Improving Tiger’s Login Window for lists of users

[baliset]

When Tiger came out, Mac admins employing it to upgrade from Panther as a client in a managed environment would have noticed something: If you have your login screen set to show a list of users drawn from a server, rather than two text fields for l/p, Tiger’s login window is significantly smaller for Tiger clients than it is for Panther.

Check it out, side by side if you’re able. In Panther, you can see five names at a time, and none of these usernames (user longname) are horizontally truncated unless they are ridiculously long. Under Tiger, you can only see 4, and many of the names are truncated horizontally if they are above average length. I find this to be a real step backward, because we list some 700 users in this format for our school (users drawn from OD on a Tiger server) and I was looking forward to more flexibility in our login screen arrangements for Tiger, not less.

Now, under Tiger the elements making up the Login Window can be found in the /System/Library/CoreServices/SecurityAgentPlugins/loginwindow.bundle/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/ directory. There are a series of packages there that can be opened in the Interface Builder application that comes with Apple’s XCode (which is a free, if hefty, download). I’ve tried modifying the Login Window application and it looks promising, with one stumbling block- Read on.

Yes, all the interface elements associated with the Login window seem to be here for 10.4 systems. I was able to open the “LoginWindowUI.nib” package and drag out the overall window size and the “portal” window inside it which displays the list of users. Editing “TableCellTemplate.nib” allowed me to change the size of each “cell” that represents a user in the list of users (including the icon and font type/size), and “UserList.nib” seems to set the dimensions of the actual userlist portal which goes inside a particular element of LoginWindowUI (such as how many users appear in the list at any one time- the default is 4, or if the list background tints alternate lines).

Here’s where I get stuck though: Most of the changes I make are correctly reflected when I save them and log out to re-examine the changed login screen. However, no amount of tweaking will let me show more than four users in the portal section, even when the “UserList.nib” has been explicitly changed to allow it. Either I’m not tweaking it the right way, or this setting is held somewhere else and I don’t know it.

What I’d love to do is enlarge the login window to within an inch of the edges of a 1024×768 display, and have a nice, wide userlist portal display 20 or more names at once with 30 pixel line spacing instead of the current 60 pixels (yes, icons will be scaled or truncated but that’s OK, I can substitute the icon pic with a smaller version). This would greatly assist users select their name from a large list and do less scrolling and hunting for their name. In our enviroment, Tiger would become significantly more friendly as a large login system if we can make this change.

If anyone has luck decoding what changes need to be made in Interface Builder (or elsewhere) then post back here and let us know!

Needless to say, such tweaking is best done on a backup copy of your loginwindow.bundle, as it’s easy to break your login machinery.

[Anonymous]

Did you ever find a solution to this problem? I have the same issue with an elementary school. I’ve gotten as far as you and run into the same thing.

[Author]

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