Just a quick plug for some Mac applications that make my life a lot easier.

Namely. It’s a free application launcher for Mac OS X 10.5. I used to use MenuStrip in 10.4 but really only used it for the Quick Launcher feature. When I upgraded to 10.5, I found Namely, which does just one thing. You set a hot-key combination that lets you pop open the Namely window. Then type in a few letters of the application you want to launch, and hit enter. I find myself using the dock less and less these days.

Fluid. Another Mac OS X 10.5 only application. It lets you build a “site specific browser” i.e. a separate application out of a browser window. I’ve wrapped my Google Calendar in Fluid and just keep it running all the time.

VoodooPad Pro. I use it for two things. I have one document to keep track of stuff I’m doing. I have another that I lock with a password to keep track of all my passwords. I haven’t done any scripting with its built-in Lua script engine, but I keep meaning to…

FlySketch. I use this for screen grabs all the time. One great use is to capture those web receipts you get when you buy something or pay for something. I grab them with FlySketch and put them into VoodooPad Pro.

Li’l Snitch. A great little app that lets me know what’s happening on my net connection.

At the museum, we’re setting up a kiosk to let people browse our online collections database. We’re very much in the mode of trying things out using a simple setup and then when we see how that works, we can tweak it as needed.

The basic requirements were to let visitors browse a single website (http://webmuseum.mit.edu) but not to be able to follow any of the outgoing links. Additionally, the visitors should not be able to leave the web browser and start mucking about with the underlying computer.

Even though our old PowerMac G4’s are dropping like flies with broken power supply units, we have two left in the “good enough to reuse” bin. So I set one up with Mac OS X 10.5. Using MacPorts, I installed Squid and set up the network to use that squid as a proxy. Squid lets you configure which URLs it will go out and get, and which ones it will return an error on. I set it up to only return pages in the webmuseum.mit.edu site, and whenever a link outside that site is requested, it returns the toplevel page at http://webmuseum.mit.edu.

So far so good. The next thing I needed was a browser that won’t let visitors do too much other than browse. Luckily last week I bumped into Plainview. Plainview is a webkit based browser with no chrome. It also happens to have a kiosk mode that requires a password to get out of.

Then I set up a user account with Parental Controls, and only allow it to run the Plainview app and nothing else. I have the Mac boot up with that user login coming up automatically, and Plainview starts as a login application. Presto, a nice web kiosk. If users break out of Plainview, they can’t do anything else but log out of the system. We’ll see how long that takes…

One minor hitch in the entire setup – I don’t know whether it’s possible to set up Plainview to go directly into kiosk mode. Right now you have to type ⌘-/ and enter an administrator password to start kiosk mode.