Kiosk - Alpha - Aqua-Soft Forums

Kiosk - An early preview

Following the idea by Panic! Software with their application Stattoo, I decided to bring the fun and joy over to Windows.

If you're like me, I've got enough things going on to worry about customizing every little detail but still like to have something that looks good, isn't obtrusive and, most of all, functional. These are the things I thought about when designing Kiosk.

Kiosk was built from the ground up to deliver your information in the easiest form possible. I call it 'pamphlets'. Each pamphlet has one specific task and it does it with the least amount of required user interaction. Just run the program, pick which pamphlets you want Kiosk to display and away it goes.

Now, for those who like eye-candy and I happen to be such a person, I've included a few things that will please that crowd as well. The pamphlets can be skinned with full alpha-blended, transparency support. Pull up the pamphlet template in your favorite image editor and customize away. And for those that like to keep there desktops nice and clean, fear not, sweep the pamphlets away with the click of a button. Retrieving them is just as simple.

Check out the

at youTube or take a look at the screenshots below.

Pamphlets that are currently included:

Battery life - never have your laptop suddenly shut off due to a dead battery.
CPU activity
Date
Drive space - cycles through your available hard drives and lets you know how much free space you have left.
Time
Memory usage - keep an eye on your memory
Recycle bin
Headlines - cycles through the top headlines of any RSS feed you choose.
Weather - get weather updates and your 5-day forecast (provided by Yahoo! Weather).

Planned pamphlets:

Media - get the currently playing song from Foobar, Windows Media Player, Winamp or iTunes.
Network watcher - easily check your available bandwidth at a glance.
Folder watcher - be notified when a new file is created in the folder, handy for download folders.

Let me know your thoughts, ideas and suggestions on what you would like to see in Kiosk. Also, as soon as I get the settings fixed up and replace the hard coded details for weather, headlines, etc, I'll be looking for some beta testers to give it the run through. I especially need some people on lower end computers to test the limits of the transition effects - on my development computer, the animations were too fast and had to slow them down a bit.

Again, I hope there's some people out there that may find this interesting. Regardless, it's been a fun night / day and I definitely learned a few more tricks!

#486164

Oh I think I like it,looking forward,thank's

#486166

Some screenshots of it in actions. This should give a better idea of what Kiosk is all about.

#486169

looks interesting, when are you posting links

#486185

@ethereal: I'll be looking for beta testers in the next couple of days.

#486188

Wow, an actual video I can watch on dial up.

Looks very good. Will the ability exist to create/add pamplets?

#486192

Looks stunning mate, nice and smooth animation.

Can't wait to give it a blast.

#486194

Wow, an actual video I can watch on dial up. Looks very good. Will the ability exist to create/add pamplets?

Ahh, the wonders of Xvid compression...hehe. I am looking into making it a plugin-based system where pamphlets would then be easily added. If anyone has any helpful hints / guides to this, that would be great. I'm new to the plugin world and would really love to go this route.

Looks stunning mate, nice and smooth animation. Can't wait to give it a blast.

Thanks a lot mate for the kind words! I'm really hoping the animations stay as smooth on everyone's computer as they are here. They really make the program that much more fun.

#486241

Good luck with this, looks good !

I really need to get started on .Net ...

Maybe an GMail plugin would be great instead of using gmail's rss

#486245

Here you've a betatester for vista =)

#486259

The most language independant plugin system I can think of is putting executables as plugins, but this would be painful for very dynamic plugins such as cpu usage.

I would suggest using a .dll based plugin system. What programming language are you using?

#486264

@Matonga: I'm using good ole' C#. I was leaning toward a .dll based system actually.

I found a couple articles on CodeProject that deal with it...now to just implement the whole thing. *shakes head* Still though, if anyone has examples of real world code - the coding on CodeProject is an example and is a bit too simple - that would be great.

#486279

@Sranshaft:

Check this:

http://www.matiasmoreno.bbt.net.ar/PruebaC...pDLLPlugins.rar

'Prueba' means 'Test' (have no time to translate, must go to sleep).

This is for "legacy" plugins, i.e. dlls.

You have the sources of the tested dll also.

You can load any .dll, at runtime.

I don't know how to do a .dll in C#, but found stuff in CodeProject, have to check,

Gute Nacht!

#486286

Wow! That's really great of you to take the time to do that for me. This really simplifies the process. I think I've got the basic idea down now!! Now I should have fun adding this into Kiosk. hehe

Really appreciate you taking the time. A big thanks from me! Now get some sleep, you've done enough for one night. Oh and it should be Guten Nacht. or, being on Australian time, Guten Morgen Abend - didn't realize what time it was. hehe

Edit: Looking at your example, I'm surprise that I'm actually doing, in a round about way, the same thing! I've broken the individual pamphlets into their own .cs file and pull the info from that. So it really it shouldn't be hard at all adjusting the existing code and moving each of the pamphlets from an embedded 'dlls', if you will, into standalone files.

#486288

I will be more than happy to make plugins for it if .dlls are supported (I mean can I load my own assemblies with this system ?)

#486304

I think the way to load your own assemblies is similar, but not the same.

Indeed the stuff I sent would be for "legacy" (not .NET) plugins.

Whatever I think both ways should be supported (maybe native support for assemblies and a 'wrapper' assembly for legacy plugins). This way you will have support for both .NET and non-.NET plugin developers.

#486322

Is this still in the works?

Looks very interesting.

#500071

Still working on it. I've been a bit side tracked with it though so the release is still a far off thing. Who knows when...

#500100