Setting a Custom Curtain Screen in Apple Remote Desktop
We’ve decided to run with Apple Remote Desktop because it’s easy to use and made for Mac. It comes with a neat feature called “curtains” which allows us to lock the screen and still work on it remotely. The problem? It displays a huge image of a padlock while you’re doing so.
The solution turned out to be a little more complicated than we at first thought. First of all, our Mac Minis shipped with Leopard as opposed to Snow Leopard, so a quick call to Apple got us a Snow Leopard family pack sent out free of charge.
On Leopard, Apple’s instructions for a custom curtain screen don’t work – they say you just have to add an image called Lock Screen Picture to your /Library/Preferences folder. This didn’t work at all.
Once we’d upgraded to Snow Leopard we managed to get it working, but we had to save the file as a TIFF image, and ensure that there was no file extension on it. To remove the file extension just click on the image, select get info ( + I) and then ensure that a) the file has hide extension unchecked and b) that there is no extension on the name of the file.
Saving the file as a TIFF image is important – PNG and JPEG files don’t seem to work correctly, contrary to Apple’s documentation.
The other annoyance we had was the text that would appear alongside the logo – “Screen Locked by Lawrence Dudley” or whoever’s machine had locked the screen.
To remove this we had to dig into the management utility.
Control-click Remote Desktop in the Applications folder and select “Show Package Contents”.
From there navigate to Contents/Resources/English.lproj/ and open LockScreenTask.strings in TextEdit or the text editor of your choice (Textmate is nice!)
The line you’re looking for is this:
lockedByStringNoText = “”;
Remove whatever’s between the quotes (as we’ve done already) or customise it to your own wishes. %@ can be used as a placeholder for the username of the administrator interacting with the computer.
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