Getting Started

There are a handful of things you need to do to get up and running with Gertrude. This tutorial is meant to walk you through the required steps, and also to give you a bit of practice using all of the core features of Gertrude.

NOTE: If you'd prefer to watch a step-by-step video showing all aspects of getting started with Gertrude, click here.

Step 1: Set up your parent account

To start out, if you haven't already created a Gertrude account you'll need to do that first. To create an account click this link and follow the sign-up instructions. No credit card is required, the first 21 days are totally free, and you can cancel at any time.

Adding your first child

Once you have your Gertrude account created you'll need to start by adding at least one child. A "child" in Gertrude represents someone that you want to protect. This is very often one of your own children if you are a parent using Gertrude to protect your kids—but it could also be a peer whom you are protecting in a relationship of accountability. You'll need to add at least one child to do anything useful with Gertrude.

To add a child, click the link in the dashboard of the Gertrude parents website, or select "Children" from the side bar on the left hand and click the button to add a new child.

Go to the 'Children' screen to add your first child

Enter the child's name, and click to save the new child.

Enter your child's name, and click 'save'

Mac App Connection Code

To finish setting up your first child, we'll need to install the Gertrude Mac app on their computer. But before we do that, you'll grab a one-time connection code to connect the app to the child you just added. To do so, click the Get connection code button on the next screen. You'll see a pop-up giving you a special one-time connection code. Write this code down somewhere; you'll be using it shortly.

Click Get connection code

Then copy down the code

Step 2: Connect a Computer

For the next part of the process you'll need to switch over to the computer that will be used by the child you're protecting. You might already be using that computer. But if you're a parent working through this tutorial on your own computer and your child uses a different computer you'll need that computer in front of you to do the next few steps of initial setup.

Downloading & Install the Gertrude macOS App

On the computer that will be protected, login to the macOS user that you desire to protect, then open a web browser, visit the Gertrude website download page (www.gertrude.app/download), and click the download link to get the most recent version of the Gertrude macOS app. Double-click on the downloaded file and then drag the Gertrude application into the applications folder.

Drag the Gertrude app into Applications

Next, double-click on the Gertrude application icon in the applications folder to launch it for the first time.

Open 'Applications' and double-click to launch Gertrude for the first time

After you launch the app for the first time, you'll see the Gertrude welcome wizard, which will guide you through all of the necessary steps to get the app fully installed with the correct permissions from the operating system.

The welcome window will appear and guide you through the setup process

After a few clicks, you'll see the spot where you should enter the connection code you got in step 1:

The welcome window will appear and guide you through the setup process

Because Gertrude needs to do things like:

• Filter the internet
• Send your child notifications when you unlock a site
• Record screenshots of their activity
• Record what they type

We have to request several special permissions during the welcome and setup process. The welcome wizard will guide you through all the required permissions, but a few of them Apple has made bizarrely unintuitive, so be on guard and carefully follow the instructions provided!

A few of the permissions steps are unintuitive, so follow the directions closely!

Step 3: Setup Notifications

Now that you've got the app installed, two of the main things you'll likely want to do next involve you being able to get a notification from your child's computer. Specifically, we want you to get a notification when:

1. your child requests to have the filter suspended
2. or, your child requests to have a site unblocked

Head over to the Settings screen of the parents website:

In the parents website, go to 'Settings' to create notifications

You've already verified your email during the account creation process, so we can notify you by email if you'd like. But most parents prefer to get a text message, so we recommend you take a moment to verify your phone number as a notification method. Click Add a method to start the process.

We recommend you add your phone number to receive text message notifications

Once you have verified the method/s you'd like to use to be notified, set up a notification for BOTH unlock requests and filter suspensions:

We recommend you create notifications for unlock requests AND filter suspensions

Step 4: Practice Suspending the Filter

Now that you've got your notifications setup, let's take a quick minute to learn how filter suspension requests work.

Back on your child's computer, click the Gertrude icon in the menu bar in the upper-left corner of the screen:

Click the Gertrude menu bar icon

Then click the Suspend filter button, as shown here:

Click the 'Suspend filter' button

Choose a duration, and click next:

Choose a duration, then click 'Next'

Try entering a comment, and then click Request suspension.

Enter a comment and submit the request

At this point you should receive a notification (if you completed step 3). When you get a text, email or Slack, you should see that your child has requested the filter be suspended, and their comment. Try granting the request.

Grant the request

Your child will receive a notification on their Mac that the suspension was granted, and clicking the Gertrude menu bar icon will show that the filter is temporarily suspended.

Filter is temporarily suspended, but monitoring continues

Congrats! You now know how to request and grant a suspension. As mentioned earlier, using filter suspensions is highly recommended while you're getting going with Gertrude, because it can take a little time to get all of the normal everyday parts of the internet unlocked for your kids. It's much better to suspend the filter for chunks of time than give up and uninstall Gertrude and lose all filtering and monitoring completely.

Speaking of which, Gertrude by default also indicates when screenshots are taken DURING a suspension which helps you hone in on particularly important stretches of activity to review.

Gertrude will show you which screenshots were taken DURING a suspension

Grant a suspension from the computer

If you're physically with your child when they need a filter suspension, and you'd rather not reply to an email or text, you can always manually grant a filter suspension right from the computer, using an admin username and password by clicking the Grant suspension button.

Use your admin password to grant a suspension right away

Step 5: Add a Public Keychain

With Gertrude, the way you allow access to parts of the internet is with keys. Keys unlock parts of the internet. Gertrude's filter works by blocking the entire internet, only allowing access to the sites and apps you specifically designate as safe.

When you first install Gertrude, your child has zero keys by default, which means they can't access any of the internet. Super safe, but not terribly useful. Let's fix that.

Go to the Children tab of the parent's website, and click the Settings link for your child:

Go to Children > Settings

Near the bottom of the screen you should see a single keychain with zero keys. This keychain is created automatically for you when you create the child, as a default spot to hold keys for your child. Many parents use just one keychain to hold all of the keys their kids need, but others like to organize keys by topic (games, school, church), class, or anything else. Using more than one keychain allows you to share them between kids, and also take advantage of more advanced controls, like setting schedules for certain keychains. But for now, having one keychain we can add keys to is all we need.

Public Keychains

There are two types of keychains in Gertrude: 1) keychains that you own and can add keys to, and 2) keychains that we've created for all Gertrude parents to use—these are called public keychains. We maintain a growing list of public keychains to make it easier to quickly unlock common websites, apps, and online programs. Adding a few public keychains is a great way to get started unlocking some safe portions of the internet for your child. Let's add one to your child.

Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click Add keychain.

Click 'Add keychain' near the bottom of the screen

Click to view Public keychains, then try searching for Khan. Select the keychain, and click Add keychain.

Search for a public keychain and add it

Once you've added the keychain, be sure to click Save child.

Then click 'Save child' to add the keychain

Once you've saved, test it out on your child's computer by going to https://khanacademy.org.

Your child now has access to the sites allowed by the public keychain

Step 6: Create A Key Manually

Ok, so you've added a public keychain that unlocks part of the internet. But we don't have public keychains for everything, you're going to need to know how to create your own keys. There's two basic ways to create keys, we'll cover both, starting with manually creating a key.

To create your own key, start by going to the Keychains screen, and click to edit the default keychain that was created for you.

Go to 'Keychains', then click 'Edit'...

Then click 'Create key'

Creating and attaching your first key

For the sake of this tutorial, start by creating a single website key. Enter the address of a website that you want your child to have access to, and leave the rest of the options unchanged. If you can't think of a website to unlock, enter nationalgeographic.com, as we'll use that example later in the tutorial. Click Create key to finish the process.

Create your first key

Next, back on your child's computer, try to visit kids.nationalgeographic.com. You may notice that it is only sort of loading.

The site is loading, but if you look closely, all is not right...

Step 7: Create Keys by Sending Unlock Requests

The reason the website we tried to load didn't fully work correctly is that most websites ALSO load code from several OTHER websites, so it usually takes more than one key to get them fully working. This is one of the reasons we group keys into keychains. There's a more technical explanation here if you're interested.

To fix this, we'll show you the more common way to create keys in Gertrude, using Unlock Requests, and in doing so we'll explore Gertrude's Blocked requests window. Go up to the menu bar icon again, and this time click Blocked requests.

Click the 'Blocked requests' button

When the Blocked Requests window appears, it will start showing you a list of every network connection being blocked by Gertrude. Your computer tries to make many network connections, so it's very common to see a lot of requests in this window, like this:

By default, this window shows ALL blocks, which can be a little much...

To make it easier to see the blocks we actually care about, type in a filter term to isolate requests just coming from the web browser Safari (or whatever browser you're using), and then press the Clear button to clear out old requests.

Filter by app name, and clear requests to get a clean slate

Next, RELOAD the broken website so we can see just the blocks we care about. They should come in at the same time we press refresh. Once they do, click the PAUSE button to prevent any new requests from streaming in:

Much better! By REFRESHING then PAUSING, we isolated the important blocks

Now we can select the blocked requests and send an unlock request.

Select the blocked domains, and click 'Send unlock request'

Accepting an Unlock Request

Now that the unlock request is submitted, put back on your parent hat (you've been impersonating your child for the last few minutes), and visit the dashboard of the parents website. You'll notice that there is a new unlock request visible:

The recently submitted unlock request in your parents website

Click to accept the request, and you'll be taken to a screen where you get to choose which keychain to add it to. You likely only have one, so go aheand select it and then click Review key.

Select a keychain, then click 'Review key'

Next you'll be taken to a screen where Gertrude recommends a key that will unlock the blocked request. You're free to stop and edit the key if you want, but for now, just click to "Submit":

You can review and modify the key that will unlock the request

Back on the computer running the Gertrude macOS app, your child should see a notification that the unlock request was accepted. And if you refresh the web page, you should see that the site is now fully unblocked!

Success! With all the keys created, the site loads fully

Step 8: Practice Reviewing Child Activity

If you haven't disabled monitoring of your child, you will be able to review your child's activity right from within the Gertrude parents website. In fact, if you've been following along with this tutorial you should already have a few items that you can review. To see how this works, login to the Gertrude parents website and go to the children screen and select the activity link from the child you added.

Go to 'Children' and click 'Activity'

You should see on the next screen that there are some unreviewed activity items. Click to view these and you will see a mixture of screenshots and text that was typed by the child.

Click to review activity

Activity items are a mix of screenshots and keystrokes (if both enabled)

Approving an item is essentially the same thing as deleting it. The idea is that an "approved" item does not need to be seen again. It's rare that you'll actually approve items individually—you'll notice when you have large amounts of items to review, that Gertrude gives you the option to approve them in chunks of one hundred at a time, and also you can approve an entire day at once at the bottom of the screen.

Step 9: Explore More...

You've got all the basics now, but there are more features you might want to check out, including:

• Creating a Downtime schedule for your child when they get zero internet access (usually at night)
• Assigning keychains to be active for certain times of day or days of the week
• A feed of Security events that you can review to get a birds-eye view of your events to keep an eye on for you children's safety
• Our companion iOS app which plugs holes in Apple's Screen Time
• The internet's best step-by-step guide to locking down an iPhone for a child.

If you have any questions, feature requests, or need help with anything, please don't hesitate to contact us. We'd love to hear from you!