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Open GUI programs as a fast-switched-out user
Authored by: Faux Plastic on Apr 07, '04 01:31:17PM

I can tell you one use for this, if I understand it correctly. It would allow you to have two copies of the same app open, each with their own set of preferences. You could create a second, "dummy" user, and then login to your own account and open a second copy of, say, Safari, the preferences for which are saved in Dummy's library.

I needed this a couple weeks ago. I was working on a project where I had to take a lot of screenshots of web pages. I wanted to to do it in Safari because I like it's GUI. But I had to turn off my bookmark bar, the Google search box, and some of the buttons to get a cleaner look.

But that made using Safari for my own personal browsing--while I was working on the project--a PITA. I wound up copying all my bookmarks over to Firefox and doing my personal browsing in Firefox. But this would have been much better.



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Open GUI programs as a fast-switched-out user
Authored by: digitalone on Apr 07, '04 03:56:36PM

Does this work? So, I could run a Mac program- let's use Mac Mail as an example- on a remote machine using the "target" user's preferences? I could see this being very helpful to troubleshoot client issues in a technical support capacity. Have you tried this yet? I haven't, but I will later tonight.


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- 7h4 d!917@l0|V3



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Open GUI programs as a fast-switched-out user
Authored by: niloc132 on Apr 07, '04 04:23:26PM
From my testing and understanding of this, tht would not work - when it launches the app, it does so in the other user's screen, even though that is not active.

OTOH, what you are looking for can also be done - if you sudo a task as another suer, it will run more than one copy of a program. I have an alias in my .bash_login for suTextEdit to have root run TextEdit with a given document, which opens another copy of the program, except with root permissions. (I believe the line is
alias "suTextEdit"="sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit";
) - I think this bit of code was taken off this site...

I'm sure that can be modified to your liking.

(Extra thought:) What about launching another dock...say on the side instead of the bottom...

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