Admin & Non-admin apps installations - privillages & uses

[aido]

Hello all, this might sound like a dumb question, but I wonder if someone might be able to throw some light on the below.

I have set up a separate user account from admin, and have installed several 3rd party apps (with admin authorization) from that account.

What i'm concearned with is, will the privillages be wrong, and, should i reinstall these apps in the Admin account. Or should I correct the prefs later from within the Admin account, or does it not matter?

Additionally, I note that some apps are not useable between one account and the next once a serial key has been added. Do I have to enter the serial key in both accounts, or is there a way to enter the key in say admin, without the requirement for it to be re-entered in the user account, and vice-versa?

Lastly, are there any specific privillage settings that should be universally applied to all 3rd party apps? Some are owned & read/write by the admin group, some the administrator account, some by the system, some root. In some cases, all users have read/write privillages???

I am v confused.

Thanks in advance

A

 

[angelwatt]

I use my standard account exclusively, even while installing apps. I have the admin credentials so can enter them when need be for programs. I've never had permission issues resulting from this. The Mac is generally smart enough to handle this correctly.

Not sure about the license thing, but all accounts on the machine should be sharing the same license as they are often per machine licenses. That said, I don't have licensed programs so not 100% on this.

It's rare for me to need to mess with permissions of any 3rd party apps. The one exception I can think of is MAMP because I need to access various files in its folder and that folder is in the Applications folder, which my standard account doesn't have write access to, but I changed the permissions for that folder to allow it for my standard account.

 

[aido]

Thanks Angelwatt.
I had thought the same thing as you, that installing with admin credentials on a user account would be fine, then I looked at the prefs and they were all over the place.

With regards to license keys, I had to re-enter the serial for both accounts for some apps. ie a file/system cleaning programme, which would only clean on a user by user basis. I would have thought that if this had been initially set up via Admin, then all subsequent non-admin users would have access to it, albeit with different prefs and rights. Strangely this was not to be the case. Still seems rather odd.