With dangers lurking in every corner and tons of raw, unfiltered content on the Net, how can you not be worried about what your children is doing online? Sure, you may already have the built-in Parental Controls on your Mac, but are you sure that these present features are enough to keep your child safe from cyber bullies, adult websites, online predators and scammers.

We got your back. Here are handy tools for the Mac that will help you block unauthorized sites, restrict your child’s computer usage, keep logs of your child’s activities, and many more. You can easily monitor your children’s online activities any time by viewing compiled reports and logs with these applications.

Read also: 5 Tips for Parental Controls on Mac

1. Norton

Norton makes it easy for you to block, monitor and receive alerts on your child’s online activities. It’s a comprehensive parental control tool which aims to help you teach your child how to surf the Net safely. Norton compiles a report displaying a list of the websites visited or attempted by your child, which you can filter, then allow or block access to.

You can also set time limits so you don’t need to pester your children to get off your Mac. Additionally, you can also keep an eye on the information your child is sharing on social networking sites, and the keywords they are searching for online. [Free]

2. KidLogger

KidLogger is a key logger, activity monitor and automatic screen capture – all in one free application. The application logs every keystroke your child types, the applications he or she opened, website history and even specific details like clipboard text.

There is also the option to capture screenshots periodically, a clever workaround with kids who are savvy enough to clear their tracks. The saved logs and screenshots in HTML format are then delivered to your kidlogger.net account or deposited into your Dropbox. [Free]

3. K9 Web Protection

K9 Web Protection has three notable features: filtering, monitoring and time restrictions. The filtering function which can block out entire categories of content improves on your Mac’s built-in Parental Controls function, which only blocks out specified sites and applications.

The "Safe Search" function, which block results for explicit or offensive topics, can also be customized so that it is a compulsory option regardless of the browser used. "NightGuard" enables you to set a curfew, blocking Web access during specific times. [Free]

4. DansGuardian

An open source filter application, DansGuardian is more advanced compared to the others because it does not filter content only by URLs, but also by phrase matching. This makes DansGuardian a great filter as the Web is full of new sites each day with new URLs that you may have not blocked.

This tool has a list of keywords which are associated with different categories, such as "drugs" or "porno", and sites containing those offensive phrases will be blocked. However, you can always make exceptions for certain sites by setting up a "Grey List". [Free]

5. Minormonitor

Worried about who your child is friends with on Facebook or Twitter? Minormonitor helps you keep track of your child’s Facebook and Twitter activities easily.

Some of its features include notifying you when there is a newly added "friend" having few to no mutual friends with your child. It also monitors your child’s social activities such as status updates, shared photos, check-ins and even private messages. [Free]

6. PureSight

PureSight is a clever IM and website filter which works on Yahoo!, MSN, AIM and even Trillian. PureSight can overwrite offensive words in incoming and outgoing messages, end a potentially dangerous conversation immediately, while blocking the other party and notifying the parents immediately.

PureSight has a list of offensive words, and constantly tracks IM slangs to weed out crude language used in the conversations it monitors. Parents can even add their own words, which may have escaped the list. [$59.90]

7. SafetyWeb

SafetyWeb highlights red flags on potentially dangerous actions, such as when your children approves someone suspicious as their friend. It also has a monitoring system that is triggered by topics and keywords that are related to bullying, drugs, alcohol, racism and even eating disorders.

SafetyWeb may be pricey, but it is a very convenient tool for you to monitor almost every social networking account your child has, and perhaps bring serious issues to light before it is too late to act. [$10 monthly, $100 a year]

8. NetTrekker

Used by over 12 million students worldwide, NetTrekker is an educational, child-safe search engine highly recommended for school-age children. Unlike other parental controls tools which blocks offensive content, NetTrekker is essentially a search engine entirely built to churn only educational results.

For instance, if you search for a keyword like "stars" on this search engine , you’ll probably get plenty of galaxy or astrology-related results, but zero results for pop stars. [$5 monthly, $50 a year]

9. Safe Eyes

Safe Eyes is a good parental control tool for families with more than one children. Each copy carries a license you can use on three different PCs or Macs, and you can manage up to 10 different profiles with customized settings.

Safe Eyes can also block websites based on dozens of different categories. Although filtering for each type of media can be customized, users can also opt for three levels of filtration: Low, Medium or High filtering. [$49.95]

10. Intego’s ContentBarrier

ContentBarrier enables you to block unauthorized sites, offensive languages in chat, impose time limits and keep logs. Its advanced features include restricting access to streaming media and file sharing. ContentBarrier even lets you customize different settings for different accounts/child.

This is a great choice for parents with varying ages of children. [$39.95 for 2 Macs' license, $69.95 for 5 Macs]

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Folder Actions are a set of actions you can assign to any folder on your Mac, which will be automatically triggered when any files are included into the selected folder. This is a great option to reduce ‘manual labor’ in actions like converting file format to jpg and png or documents to pdf, duplicating files or even notifying you via a popup.

If you don’t already know, your Mac has a feature called Action Script. What it does is help you automate the folder actions like what we described earlier. In this quick guide, we will show you how to get your Action Scripts set up and running.

Recommended Reading: 6 Simple & Effective Ways To Speed Up Your Mac

Automate Folder actions with Action Script

To start assigning action scripts to folders, open your Finder, locate your preferred folder, right-click on it or press Ctrl + Click, then select Services > Folder Actions Setup

The Folder Actions Setup window will appear with selection of Action Scripts. Select any script of your choice and click ‘Attach‘

Now the selected script will be listed on the window with the box ‘checked’, next to the selected folder.

Don’t forget to check the ‘Enable Folder Actions’ box, then close the window or press Cmd + Q.

Now your Action Script is enabled and your folder will automate all the actions you have assigned. In this example, I selected ‘Duplicate as PNG‘ which does only one thing, that is to duplicate any type of image files and convert it to PNG.

When you drop any image file to this folder, the Action Scripts will automatically create two folders inside the folder separated by the actions assigned: Original Images will hold the original, while the PNG Images folder is where the duplicated images are kept.

Conclusion

With Action Scripts, you can automate a number of folder actions at once, and if you are looking into converting image formats in bulk, it definitely saves you a lot of processing time. With a combination of these Folder Actions on your Mac, you can automate many things and save you a lot of time. For Dropbox users, I’d like to point you to an earlier article which also automates file and folder treatments similar to what is being described here.

Have you practiced using folder actions, or do you still prefer to do everything manually?

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