Taking your MacBook with you wherever you go is convenient and makes you look good, but it’s also potentially dangerous. Anyone could just grab your notebook and play around with it when you don’t pay attention. That’s why someone invented the screen saver password lock (and FileVault), which keeps prying eyes away from your precious data. But back home, it can be quite annoying. Leave your notebook to get a beer from the fridge, come back, type your password. Over and over… (one beer doesn’t get you through the evening, does it?). Can’t your Mac notice that you’re home and turn off the password protection?
It can! Home Zone does exactly this, provided you got an Airport network at home. It lets you select any wireless network name, switches off password protection when this wireless network is available and switches protection back on when you’re back on the road.
Note that this is a beta release, though. I hacked this together in less than an hour this afternoon to solve the problem I described above, but there might be improvements that would make it work better for you. I totally appreciate your feedback here. I’m already thinking about letting the user define more that just one trusted network, maybe also using the proximity of Bluetooth devices and doing more than just switching the password protection on and off – user definable actions would be pretty cool, I think.
Oh, and I’d really love it if someone did a decent icon for this… my icon design skills are pretty bad, as you can see.
February 8th, 2007 at 11:05 am
Hi,
sounds like a nice app, but it wouldn’t let me choose my own network (essid ‘dreamind’) – but when I edited the plist file manually it works fine.
bye
dreamind
February 8th, 2007 at 11:09 am
would love to see a version of homzone that is able to work with formerly used wlan networks. unfortunately all my networks are with invisible SSID and cause of that i can´t use it. nevertheless good idea would be very helpful. keep going,
February 8th, 2007 at 11:09 am
Just noticed another thing, maybe HomeZone should enable password protection again, when quitting it (even if the “trusted” network is availible).
February 8th, 2007 at 11:13 am
And another thing would be, being able to only use a specific network if the machine is actually using it (and maybe if the mac address of the ap is right) – because otherwise an attacker could fake a network (named ‘dreamind’ in my case) and thus disabling the screensaver password even when I’m not at home.
February 8th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
Really nice idea.
I’d love more control over what it controls. I’d like to see it set some keychains to autolock etc.
February 8th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Works for me. My home network is invisble too and Home Zone picked it up.
February 8th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
Nice app. I just downloaded it . Gives hope for the chance to be lazy and secure at the same time.
I would love to choose more than one network: home + office.
Thank you very much for the initiative and the result! Keep going!
February 9th, 2007 at 4:34 am
Maybe make it scriptable? So those of us with Adium can control which accounts try to start up with different points? Darn paranoid security guys…leaving only MSN open…
February 9th, 2007 at 8:21 am
On my MacBook it wont work after I waked it up. In this case Home Zone says “SSID not available”, but it is.
I would also like to see that it could do Apple Scripts.
February 21st, 2007 at 7:09 pm
Hi, I really like your homezone.app, but there is one serios thing bugging me. When homezone is turned on, I get constant laggs every 5 seconds. I think it is the refreshperiod und my ping jumps from 64ms to 1300ms. You may check it yourself. Terminal -> ping something and then see what happens.
February 21st, 2007 at 7:15 pm
Oh sorry, just realized now, that youve already fixed the issue in more recent versions. Nethertheless, great app