Ask Slashdot: Making a Tablet Run Only One Application?

An anonymous reader asks "I'm working for a medical centre who want to make a tablet with various videos and webpages about smoking cessation available in their waiting room. The tablet can't access the Internet because of security policies. I'm planning to use a local server with copies of the (Creative Commons) videos and pages accessed through local webpages using the tablet's browser. How can I make only the browser be available to the tablet users? Ideas? Suggestions?"

Comments

DNS Hijacking

[Anonymous Coward]

Setup a wireless network where all the HTTP requests go to the server with your content.

Curious...

[interkin3tic]

I do not have a solution to your problem. I am curious about the situation though. Is there a reason your organization wants this to be easy-to-steal-and-expensive tablets? Especially when there's the security policy. And you'll have to keep them charged too. Why not just a cheap laptop. Or a pamphlet and TV?

I realize it's difficult to get people to stop smoking, but fancy technology isn't always the solution.

Re:Curious...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a reason your organization wants this to be easy-to-steal-and-expensive tablets?

The hospital management is being treated well by the tablet manufacturer, who would very much like this hospital to become the envy of the `non-tablet' hospitals. Plus, it's healthcare; they have money to burn.

Re:Curious...

[timeOday]

Please stop using technology for the sake of technology to increase my already outrageous healthcare costs.

On the other hand, the "cool-factor" might have a big positive impact on people bothering to actually watch the videos.

Take it from advertisers, the most cheaply-produced message is not always the most cost-effective. They should know.

Re:Curious...

[Anonymous Coward]

" Plus, it's healthcare; they have money to burn."

Yet the bastards whine they are not paid enough...

Don't confuse money that's available to be burnt with money that's available to pay said illegitimate children. I work in healthcare. We have a LOT of money available for goofy stuff like this that increases somebody's adoption of something electronic related to healthcare. It all comes from the federal government, and is earmarked for those specific types of projects. What we don't have is money to actually pay the people that provide healthcare service, in large part due to that same entity.

Re:Curious...

[bgibby9]

Besides, you will need to be able to recharge it anyway, so why not look for something that can be put on a table with a long core for recharge?

TBH I think the OHS people would shit themselves if they ran into tablets connected to long cords for recharging.

I think the better idea is a kiosk which has more functionality, connected to power and is less likely to "walk away"

Re:Curious...

[tlhIngan]

The hospital management is being treated well by the tablet manufacturer....

Hmm. Since that narrows the universe of possibilities down to a single vendor, you should probably tell us what OS the vendor uses on the tablet, otherwise people will waste their time giving you advice you can't use.

If you don't want to identify the vendor, and you can't tell us the OS without doing that, just say so. We'll pretend we don't know who you're talking about (although we will).

Using utterly reasonable powers of deduction, we know the tablets are NOT iPads. First Apple hasn't really tried to court companies, and don't really have any sort of enterprise management system in place, according to everyone who's asked about iPhones, iPads and such in the workplace.

Which means the OS in question is either Windows or Android. Since Windows would be utterly trivial to put into a kiosk mode (you don't even need a tablet to demo this) and there'll be a half-dozen ways to do it (probably writing a custom app hosting the IE COM control, for example), it's unlikely the question is about Windows.

So most likely, it's Android.

LCD Digitial Frame

[Anonymous Coward]

The solution that you want may fully well exist without having to reinvent the wheel.

Is there any reason you can not use a LCD picture frame?

I don't know how well they deal with video but I suspect that you can put a good a presentation using stills on one of those.

Wireless or USB touch-monitor

[Beardydog]

Tablets are generally designed to be resilient, and usable by the unskilled. For that reason, they can't usually be locked down like this, because the feature, in and of itself, is more technical than tablets are meant to be.

I don't know much about Androids, but an iPad makes a good example. Can you hijack DNS on the your wifi network? Yes... but it's incredibly easy to join another wifi network that isn't redirected, and there are no User and Administrator type accounts to keep people from doing so.

If you jailbreak an iPad, there is an extension you can install that locks it into a particular app (the browser, in this case). But getting around it involves, I think, nothing fancier than rebooting the device. You could modify the Hosts file on it to redirect no matter which network the user is on, as well... but a dedicated goof-off could always resort to direct DNS entry to cause mischief.

I would try to find out if anyone sells a wireless display with touchscreen capabilities. That could be linked to a computer that's locked down at an arbitrary level, and would prevent users from engaging in the kinds of shennigans they get up to when they have access to function keys and Reset buttons. If users can use the ctrl key or reboot the machine, you -will- end up with porn on your browser.

As a bonus, the device would be borderline useless to anyone who walks off with it and isn't fairly gadget-oriented, and you might be able to run several of them off of one host machine.

If this exists, someone should let me know, because I've made made want one.

If it doesn't you cold even use one of these:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/usb-gadgets/c609/

Wireless is great, but the real goal is just something hand-held that each person in the waiting room can have one of. Run some USB cables out to each end-table in the waiting room, and attach them to these. They're cheap, so have them stolen is less of an issue... unplugging them makes the, stop working, which makes them less immediately temping... they have no keyboard and no buttons that affect the actual computer behind the scenes... They're a perfect solution if you don't mind a few cables.

Re:Use something with better coverage

[anubi]

That sounds just like a job long ago for a restauranteur.

He wanted one of those hi-tech looking displays showing his food, menus, and prices. He had the "high tech display": his projection TV.

What he ended up with was his old PC-AT home computer yanked from a pile in his garage and loaded with a bunch of GIF's and JPG's he created to his heart's content on his nicer home computer. Loaded all the images he wanted to display in a subdirectory, along with a DOS slideshow program. A little edit of Autoexec.bat and config.sys, and every time the computer was turned on, all it knew to do was start the slideshow and run it until power was turned off at the end of the day.

It was a no-brainer being he plugged the whole shebang into his beer-sign lighting circuit. There was no change to the routine for his help in opening shop for business. When they turned on the beer-sign circuit as usual, his "high tech display" would start up and run until they turned off the beersign lights at the end of the day.


He was aware of the limitations of the system, so he made his images with that in mind. He could create anything he wanted for it to display, with no more intervention from me.

He seemed happy enough. He was ready to toss it all anyway, and all it cost him was a dinner for me and my buddy.

I wanted so bad to do something for a '50s style diner in my area to retrofit those table-controlled jukeboxes as a serial terminal so I could queue up .MP3 requests for a DOS MP3 player, but the owner had other vendors in mind.

That would have been fun, as I wanted to keep all the old vacuum tube amplifiers running, and even the record selector, but what would actually go through the system would be a MP3, not what was coming off the tone arm... the spinning record being "played" would be just for show. It would not make any difference at all what 45rpm record was in the slot... its just there for people to reminisce seeing things behave and hearing that 120Hz hum in it, just like it did when they, like I, was a kid.

I could rip all the MP3's I needed because he already had licenses from all the copyright people to play copyrighted music in his place. So I could load up the machine with anything. I thought it would be a nice touch if he kept his customer's favorites on the machine, as well as honoring requests. I even have an old mechanical typewriter so I could make more of those tags for the table units so they still looked like they came from the '50s.

Boy, did I ever date myself with this post.

cheap digital photo frames

[pbjones]

buy them cheap digital frames and load the pics and movies onto SD cards? A search will show you cheap MP3 players that may be as good. not the best answer, sorry. I like the 'Delete all other app' and 'isolate your network', and have it all just point to a web server, like airports and Twin Golden Arches.