Disable multitasking for child's account (10.7)

[Dr. Gzus]

Hello illuminaries,

I recently set up a user account for my three-year-old on our iMac. She's great with it, but she has a tendency to open multiple apps at a time, each with their own annoying kid music, and you can imagine the ear-bleeding cacophony of all of them playing at the same time. Is there any way in OS X or a third party app to disable multitasking? As in, nothing backgrounded but apps are 'force quit' before another app can be opened? It's a kid account with full parental controls so I assume our important stuff should be shielded from any tweaks. Thanks!

[GGJstudios]

Originally Posted by Dr. Gzus

Hello illuminaries,

I recently set up a user account for my three-year-old on our iMac. She's great with it, but she has a tendency to open multiple apps at a time, each with their own annoying kid music, and you can imagine the ear-bleeding cacophony of all of them playing at the same time. Is there any way in OS X or a third party app to disable multitasking? As in, nothing backgrounded but apps are 'force quit' before another app can be opened? It's a kid account with full parental controls so I assume our important stuff should be shielded from any tweaks. Thanks!

No, you can't disable multi-tasking, as it's a key part of Mac OS X. You might choose to leave only one app on the Dock, so she can't easily find and launch the others, but you can't stop the Mac from doing what it's designed to do.

[Peace]

The only thing I can think of is limiting what apps you allow.

[jameslmoser]

Sounds like she needs an iPad. =)

[squeakr]

The only thing that I could think of is you are really good with Automator, you could create your own custom dock icons tied to each of the apps and then have that icon launch an automated task that would scan the activity monitor for running apps, kill the running apps and continue on to launch the one app trying to be started. It would be involved, but I would assume possible. Good luck with this. To each his own, but I wouldn't allow my 3 year old unsupervised usage on my systems (no matter how locked down it is), this just seems like a recipe for disaster, data loss, and computer problems to come.