dashboard rebels against parental controls

Posted Dec. 13, ’07, 1:05 PM PT by Aayush Arya
Category | Troubleshooting

Dashboard and LeopardThe day I upgraded to Leopard, I turned on the Guest account and enabled parental controls for it. Who knew that I was giving up the pleasure of being able to use the thousands of awesome Dashboard widgets for the pleasure of spying on the people who use my Mac? It turns out that, for some weird and as yet unexplained reason, Dashboard stops working on an account which is used to enable parental controls for another account.

Now when I hit F12, the screen dims like it’s supposed to and the plus sign (+) appears in the bottom-left corner of the screen, but the widgets are mysterious absent. The shelf still shows up and widget management works too, but that’s it. Clicking on any widget in the shelf quits Dashboard. Invoking the Dashboard, therefore, is the Leopard equivalent of “dimming the lights” and pretty much nothing else. It seems that I am not alone either.

After having led a widget-less life for the past month, I decided to do something about it. Among other things, I deleted the ‘com.apple.dashboard.client.plist’ and ‘com.apple.dashboard.plist’ files from my user library folder, turned parental controls off for the guest account, made a new account with parental controls, turned parental controls on and off on my own account, and logged in and out more times than I care to remember. At the end of the whole ordeal, I ended up with a situation that is just slightly better: I am now able to launch Dashboard and use all the default widgets, but the pleasure of being able to play pinball or track birthdays through third party widgets still eludes me.

I hope that Apple is taking notice and has added this problem to their to-do list for 10.5.2. In the meanwhile, if any of you readers have a potential solution for this, please enlighten us.


1 Comments

TK said:

it's been a pain to be widgetless these past four weeks. i've tried all the remedies, nothing works yet.

December 13, 2007 2:09 PM

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