Kiosk Question - Lock User In

[Jeff Reynolds]

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...