On 12/29/2004 10:11 AM, mvol...@fruitlands.org wrote:
Thanks Matt. Its nice to see OpenKiosk on mozdev.org.
My pleasure!
For comparasin, here is a link to a kiosk chrome I developed for our kiosks. We've used this on both linux and wondows platforms.
http://wiki.mozdev.org:8080/cgi-bin/mozdev-wiki.pl?KioskProject/VolmarSetup
How cool. We did know about that effort, but I had no idea it came from
another museum. Good work!
I think developing kiosk applications using mozilla XULs is a good way to go. Once the basic kiosk interface is set up, the rest of the development is largely standard web programming technologies. I dont remember exactly but I think Matt uses a client-server model.
Right. There are a few benefits for us, relative to a kiosk with a local
http server: in short, they are a) centralized management; b) the
clients are all nearly identical and thus easier to replace/swap; c) we
can take advantage of external online resources (which we can manage
using blacklisting/whitelisting in OpenKiosk).
Our smaller museum is not networked in all exhibit halls.
We're not either! We have switch cabinets and a backbone throughout the
building, though, so we pay only about $200 for an ethernet cable--which
does not add much to the cost of a kiosk. That's easily worth it,
considering the benefits, especially the labor-savings. If we had not
had the luxury of installing a modern network backbone a few years ago,
this would be harder. But wireless is an option.
The beauty of using mozilla as a program platform is that you can enable server side scripting and database functionality - even on stand alone machines. On linux this is a little easier since you can automatically install an apache webserver with php and mySQL. Using php triad or easy php on windows can achieve the same result.
I also recommend xampp.org (apache, MySQL, php, perl, plus great config
tools), which is similar and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Each OS has its own keyboard issues.
It would be great to hear about your non-stnadard keyboard vendors Matt.
Here's a list of links from some places we've tried. They all sell
tamper-proof, spill-proof, panel-mountable (so you can build them into a
desk) keyboards. Not all of their models are shown on these pages; you
may have to call to ask about keyboards lacking problem keys.
http://www.stealthcomputer.com/peripherals_oem.htm
http://www.input-tech.com/
http://www.ikey.com/
There is some overlap between them because, we think, Stealth is a
vendor while iKey and Input-Tech are manufacturers.
Thanks,
Matt
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