Bumper Car Guide

BumperCar: Web browser for kids BumperCar is a Mac OS X Web browser for kids. It offers unparalleled content control and customization features, making it the most powerful Web browser for concerned educators and parents on the Macintosh. BumperCar earned a prestigious Best of Show Award at MacWorld San Francisco 2004. The BumperCar Start Page BumperCar’s start page is attractive, and encourages children to explore a collection of kid-friendly sites. Browse the Internet by clicking on any of the categories, or type a destination in the Address or Search fields. Children may also guide the bumper car into the Tunnel of Mystery to be teleported to a kid-safe site. BumperCar can be configured to be in either a Home, School or Pre-School setting, with personalized features appropriate for each location. The colorful interface artwork also appears on custom error pages, such as when BumperCar blocks a page. Grown-Ups Menu The Grown-Ups Menu contains the features of BumperCar that set it apart from other browsers. In addition to the browser’s preset preferences, the Safety Settings item allows you to individualize your kids Internet experience. Only someone with an administrator password can adjust the Safety Settings. This prevents children without administrator access from bypassing or changing the selected restrictions. Mac OS X makes multi-user computing easy, but just in case you don’t use multiple accounts, or an administrator forgets to logout, the password must be entered every time. Safety Settings Tabs: General For adults who do not wish to set specific restraints, there are three levels of protection from low to high which provide set-and-forget convenience. You can also customize all the features in the other panes of the dialog. We recommend starting at the lowest setting and only increasing the level, or customizing as need warrants. Homepage The homepage pane allows for dynamic customization of all of the links in the sub pages of BumperCar’s internal website. Rather then dictate a set of links under each category, BumperCar allows the school or parent to customize the included kid-friendly links in a simple consistent interface. This customization, along with all the other features, makes BumperCar appropriate for the widest possible audience. In Educational mode, you can add an institution’s name to the homepage; in Pre-School mode the program runs appropriately in full screen mode to keep toddlers from clicking where they shouldn’t. Content The Content pane provides several powerful options that help to protect children from objectionable content, and can prevent them from giving personal information to others. The Filter search engine results checkbox forces Google (and other popular search engines) to use their Safesearch features. This reduces objectionable content when a child visits these necessary sites. The Block profanity checkbox activates BumperCar’s curse word blocking capabilities. If…