Kiosk Question - Lock User In

Sivakatirswami katir at hindu.org
Sun Sep 16 17:59:30 EDT 2007


Jeff:

As usual, your very thorough analysis and report are super input.

Our current requirement will need to let people fill in
their name and address and possibly even CC# number.

I'm not sure that blocking the keyboard is going to work.
Well, try we could put a point and click keyboard on screen,
but that will raise user resistance to our goal: get their
name and address...email address and hopefully a donation.
Would people actually fill in their entire address on a screen
keyboard? that will be the question.

The "public" traffic we are talking about is in the vicinity of 20-150 
people
a day, where we would be very luck to get 30% of that traffic to
actually "sign the guest book"

So I guess this probably qualifies as "very light use"

On the other hand, our place here is slowly becoming "famous"
and traffic is going up every week...so, the future will be different....


Jeff Reynolds wrote:
> Sivakatirswami,
> 
> you are correct rev is the best solution here! many public kiosk apps 
> living happily for years at many museums made in meta/rev!
> 
> As others have suggested, getting rid of the keyboard in a public place 
> is the best thing to do. i they do need to put in some input then just 
> do a split screen and create a screen keyboard they can use to do 
> limited input with.
> 
> The main reason to do this is that the public (even with light use) can 
> be very, very hard on hardware. keeping as much of it away from them as 
> possible is the best option. best option is to use a touch screen lcd 
> that is bezeled into a wall or something to provide support and keep 
> folks from trying to move or poke around it. Keyboards just spell 
> trouble. all sorts of stuff can be dropped into them. mice and 
> trackballs can also have amazingly short lives on displays.
> 
> While i have rarely seen folks trying to purposely damage equipment, 
> they just seem to be oblivious to things on display at all and dont 
> treat them as they would their own home computer. Hacking isnt usually 
> on purpose also, many times someone just happens to click or hit the 
> keyboard oddly and things happen... We had one Kiosk app that kept 
> crashing and could not figure out why until we put a camera on the 
> display. looked like when folks were trying to click on some buttons on 
> the right hand side of the screen things were bombing. could not 
> reproduce this in the office. finally i worked on the machine in situ 
> and i could get it to crash if i rolled the track ball as far as it 
> could go to the right. would not do this with other mice or trackballs. 
> replaced the track ball and all was fine, best we could guess it the 
> track ball got bunged up with public use as no one (even at the 
> manufacturer) had see this before...
> 
> i would suggest that to start you just block off the keyboard with a 
> piece of wood and putting a mouse or trackball out. you may also want to 
> put a piece of plexi glass in front of the screen as folks will also 
> poink the screen thinking its a touch screen and the even just like to 
> point at things and touch them anyways. the power book lcds are not that 
> hardy of a surface and sharp fingernails can help this.
> 
> there are touch screens for lcds that mount on a piece of glass you put 
> over your lcd to really make them tough if you find stuff gets banged up 
> quickly. you never will know what the abuse will be in an environment 
> until you try it! Ive had places where i thought things would get 
> trashed do fine and other places i thought would be fine get trashed...
> 
> cheers,
> 
> Jeffrey Reynolds
> 
> 
> On Sep 16, 2007, at 1:00 PM, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:
> 
>> Andre Garzia wrote:
>>> You don't need to prevent CMD+TAB, you need to prevent running other
>>> applications. You can just quit the Finder and everything else so 
>>> that your
>>> app is the only thing running. ;-)
>>> Andre
>>
>> That's too easy! HA! (smile)
>>
>> but what about  cmd-option-esc? (I am unable to trap this)
>>   could invoke the Force Quit Applications; user quits Rev and is back 
>> up in
>> the Finder...
>>
>> On the other hand, we are not really expecting any super hackers
>> I'm just trying to get noisy kids from trying to do stuff while Mom
>> is off talking with someone...I'm not sure how many will even
>> know about cmd-option-esc.
>>
>> Other suggestions were good too. we can restrict user priviliges,
>> the gateway to the internet can lock the user out from everything
>> but very specific sites...
> 
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-- 
Om shanti
(In  Peace)

Sivakatirswami
www.himalayanacademy.com

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