Call me crazy, but it doesn’t seem like you can “natively” lock your screen on a Mac like you can on Windows. Very odd and annoying as it’s something I do everytime I leave my workstation, I’ve even had to agree to a policy that I will never leave my workstation open as I have secure access to production servers (via ssh).
I found some craziness on google where users setup “hot corners” with mouse gestures with the idea that when you “drag your cursor” into that corner the screensaver will be activated requiring a password to get back to the desktop.
You’re joking right?
I can just imagine how many times a day I’d accidentally activate this, especially using dual monitors.
Here is a cool utility I found to get around this apparent shortcoming without silly workarounds, it’s called Utility Lock.
Utility Lock (formerly known as SleepLock) is a custom built Screen Locking mechanism, it was designed after the Apple lock that is available in Apple Remote Desktop, its purpose is to allow for a greater customization in how the screen is locked, you can now have it locked on Sleep/Idle/Intervals and with the AppleScript support you can combine it with other applications like WiFiScriptor.
Nice and simple 
7 Comments
You can also have a lock put in your menubar using OSX’s built-in Keychain Access. There are some simple instructions here:
http://whatdoiknow.org/archives/000957.shtml
How about opening up Keychain Access (utilities folder), go under preferences, select Show Status in Menu Bar. The new menu bar widget has an option for locking the screen.
I found out about it here (http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/12/16/what-is-keychain-access.html?page=last) near bottom of the page.
Thank guys, I didn’t know about that one.
Keychain Access works great, perhaps the “Utility Lock” has one thing which Keychain doesn’t…you can set a hotkey to lock your system.
Apart from that they seem almost identical. Still, a small plus for Utility Lock but a nice one nonetheless.
I use the hot corners. I sometimes activate it, but it doesn’t prompt for a password right away. You have time to move the mouse and all is well. I think it works pretty good.
One thing you can use to fire off items that do not have hotkeys is Quicksilver
thanks for the post.
dude… i use sizzling keys preferences menu, it lets you map loads of things to shortcut keys like itunes commands and like windows (win+L) i have lock as (cmd+L) on mac
On Leopard (maybe on Tiger as well. Can’t remember…), enabling “fast user switching” from account preference will add “account name” as a menu on the top right next to Spotlight menu. You can temporarily lock your machine just like on windows from there, and you are logged in and any on-going tasks continues as well.