Making a simple Kiosk

Today, a very different sort of project managed to find its way to me. I've been tasked with building a kiosk out of this, this, and last but not least, this. It's a pretty cool idea - make the mini run, mount the monitor, cover it with plexiglass, sand the box, and give it a nice new coat of paint. My parents had always made sure that power tools were more than an arm's length from me at all times, so I've grown up with zero experience in that realm. Needless to say, I started with the mac.

The box needed to do only one task: start up, open a browser, cycle through links. Perfect job for applescript. The script to launch a browser and loop through links is simple:

#!/usr/bin/osascript




-- argv is a list of links to loop through

on run argv

  tell application "Opera.app" to activate

    

    tell application "System Events"

      tell process "Opera"

        click menu item "New Window" of menu "File" of menu bar 1

      end tell

    end tell

    -- list of urls to cycle

    repeat

      repeat with someurl in argv

        tell application "System Events" to set browserRunning to (name of processes) contains "Opera"

        if browserRunning then

        else

          exit repeat

        end if

        

        tell application "Opera.app"

          set URL of document 1 to someurl

          delay 5

        end tell

      end repeat

      tell application "System Events" to set browserRunning to (name of processes) contains "Opera"

      if browserRunning then

      else

        exit repeat

      end if

    end repeat

end run

I made a python script that does everything else. Grabs a list of links from a feed, passes them over to the cycler:

#!/usr/bin/env python




import feedparser

import os

from subprocess import call







# this actually parses the feed as if it uses the firefox live bookmarks format

# your parsing may change on how your links are represented




applecmd = []

applecmd.append("osascript")

applecmd.append("kioskcycle.scpt")

d = feedparser.parse("http://myhost.com/somefeed.rss")

bookmarkitems = d['items']

for item in bookmarkitems:

for link in item.links:

applecmd.append(link.href)







os.chdir("/Users/someuser/Desktop")

call(applecmd)

And got it all working by turning my python script into a natively built python applet, and telling OSX to use it as a startup item. All pretty straight forward, under normal circumstances. Of course, my script initially used Safari, but things can never be that simple. RIT is its own Certification Authority, and Safari thinks some of RIT's sites (ie, my.rit.edu) are traps. Even if you forcefully allow the certificate to pass, Safari will warn you. This got on my nerves, so I went looking for another browser. Firefox dropped support for PPC a long time ago. Chrome never had it. TenFourFox, as nice as that is, doesn't work with applescript. I decided to settle on Opera 10, the last Opera release to work with PPC. It also gained Applescript support since 9.5. Nice.

I've got some major sanding, painting, drilling, and polishing to do tomorrow, so I'll be sure to post a picture of the final product of my labor. Mmmmm... power tools.