[Dogma]

I realise it's been covered and many people have posted their views upon the security nature of this but some people may require this function.
The one function I like about OS X over 9 is the Multiuser startup i.e choose your name from a list rather than typing it out. For admin or general users it is fine to have each person able to keep their login name and password to themselves, though for an environment where users who do not have large computer knowledge, or no constant users, a guest account is required. It would be simple to post a piece of paper telling people to simply login as guest with no password, but even that may seem daunting to some (trust me, I know which market I'm thinking of).
So the Challenge is this - create a replacement login that lists the available users from a chooseable list.

I realise this may be very hard or nigh on impossible, but I've caughtened on to the idea, and it would make the whole multiuser environment much easier to use.
As you can probably tell, I don't know the ins and outs of OS X programming yet, but surely the Login screen has resources and coding like everything else, and therefore can be changed?
Or is it so embedded into the darwin layer that no-one could get into it?

There's a lot of talented people on these forums and I think enough knowledge to pull this one off. (you never know - Apple might offer you a job)

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"If you can't stand the flames, get out of the bulletin board!"

[gorgonzola]

Moving to OS X Developer.

thanks

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the oddball newsletter
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it's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything

[robotic]

Well, the whole login window is a tiff.
I think it might be mighty hard to change the textField into a pull down menu, but you can always edit the tiff itself to say "enter guest here" above name and "enter guest here" above the password.

Or, if everyone just needs to login under the same name, you can just turn auto login on, with a guest user you make.

When you need to login as administrator, you just go to sys prefs, enter your admin password, and turn off auto login. Then when you login next you can log in as your admin user.

-Nathaniel

[mikebeam]

It seems like all you would need to do is write a new login application that gets opened rather than the default login app. To me it seems there would be several challenges in this:

1) Some low level UNIX stuff that reassigns your new app as the default login app.

2) getting your login app to communicate with whatever login system there is beneath the UI.

I wonder if there is a way we could make the login app as it is some background server sort of thing, and then just make a simple Cocoa app that sends commands to that server login app to handles all the actual commands. In this way, the new login app would serve as a new front end to the current one.

I would think retreiving a list of users and displaying them in a list would be trivial. Hmmmm. Interesting idea. I like it...

Mike

[mikebeam]

Hello again,

well, the login app is just loginwindow.app located at
/System/Library/CoreServices

I can open the application's nib file in Interface Builder and muck around with the interface. Since we can't get to the source code, i wonder if it would be possible to splice some code onto the NIB file that simply provides a list of users and have this list connected to the IBOutlet that is normally connected to the user text field. I imagine that the loginwindow code just gets the stringValue of the user textfield, and pop up buttons would respond to this as well. Hmmm. Any ideas anyone?

[Angus_D]

Sounds like more trouble than it's worth. Ho hum... Just feedback it to Apple and hope

[SmileyDude]

There is a drawback, and this may explain why it's not there.

Typically under Unix, sysadmins don't want the names of all the users available to anyone... this is part of the logic behind disabling finger, besides buffer-overruns.

Once someone has a list of usernames, it's easier for them to attempt to obtain passwords for those users. But, without user names, it's a crapshoot. It's classic security-by-obscurity, but it does make things easier on the admin.

So, having said that, I wouldn't object at all to having the option to turn on a list of users, similar to OS 9... even with the pretty pictures . But I do stress the option... imagine a university setting where all 500 or so users are in the login box... .

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dennis

[NeoMac]

The OSX system admin. should have the a preference panel that gives him an option between a 'home' and 'pro' login window:

1. a "home" login window would basically look like the OS9 login system, with pictures and login names to make it more home friendly.

2. the 'pro' login system, is basically the current system, which is better suited to offices, schools, and such, only the 'shutdown' and 'restart' buttons would be disabled.