A few minutes after you purchase a license, you should receive an email with an attachment named after the Machine ID your provided. This attachment is your license file.
To be activated, this license file has to be copied to the following folder:
~/Library/Application Support/eCrisper
Where the tilde symbol (~) in OS X refers to your home folder.
Mac OS X keeps preferences in Property List files or .plist files. For eCrisper, the file is com.eCrisper.plist located in ~/Library/Preferences. The ~ refers to your home folder therefore /Library/Preferences is a path starting from the home folder.
To access it, go in Finder, click on Go in the top menu (very top of the screen) then hold the Option key down. Library will magically appear as an option.
It is not enough to overwrite com.eCrisper.plist from another kiosk. To activate the new configuration you have to kill a process in Activity Monitor – the process is cfprefsd – select it and click on the X button top left to kill it (the user process, not the root one).
Your kiosks can include buttons in the web content to quit a session, navigate, change the font size, print, reload, stop loading, and print. eCrisper recognizes the following URLs:
Buttons can be included in any of the 5 areas on the screen (top, left, center, right, and bottom) but the action is always applied to the centre area.
You will find an example at http://ecrisper.com/buttons/buttons.htm.
This page works great when displayed in the bottom area. You can of course change the format to suit the side areas as well.
With large screens used by many kiosks, it can be useful to set a default zoom level. This can be achieved with eCrisper by applying a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) that will be applied to every page loaded by the kiosk users.
Digital signage and kiosks can be merged into one powerful tool for high schools and colleges. Using a Mac mini with a large touch screen display (with either horizontal or vertical orientation), kiosk software such as eCrisper can be used to display news and information:
eCrisper is created specifically for Mac using the Cocoa frameworks, the same way Mac OS X itself is created. Much of Cocoa is implemented in Objective-C, an object-oriented language that is compiled to run at incredible speed.
The actual set of tools used is the Xcode developer tools package.
How can eCrisper display web content including HTML5? It uses WebKit, the world’s most advanced web browser engine. WebKit is a Cocoa framework so software developers can easily integrate web browsing into their applications.
The possibility to include web content in any of the 5 areas on the screen allows you to be as creative as you want with your Internet kiosks.
Since the web content is kept behind other objects such as the title for the top area or buttons for the side and bottom areas, web content can be used to display a simple background.
Your own central user database
eCrisper makes it easy to setup your own central user database using resources you may already have. If your current web hosting service includes MySQL and PHP, like most do, your database could be up and running in no time and at no extra cost.
Having a central user database allows you to create accounts (username/password) that can be used to access any of your kiosks.
This is a list of what should be done to prevent unwanted access to your Mac kiosk.
Once you have activated the full version, the Preferences window will become password protected. The default password is password and should be changed. This can be done from the Preferences window under General.
After you change the password, test it at least once before setting the automatic launching of eCrisper using the Start Kiosk Mode button. When it is in kiosk mode, your only way out is through the Preferences window. Even rebooting would not save you.
In most cases you should check Delete cookies, Delete cache, and Clear pasteboard.