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Leopard - Fast User Switching

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You will probably share your Mac with other people. Sometimes, it happens that the person with whom you share your Mac wants to use his/her account for a while. So, what should you do?

Stop All Your Activities and Log Off Your Account?

I thought we're talking about Leopard now. This old-fashioned, troublesome way to switch user is no longer of our interest, I believe.

Fast User Switching


Fast User Switching will be the right choice. Using this, whenever you want to switch to another user, you can just click on one of the accounts, enter the correct password and after a nice switching animation, your view have been changed to another account. Is it cool?

Activate Fast User Switching

It's really simple to activate fast user switching. You'll only need 3 steps :

  1. Accounts Preferences Pane
    The icon to take you into Accounts Preferences Pane can be easily spotted inside your System Preferences. It's right under the 4th section of the System Preferences, i.e. the System section.

  2. Click the Lock to Make Changes
    Usually, you won't be able to make changes if you're not registered as an admin here. If you're an admin, you should first unlock the protection before making changes. The lock can be found at the left-bottom corner of the Accounts Preferences Pane.

  3. Enable Fast User Switching
    The last step, go to Login Options and check the checkbox to enable fast user switching.

After finishing these steps, you will see a new items on the right corner of your menu bar.

Categories: Leopard, Popular
Tags: Login, login

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6 Comments

kuty 

Cool, but it's a (at least a) Tiger feature.
Nothing new in Leopard there.

M

gautama 

Does anyone know a shortcut for the "Login Window", which is also available from the Fast User Switching menu?

Frank 

I'd like this user-switching animation for my Spaces... Any hints?

Roy 

I thought there should be a way to do this, I was just looking for the hard way to do it.

jfMac 

"switching for spaces"

Me too. I've been looking/searching for weeks. There is a shareware program called "youcontroldesktops" or something like that, and it has the 3d cube effect for spaces. Very much like the Compiz open source program on Linux.  Unfortunately Compiz cannot be simply ported to OS X.  I just can't bring myself to pay $30.00 for the shareware. Been rooting around in development articles and fooling with Quartz composer, but there doesn't seem to be  an easy solution. So if you're up for learning Objective C and Quartz programing... go for it.

inmex 

I'm not sure if this already exists but I've been looking at this site for a while trying to find it but I cant find it. How bout a short cut key for switching users. instead of having to up to the icon and selecting it etc. Kind of like the four finger side swipe that lets you choose an open application, but with the accounts....

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