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Plainview 1.0.151

posted by Chandler McWilliams
Chandler McWilliams
Chandler McWilliams

Developer : San Francisco

topics: Programming Languages, Processing, Software, Barbarian, and Installations

on July 23, 2008 at 12:13 PM
filed under: Software
http://tbg.cm/ed0jlJ
Last night we released a new version of Plainview. The biggest changes in this version are the addition of a custom user agent string, to help some web apps which use questionable detection methods, some new keyboard shortcuts in response to user feedback, and a few new features for kiosk mode.
Kiosk mode is a way to easily lock users into Plainview, making it a good choice for kiosks where you want to show web (or flash) content, but don’t want the user to have full access to the system. When you enter kiosk mode, you’re asked for an administrator password and then you’re locked in. No menus, no cmd-tab, no bookmarks or location panels, nothing except where the currently loaded site will take you. To this we’ve added a few new bells and whistles. In the preferences, you can now set some options to hide the mouse, and have the app automatically load in kiosk mode.
You can download the new version here, or launch Plainview and let the auto-updater do its thing.

20 comments

Hey,

Just a small bug report:
The progress indicator in the top left corner prohibits links from working in that area.
Maybe I'm the only fool who likes to put a link up there, but hey, now you know (that there's a problem with the links that is, not me being a fool).

Anyhow,
thanks for this great app!
hey thanks for the heads up. I'll add it to the bug tracker and see what i can do.
Hey, great! I've just installed this at the MIT Museum, we'll see how it goes.
On July 30, 2008 at 04:47 PM, Daniel Schutzsmith wrote:
Nice....loving it!
Hi, we've discovered a small bug that has quite large consequences. When you launch plainview in kiosk mode as a startup item the user can still get to the apple menu at the top of the screen and close the app and then all sorts. This doesn't happen when you launch the app normally. We've tried using applescripts as startup items to launch the app, putting in delays and all sorts but to no avail.

Obviously when creating kiosks you want the machine to return to the default state on start up so this is quite a big issue.

Thanks,

a
Plainview is going to be awesome as soon as it supports applescript, I'd love to be able to tell application "Plainview" to set URL of document 1 to "%s"
@andrew - we'll look into this right away.
@thomas - applescript support is in the works as we speak!
Hi,

What a great product guys! Can you please think about adding "Print" because I have installed it for making appointments with careers advisors at our center. Everyone loves it so much that the word got around and now soon it will be adopted by the University of Maryland Baltimore County's few departments.

Keep up the great work!

Thanks for an awesome product.

Shahid
Hey that's great! I'll add print support to the feature request list and see what we can do.
thanks for plainview

but, as a dummy, I checked the kiosk launch mode and now I can't get rid of it.
stupid, isn't it! I must switch my computer off to escape
is it the only way ?
can you help me ?

thanks
command-/ will get you out.
On April 05, 2009 at 10:57 PM, Kristofor Vokes wrote:
Is there a way to use Plainview in full screen mode while on a secondary display?
Not yet, but it'll be an update shortly.
I'm working with Allan at the MIT Museum and putting Plainview on a few more kiosks in the museum. We've run into the same problem as Andrew, of computers loading Plainview as a startup item (directly, as an alias, or as an Applescript) giving users access to the Apple menu. Did this bug ever get resolved or a workaround figured out?
On August 18, 2009 at 02:16 PM, Jaye Nelson wrote:
Is Plainview development dead? We haven't seen much activity lately. The product could be amazing but that pesky menu bar just won't go away when auto-laoding at start-up. I can tell the mac to autoboot at a certain time but it can't work unattended until the menu bar disappears on it's own. I've tried it both in and out of kiosk mode, same result. I've even added <key>LSUIPresentationMode</key> and <integer>4</integer> to the plist.info file and still, that bar just won't go away... running OS X 10.5.8

Overall, thanks for a great product.
no! it still lives! just been behind a bit. Please keep the feature requests and issues coming.
Just posted a new version; more over here: http://www.barbariangroup.com/posts/3329-plainview_1_0_173
Nice....loving it!
Any chance, that I can open the PlainView Browser via a Terminal command so it is starting and loading a startpage (url) and that the size of the windows is 1920*2160 pixel large and positioned like 0px down and 1680px left. I would need this for a exhibition installation - Fullscreen Webpages over to fullHD Screens.

Thanks and respect - i am loving it
You can launch with a specific url by passing the url via the command line:

/Applicaitons/Plainview.app/Contents/MacOS/Plainview -url "http://google.com"

But some folks have had issues getting the calling app (say, terminal) to give up focus, in which case you can toss in a little applescript:

/Applications/Plainview.app/Contents/MacOS/Plainview -url "http://google.com" & osascript -e 'tell application "Plainview" to activate'

There isn't anything at the moment for setting the window size and location since it is mostly designed as a full screen browser. What is the use case here?

thanks,
c