Last week, upon returning from a trip to New York I told my daughter to make a list of fun things we could do together. It was daddy and daughter day. Her number two item on the list, the Apple Store. She loves hanging out in the kids area while daddy drools over new gear. Needless to say, she is very computer savvy for her age.
Determining what computer a kid should have and at what age is a very tricky and personal matter. It varies from kid to kid and from parent to parent. For example, my daughter(5 years old) has yet to break anything on her iMac. However, my son(2 years old) has gone through 3 keyboards, two mice and has filled up the DVD drive with coins (a common trait amongst boys i’ve found). They each have had their own iMac since day one. These old iMacs are sturdy and durable. And although 12 gigs is not that much hard disk space, it can hold a good 10 to 15 game CD images.
This is Part 1 in a series for a kids Mac setup.
The Kids Gear
iMac G3 SE 400 MHz ($200 @ eBay), 256 RAM, 12 Gig Drive, Airport Card
iSkin Keyboard Protector ($27 @ Amazon, fits only the new keyboards not the original iMac keyboards)
Ikea Round Table (not available online)
How long will the iMacs last?
Right now these old iMacs serves us good. They recently got updated to the latest Mac OS X Tiger and they zip along just fine for having only 256 of RAM. They chuck a bit during some new games like The Incredibles, but for the most part, kids games like Dora the Explorer are a lot less demanding than grown up games. For a couple of hundred dollars the iMac could be upgraded with more RAM and bigger Hard Drive, but I personally wouldn’t spend any more money on them and rather use that money towards a replacement in the next year or so. My daughter is about to turn six and I recently set her up with email and aim (with parental controls). She uses these (under supervision) to communicate with her grandparents and aunties who live in other states. This is where the iMac starts to drag. Because of the processor speed, she can do voice chat but not video. She can receive pictures through email, but accessing my shared iPhoto library to send some images is impossible. Next year I want her to learn to edit some videos but she will have to do that in mine because her iMac is not up to the task. So most likely she will be getting a faster computer in a year to handle all these new tasks. As for Dante, well, he will be looking at a Graphite iMac for a few more years to come or until his iMac dies.
The Setup
I have saved all their games into the computer as disc images. This has required some mad CD ripping skills I will be sharing in my next post. Armed with an array of custom icons, no docks, a very cool app launcher and parental control for mail, chat and web, this kids computers are very cool indeed. Not swapping discs(not an option for Dante anyway) needed, all disc images get loaded at startup so all they have to do is click on an icon and play.
Next post: disc imaging secrets
p.s. I’ve tried to track down the flash based launcher used at the kids computer Apple Store with no luck. Any leads are appreciated.
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How do you get the desktop to display the icons in the middle of the screen, similar to the icons on the desktop on the macs at the apple store?
i used DockTop, a cool little launcher. I will be posting about that on Part 3.
Very interesting. I’ve got a 4.5 year old, and she loves playing with computers. So anything that will make her experience more enjoyable I’ll take!
I am trying to do the same thing for my son. In addition to using DockTop I would like to be able to disable the menu bar and Dock. Of course I can hide the dock but my 3 year old is way to clever. I poked around xCode and found a function to totally hide the Dock and the Menu Bar but it only stays hidden while my compiled app has focus, click on anything else and the Dock/Menu reappears. Any suggestions? I did create an AppleScript app to log out which I added as an icon to DockTop to address the issue of not having the menu available.
Many thanks and I very much enjoyed your first two installments.
Mike
I cant wait for part 3 regarding the use of DockTop. I just purchases it and have the same questions on how you have 3 menues up I can get three but when I log back in they are all the same as the last one saved. Also how do you hide the Dock permanently and make sure spotlight is not an avenue to launch programs.
To run it in three rows, duplicate the app twice so that you have DockTop, DockTop Copy and DockTop Copy 1. Launch the apps one by one and edit the preferences of each one to add the applications to each row. DockTop should keep separate preferences for each so the apps you select on the first ones are associated to that copy of DockTop only.
I’m using DockBlock, a little app that runs from the menubar. It allows you to disable, hide or show the Dock.
Hum, I haven’t really looked into this. You can have Spotlight not look into the hard drive by specifying it in the spotlight preferences(available from the spotlight results). I’m sure there’s a way to disable it as well. You can also limit the user to only a few applications but this tends to conflict with games from disc images. Remember, we’re not building a fort knox kiosk here, just a limited permissions kids computer. More to come soon, I would appreciate if you guys point out any specifics you might be interested in like the Spotlight issue.
Ok, I’m stumped. How did you hide the volumes on the Desktop?
From the Finder select Preferences > General and deselect Hard Disks, CDS and Connected Servers from the “SHow these items on the Desktop”
Duh! I can’t believe I missed that! Thanks!
Barry, you were right. After relaunching, DockTop will only remember one of the settings and not all three. Jonathan Nathan, author of DockTop read this post and has built a quick Applescript called Multiply DockTop, a little script that will duplicate DockTop and assign new Bunddle IDs so that they each retain their preferences. Thanks Jonathan.