how to lock icons in place or reset them

Here is the problem:

My grandmother has frail hands and clicks and drags when she does not mean to. So the dock and its icons are always getting mixed up, deleted, hidden. etc etc..

How can the mac be setup to either lock the dock and all of its contents or have it all reset when the mac is logged out and logged back in?

I setup a dummy account that was not admin, but the user still has access to move icons and play with the dock.

Thanks


and she has the latest iMac with Snow Leopard I think. Purchased a few weeks ago. I have 10.4 so I'm not up on all the new stuff.

You could install Deeper when it comes out of beta from Titanium Software
(the makers of Onyx). It has the option of locking the icons in the Dock.

Next one is going to be using Parental Controls. You would have to create a new admin account and change her account to a standard account. There will be other disadvantages to this.

Next one - open up Finder, head to Users / her user / Library / Preferences
right click, select Get Info on the file "com.Apple.dock.plist", then put a check mark in the 'Locked' box there
She'll still be able to make the changes, but this will put the dock back as it is after a log out and back in, restart or a killall dock command from terminal.

You can lock the contents of the dock if you're willing to use the Terminal. Open up Terminal (/Applications/Utilities) and enter the following: Hit enter and then enter the following: Hit enter and you're done. Note that if you want to change the dock, you will need to re-enter these commands but change "true" in the first command to "false" (without the quotation marks of course). I just tried this and could not change the order nor could I add icons to the dock. See here for more.

Explanation - the first command effectively sets the dock as immutable or unchangeable. The second command relaunches the dock so that you can enjoy the changes. Enjoy!

Might I add to van's post, that if you're going to use the terminal command he has posted, that in order to prevent typos, you copy and paste that command into terminal, as opposed to manually typing it.

Hope this helps.

bobtomay said:

select Get Info on the file "com.Apple.dock.plist", then put a check mark in the 'Locked' box there

Click to expand...

I like that! Just in case my better half accidently poofs something, I did it. I hope I can remember that when something else isn't behaving because of it.

Now, is there any way to do that to the Sidebar? We've had a little poofyness with that already.

Great help guys! I appreciate it. I'll try a couple of these options for sure.

Thanks!