Hi John! Old MCN roomie! I am the culprit you mention. A long while back I mentioned on the list (actually museum-l I think ;) how we had hacked Netscape for Mac using Resedit so that it was more suitable for using on a public kiosk. We will be using the same solution for a kiosk to go up soon.
Mosaic does have a "kiosk" mode, but it was far from suitable. It allowed people to quit the program for instance, and many other no-no's such as adding bookmarks I believe, and maybe even opening new URL's. Anyway, our hacked version of Netscape ran in exactly the environment you describe: a Mac with Internet connection, System 7.5, At Ease for finder-level protection. We left the keyboard on for online searches, but disabled the "open new URL" function. The nice thing about the Hack was we could really simplify as well as secure the interface, so that we renamed some menus (such as "go to home page" was "go to main page for xxx exhbition" etc). We completely blocked the functions of opening new URL's - this forced users to start at our home page, then click out from there, so even if they wanted to go "out into cyberspace" they would have to at least start at our content. Then if they had a particular site in mind (not ours) they would have to find it by clicking across the Internet. I found that just building in this level of "inconvenience" or rather focus on our content was better than SurfWatch (especially since one of our online exhibitions is about Queer sensibility and has a lot of "controversial" keywords:) One of the main annoyances for us was that we did a site in collaboration with HotWired, and everytime someone called up their pages, of course there were ads. So we were providing Stoli Vodka with free ad space in our galleries on a kiosk (in a sense), but it was not a terrible thing; just annoying. If a session is gathered I'd like to recommend bringing in someone from a library. Libraries have been dealing with public access terminals for a decade or more now (that's how I got my start), and currently employ a lot of Internet-able terminals, which they do NOT want to focus as much, but rather let people do open-ended research, so they surely have some insight. Anyway, John, I'm sure that if anyone from Netscape is watching this list, I'm in trouble and in breach of my license agreement, but again if you want to talk off-list I can tell you more :) Take care, Richard Rinehart | University Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive Systems Manager & Education | University of California at Berkeley Technology Specialist | 2625 Durant, Berkeley, CA 94720-2250 [email protected] | http://www.uampfa.berkeley.edu/ ph. 510.642.5240 >We are actually going to try it for a month -- putting a computer with live >link to the Internet in a public space. We will be using a Macintosh >running system 7.5, At Ease to limit access to the hard drive, Surfwatch to >limit where the visitor can go, a mouse only, no keyboard, and of course >Netscape 2.0. > >My concern is that visitors will close the window or try to quit netscape. >I remember someone mentioning once, maybe on Museum-L, that they had hacked >at Netscape and disable some of the menu functions. > >Is there a simple way to keep a Netscape window up at all times? Does >anyone have experiences and/or horror stories to share before we do this? > >thanks, > >john chadwick > >=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= >John Chadwick, system analyst >New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science >1801 Mountain Road NW >Albuquerque, NM 87104 >[email protected], http://www.aps.edu/HTMLPages/NMMNH.html >phone: (505) 841-2843 FAX (505) 841-2866 >=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
