

Parental Control for iOS (my weekend project) - vpdn
http://mocava.de/ios/parental-control

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rada
The idea is outstanding. Thank you for making this.

One nitpick. It is confusing that all your options are named "disable" and
"allow" but your instructions say "if you set this control, it will
disable...". So the control is "set" when it says "disabled"? It is also
against convention in the sense that your options are negative-positive
(disable-allow) when the convention is positive-negative (yes-no, set-unset,
block-unblock, etc).

Personally, I would change the controls to "block" and "unblock", and the
instructions to something like "set this to _block_ to disable and hide... ".
In the very least, I would change them to "enable" and "disable", in that
order.

Edit: just wanted to add that after completing the whole sign-up, I found your
overall style clear, concise and organic. You did get a lot of things "just
right". Great job.

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vpdn
good points, thanks for the feedback! I'll look into how I can reword the text
to make it clearer.

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rada
One more suggestion, in case you don't know, there is this HN parents mailing
list:

groups.google.com/group/hn-parents

I vaguely recall there being a discussion on it a while ago about this.

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vpdn
Didn't know about the group, thanks for the pointer.

Seems like the group is invite only (my signup is pending for approval). If
you have a minute, would be great if you could help me post the link there,
otherwise I'll wait for the approval and do it later.

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rada
How about I test it out on my iPhone (left it at home today) and post a
recommendation to the group tomorrow?

~~~
vpdn
That would be awesome of course, thanks!

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bruceboughton
How does this work? Is there a public API for these settings or does it
require jailbreaking/sideloading?

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0m1cr0n
The site generates a .mobileconfig file, which is an Apple plist file in XML
format. The API is public, and easily reverse-engineered from other
.mobileconfig files.

The "app" that gets installed is actually a webclip, not a native iOS
application. They embedded the icon as a base64 string inside the
.mobileconfig.

The webclip opens mobile Safari in fullscreen, with a link in the format of
"[http://mocava.de/ios/parental-
control/profiles/UNIQUE_ID/par...](http://mocava.de/ios/parental-
control/profiles/UNIQUE_ID/parentalControl-active.html), where UNIQUE_ID ties
back to the choices you made on the setup screen of their website. This will
allow Mocava to track usage stats, which seems like a fair trade-off for a
free service.

You could roll your own version of this using Apple's Configurator
application, however Mocava has done a decent job of streamlining the setup
and installation.

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vpdn
"Mocava has done a decent job of streamlining the setup and installation."

Thanks :) Usability wise, the hardest part was to explain that you have to
_install_ a profile to deactivate an existing profile. Also people associated
the word "profile" with a facebook profile and thought it contains their
personal data like name & address. To prevent confusion, the page I removed
(almost) all instances of the word profile from the page.

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0m1cr0n
The whole "profile" and "mobileconfig" nomenclature is confusing to most
people, I'm a little surprised that Apple hasn't put more effort into this
area.

Sorry if I came across as damning you with faint praise, you really have done
a nice job of setting up the service for non-technically minded people who
want to keep their kids safe online.

I can't find any reference to your privacy policy or terms of service. You
appear to use a unique string to identify profiles, what are you doing with
the data you collect?

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vpdn
The unique identifier was really just the technically simplest way to do it. I
might eventually deduplicate the data and aggregate profiles with identical
settings into a "canonical profile" if I can find the time.

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hackmiester
Why say "Toddler" ? Could be any child.

