My exact problem with my new Nexus 7. The google apps do a great job of "convenience" switching (for me and my wife - gmail, gtalk...) but "privacy" switching isn't available. Some apps (Flick Note) also have multiple login "convenience" switching, but again not much in the way of privacy switching for visitors.
Using someone else's smartphone or computer feels a little bit like wearing their underwear.
Try using the SwitchMe app described in the article. I use it to share my Nexus 7 with my wife. It requires root, but you have a Nexus tablet, it's made to be rooted. It also requires a reboot to switch users, but the Nexus 7 is fast enough it isn't much of a problem.
Hopefully the next Android release will complete the built in account switching.
I've been using SwitchMe on my tablet for my wife and I(it's free to set up two partitions, and cheap if you want more). It works pretty well and even lets you see how much space a user's account is taking up. The only real downside is that the tablet has to reboot to switch users which can take a few minutes depending on the device.
The lack of "Fast User Switching" type functionality and the privacy separation that it provides is one of the things that has held me back from purchasing a tablet for so long.
I think the day is coming where the purchase of a tablet will make life simpler in our household but I think there is going to be a fight over who's cloud account it gets associated with and possibly some kind of continual flickering between user accounts by wipe and re-install depending on who is the primary user this month.
Oh for multi-user/multi-cloud support to come natively to a tablet.
Home computers are pretty crappy at the "multiple user" problem as it exists at home.
iTunes and Windows Media Player both assume, by default, that every user wants to have a private collection of music. Maybe when my son is 17 that will be the case, but now that he's 10, a shared pool is what we want. Neither of those programs makes managing a shared pool effortless.
Having to log out and log in (dump my son's game on the floor) so my wife can check email is just lame. (Switch users isn't much better)
Laptops today all come with cameras and face recognition technology is pretty good, so in a family situation the system should always know who's sitting in front of it.
And yeah, autocompletion on your web browser should NEVER turn up a porn site...
Still, Google has SafeSearch, they have some conception of what one might not want to pop up unexpectedly. I know that that particular autocomplete was probably generated from history, but the browser could be more noob-friendly ... everybody starts from ignorance.
IIRC, incognito mode still picks up stuff that was done in the wide open - ie, the scenario from the comment above would still happen if the author went into incognito.
Android browser seems pretty bad for this.
Even if you clear history/cookies/offline files you can still hit the back button and traverse the history that way.
Having a shared pool for Windows Media Player isn't a big deal at all: on Windows 7, you can store any shared music in /Users/Public/Public Music, and Windows Media Player should index it automatically, or you can add it to the list.
To the browser, unless you have a pre-populated list, the autocomplete URLs are just a list of strings. How should it know if penisland.com is a website that sells pens or otherwise? Also, where do draw the line really? therapistfinder.com? expertsexchange.com?
Autocomplete URLS don't have to be just lists of strings. Many sites already send down metadata to indicate that they are serving up adult content.
That "honor system" approach, coupled with a pre-populated list that gets updated with regular browser updates, could catch the vast majority of embarrassing situations, like the time I found "handcuffedlesbians.com" in the URL bar at a client's site.
My simple solution on the iPad has been to install the Google Search application and get my wife to use that for web browsing and email. That way she gets her own set of cookies so she can sign in to things separately from me (I use Safari), plus she can access gmail through it as well. It even works well for her way of using the internet, which pretty much always starts off with a Google search.
I thought the lack of user accounts would be a problem before I bought the iPad, but in practice this has been good enough and much less of an administrative overhead than proper user accounts would probably be.
I think Windows RT/Windows 8 tablets have proper user accounts. Hopefully they will come with a guest account as well. Not sure if the new apps know how to deal with multiple users and their data.
Windows really has the potential to shine in this department. Not quite a killer feature but it's definitely something they're capable of getting right.
Not only that, but the user accounts can optionally live "in the cloud", such that a user - who would otherwise be a guest - can use another's device and keep their preferences by having them synced up automatically.
There is no way Apple will pass on the revenue opportunity of making you buy more than one iPad per household buy not letting you have privacy with multiple accounts.
1 Android tablet, 1 iPad might be a solution for a couple that includes a cross-platform mobile developer.
I bought my girlfriend her own iPad. Unfortunately, we are a sleep-over couple, and she always leaves her iPad home and commandeers mine, leaving me to squint at my iPhone. (Which fortunately is a Retina one.)
I was just talking about this with my roommate last week. I picked up a Nexus 7 when it launched and I leave it out for anyone to play around with when they're over, and my roommate uses it to check his facebook and stuff too. Our solution is that I use the native twitter, facebook, etc apps and he just logs in through chrome (it's a shitty solution really).
I would love the option to login as myself and have basically just my account keychain applied to all installed apps. I can't imagine that would really be that hard for Apple or Google to do, and it would really take Tablets to a better spot in the market as they aren't really phones at all.
This is the only solution atm and it sucks. It might work with a few trustworthy friends but leave your device open at a party as music station and it's way to convenient for someone to "accidentally" open the email-app and instantly see all your private emails.
All that's needed is an app-lock and you could use this workaround. You make all your private apps password protected and guests can only use the browser.
This is similar to the problem Windows had in the 90s. Except back then the only user account they had was Administrator. So this "tablet problem" is more secure in a malware sense if not privacy.
Still, multiple users has been a solved problem since the early versions of Unix. Why companies continue to ignore it is beyond me.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] threadUsing someone else's smartphone or computer feels a little bit like wearing their underwear.
Hopefully the next Android release will complete the built in account switching.
This is definitely coming up: http://phandroid.com/2012/08/02/androids-multiple-user-accou...
Although, that means a 6 month wait at best :-(
EDIT - Nevermind, it does. Dang.
I think the day is coming where the purchase of a tablet will make life simpler in our household but I think there is going to be a fight over who's cloud account it gets associated with and possibly some kind of continual flickering between user accounts by wipe and re-install depending on who is the primary user this month.
Oh for multi-user/multi-cloud support to come natively to a tablet.
iTunes and Windows Media Player both assume, by default, that every user wants to have a private collection of music. Maybe when my son is 17 that will be the case, but now that he's 10, a shared pool is what we want. Neither of those programs makes managing a shared pool effortless.
Having to log out and log in (dump my son's game on the floor) so my wife can check email is just lame. (Switch users isn't much better)
Laptops today all come with cameras and face recognition technology is pretty good, so in a family situation the system should always know who's sitting in front of it.
And yeah, autocompletion on your web browser should NEVER turn up a porn site...
Was visiting reddit with a friend on his computer. Autocomplete kicked in at "red". Got uncomfortable there for a few seconds.
I appreciate that incognito won't give someone my FB cookie, but I don't need them to know what sites I do visit.
(not that they don't know already since the site probably uses google analytics)
That "honor system" approach, coupled with a pre-populated list that gets updated with regular browser updates, could catch the vast majority of embarrassing situations, like the time I found "handcuffedlesbians.com" in the URL bar at a client's site.
Really? My iMac was great at it and my Macbook still is. (Fast User Switching from a menu at the top-right.)
I thought the lack of user accounts would be a problem before I bought the iPad, but in practice this has been good enough and much less of an administrative overhead than proper user accounts would probably be.
I doubt it would cost sales, especially when any iPad owner could have bought 3 small Android tablets for the same price.
I bought my girlfriend her own iPad. Unfortunately, we are a sleep-over couple, and she always leaves her iPad home and commandeers mine, leaving me to squint at my iPhone. (Which fortunately is a Retina one.)
I would love the option to login as myself and have basically just my account keychain applied to all installed apps. I can't imagine that would really be that hard for Apple or Google to do, and it would really take Tablets to a better spot in the market as they aren't really phones at all.
All that's needed is an app-lock and you could use this workaround. You make all your private apps password protected and guests can only use the browser.
Still, multiple users has been a solved problem since the early versions of Unix. Why companies continue to ignore it is beyond me.
Prioritizing the 1st day UX over the 3rd week UX. It's the same thing as programming languages making "Hello World" easy.