posted by on July 23, 2008 at 12:13 PM
filed under:
Software
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.
posted by on July 13, 2008 at 08:39 PM
filed under:
Software
posted by on June 28, 2008 at 04:02 PM
filed under:
Software
posted by on June 10, 2008 at 07:59 PM
filed under:
Software
Soon after the release of
Plainview, we starting hearing about issues viewing pages that employ browser sniffing to look for compatible browsers, sites like
abc.com where Safari is allowed, but
Plainview is blocked. There was even suspicion that we were using an custom user-agent string which was causing trouble. Well, we weren’t, but we are now. Turns out that the sites mentioned, and many others it seems, are looking for “Safari” in the user-agent string, and WebKit does not identify itself as Safari out-of-the-box so these sites would believe Plainview to be incompatible. This is bad mojo. Apple
recommends looking for “AppleWebKit”
not “Safari” to ensure compatibility with WebKit powered browsers, and even offers some
code to help out.
However, I hardly expect abc.com and their ilk to switch detect scripts overnight. So the next build of
Plainview will include a tweaked user-agent string to identify itself as “Plainview (like Safari)” which seems to fix the issues with abc.com and hopefully others as well.
posted by on June 05, 2008 at 12:48 PM
filed under:
Software
Hey all -
Just a quick note to let you know we updated
Plainview to fix a few of the bugs you found. You can check for updates, or it should update when you next run the browser.
Also, we didn’t mention this before, but
Plainview does have a locked kiosk mode for kiosks. Type Command-/ and enter your password to enter it! We updated the Faq on this one.
Thanks for the comments. We’ll fix things as we find them. Still checking in on the Oracle bug that was reported.
posted by on June 01, 2008 at 06:36 PM
filed under:
Software
489 Days.
That’s how long it was from the day we first posted in beard about a windowless fullscreen browser that we should make. How many times had we done presentations where we just wanted to show our work in a browser – screw powerpoint – but couldn’t do it because it would look lame with all that browser chrome? How many pointless Powerpoint presentations have we made of Quicktime movies of our sites, just so we could show them in full screen and look slick?
Well no more! Today we give you Plainview – our full-screen web browser for the Mac, complete with presentation mode, so you can compile a list of a bunch of websites, and show them one by one, all full screen, all without ruining your flow.
The second product from Barbarian Software, it’s free. Because we know other web geeks out there have had this problem too. Because we wanted to futz around with Cocoa in advance of the iPhone. Because web shops shouldn’t have to learn Powerpoint.
Woo!
posted by on May 09, 2008 at 12:06 PM
filed under:
Software
Friend of the Barbarians and
CMO of the forthcoming
Hello Health,
Jay Parkinson, MD wrote a
post the other day about Adobe submitting the
DNG Raw file format to the
ISO for a standard in Raw file storage.
I’m a rabid archiver, and this reminded me of an idea I had a year or two ago: a call for OS-level version migration. Much like time machine does OS level backups, there could be a background process that migrates old files to newer file formats via a set of adaptors. The gist, from my old LJ post:
But nonetheless, applications die, and despite our best efforts we’re gonna have files saved in .graffle or .keynote or .chat docs. What we really need is an OS level version migration system, similar to Time Machine, but which migrates documents, according to a user’s settings, to newer versions of the same documents. Of course it saves the original, Time Machine style, for posterity’s and provenence’s sake, but basically at any time a new version of some app comes out, the service would migrate them – maybe once a month, or whatever you set it to.
This really shouldn’t be that hard – iView and DeBabelizer have a myriad of converter information saved in them to open documents – it would be relatively trivial to develop a set of converters that migrate your applications according to your preferences. I would love to see this, more than anything, as a future feature of an OS. Just make it automatically work. The vast majority of people out there really don’t care that they are losing some original metadata when they migrate their files from MS Word 95 to MS Word X, and if you did care, or were an archivist, you could set your settings appropriately. And the system could, of course, migrate over the important metadata – date created and modied, original application version, etc.
You can read the whole old post
here. I believe in this so whole heartedly. I’d love to see apple pull it off within Time Machine, which I have become addicted to.
posted by on April 25, 2008 at 04:52 PM
filed under:
Software
Whether you blog by sheer zeal, peer pressure, or obligation, you might wanna check out some new blogging software that my friend at
Brainjuice is working on. It’s in beta right now, so they’re looking for as many testers as possible.