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Plainview Update

posted by Rick Webb
Rick Webb
Rick Webb

Co-founder, COO : New York

topics: Measurement and Analytics, Video, Installations, Brands, and Viral Marketing

on June 05, 2008 at 12:48 PM
filed under: Software
http://tbg.cm/fpUNF1
Hey all -
Just a quick note to let you know we updated Plainview to fix a few of the bugs you found. You can check for updates, or it should update when you next run the browser.
Also, we didn’t mention this before, but Plainview does have a locked kiosk mode for kiosks. Type Command-/ and enter your password to enter it! We updated the Faq on this one.
Thanks for the comments. We’ll fix things as we find them. Still checking in on the Oracle bug that was reported.

17 comments

heya barbarian group,
thank you so much for this awesome software. i missed a fullscreen browser so hardly on mac. great work. i just added it to iusethis http://osx.iusethis.com/app/plainview

grettings from germany
dotdean
hi,
i entered software's web page and i wondered "what it is". and starting to read a text area title is "What Is Plainview?" after that, stil i was asking "what it is". and then, i was keep trying to follow page, and yes! that is a mac software at least. and it is a browser.

But, if it is a spacial tool for some, what is it's main feature about being a browser?

sorry for bothering but,you know, we have to follow some great blogs (like this) and some of tiny or big stuations like this makes us spend much more time, dosn't it?

I think, there should be a summary,basic explanation about that software. BTW, it looks great, and sadly, I can't use it;)

best regards.
On June 06, 2008 at 08:33 AM, dan Su wrote:
can you add keyboard shortcuts for going back and forward in plainview? Like in safari, it is cmd+[ and cmd+].
On June 07, 2008 at 10:35 PM, Joe Ekaitis wrote:
Teeny tiny suggestion:

Make the Bookmarks list auto-close after the user clicks on a bookmark. Aside from that, I could get used to web browsing like this all the time.
I'll see what i can do about those two. We got some user agent fixes in the internal build today but more about that in another post.
Um, FF3 and FF2 do what PlainView seems to do? Or am I missing something? I don't have a mac so I can't test it to see if there's something obvious I'm not understanding here. But, if you want to fullscreen your browser and completely remove the chrome in FF3, you press F11. The address bar and such scroll out leaving no chrome behind, and you can recover the top bar by hovering at the top of the screen.

You can also skip between tabs seemlessly with Ctrl+Tab (forward one tab) and Ctrl+Shift+Tab (back one tab).

No need for a completely new browser.
@ Matt Wilcox - The Mac Version of FF does not have this functionality, sadly. Also, there's a whole presentation feature of Plainview - load up a list of websites, and go to the next one by hitting a hot key, so you can show a sequence of websites in a row.
On August 05, 2008 at 03:22 PM, Shib wrote:
Hello Barbarians,

I just love the Plainview browser! One nasty bug(?) detected: When navigating to a site where one element (for instance a frame) can not be loaded the complete screen is forwarded to the Plainview error page (i.e. not only the frame in error) "Plainview can’t connect to the server."

It doesn't happen all the time, but it's hard to predict when it does...

To replicate you may try opening a file with these contents:

<html>
<frameset cols="*,*">
<frame src="http://0.0.0.0/">
<frame src="http://www.google.com/">
</framset>
</html>
i'll take a look!
Plainview is a great application. Can you make it so that the planview application can span multiple monitors???
On November 23, 2008 at 01:28 PM, Istivi Jobis wrote:
Great work, barbs !
On December 13, 2008 at 12:45 PM, Yvonne Fried wrote:
I am trying to use plainview to open a html file which resides on my laptop.
It's not clear to me if this is possible.

Yvonne
Howdy Barbarians,

My boss suggested that I drive around Plainview for use in our lab here at the Univ of Florida. I really like the feel of this simple, immersive browser.

I noticed a problem though. When I right click on any web page link and select "Open Link In New Window" it opens a new window, but nothing fills it.

Also, clicking a link with a named target attribute WILL open in a new window, but subsequent clicks on the same link will open more new windows rather than use the existing one.

Thought you should know.
On March 27, 2009 at 03:02 AM, Justin wrote:
Hello there Barbarians.

Downloaded Plainview today to check it out, since I love full screen browsing and it's quite elegant. The shortcuts are relatively easy to get used to, however I have one slight problem.

I just opened Plainview for the first time, and it ran like a charm. Then it started crashing. After about the 10th time opening it, it crashes randomly when I try to make a new window with a few already open. Is this normal, since it is mainly software for use in presentations and Plainview isn't made for standard heavy browsing?

Thanks for your hard work!

Justin
I can't get the bookmarks to work. Get "Multiple validation errors". Any ideas?
Hello,
I love Plainview. I used it here at the Humane Society Silicon Valley as a kiosk, but ran into one issue. How do you delete past History? We have an online form for an adopter to fill out but it remembers the last user information. I set all the settings in Firefox to private, but it didn't fix the issue. If you have any suggestions please respond I would like to put all the 5 iMacs back into production.

Thanks,
LT
On March 08, 2010 at 11:51 AM, Ott Luuk wrote:
Hey,

A little gripe:

Is there a way to use Plainview fullscreen on a secondary display while keeping the Menu Bar working on the primary display? It seems to go fullscreen only on the screen that has the menu bar when Plainview was launched, even if you exit fullscreen and drag the resulting window to the other display.

So, to get Plainview full screen on an external and menu bar on the MacBook built-in screen, I need to:

1) drag the menu bar to external in Display Prefs
2) Launch Plainview
3) drag menu bar back to built-in display

Even so, when Plainview is active on the external display, the menu bar disappears from the built-in along with useful status icons.

Compare this with how a decent video player works (I have Movist.app and Quicktime at hand but this should be standard among most)

1) launch the player by opening a movie - it pops up on the primary display
2) drag the player window to the external display
3) hit full screen button - the player window goes full screen on the external screen and leaves everything intact on the primary screen, including the player app's own menu.

tested on 10.6.2