[Bradford] Lock down android tablet for public use

[Alice Kaerast]

After a brief discussion with our innovation team, they suggest that
if your buttons are hardware buttons then you can build a physical
frame around them so people cannot physically press them -
particularly if you are planning on mounting these tablets anyway.  If
they are soft-buttons provided by the OS itself then there are
probably ways of hiding/disabling these.

If you're building an application yourself then you can also make it
really difficult to quit the application by forcing the user to
provide a password to exit.  But of course you'd also need to disable
the hard/soft home button.

Hope this helps

Alice


On 31 July 2012 18:40, Alice Kaerast <alice at kaerast.info> wrote:
> There are apps which allow parental locks, such as this one:
> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vlobe.smartappcloud.android.parentalcontrol
> but judging from the reviews it either works great or not at all.
>
> If you've got control over the network then you've a much better
> chance of stopping people accessing the outside world from the
> tablets.  If you connect all the tablets to your Google Apps domain
> then you also get some level of group-wide control, although I wasn't
> really paying much attention to that bit in our last training session.
>
> Finally, on the topic of Android - our mobile developer is looking for
> Leeds/Bradford based mobile developer groups to join if anybody knows
> about any.
>
> Regards
> Alice
>
>
> On 31 July 2012 10:11, David Carpenter <david.carpenter at nornir.co.uk> wrote:
>> A friend has asked me the following and I though the list might be a
>> source of help/inspiration...
>>
>> This is an art gallery that has a number of Android tablets: Model is
>> the A1CS Fusion5
>> http://www.amazon.co.uk/A1CS-FUSION5-Tablet-PC-Capacitive/dp/B007SHWKFQ
>>
>> "They are for use as part of an exhibition in a public art gallery, with
>> a wide variety of people using them. We'll be playing back mp3 sound
>> files by various different artists/musicians arranged into groups
>> (effectively 'albums').
>>
>> We need an audio/media player that offers a decent amount of user
>> interface customisation - basically to make it super simple to use, but
>> that also allows us to include our own image for each track and a good
>> paragraph of text information that can be viewed while listening to the
>> track too.
>>
>> We have tried various media player apps from the Google Play store, they
>> all look and work in pretty much the same way and don't really do what
>> we want them to. Some are too confusing to use and it is easy to get
>> 'lost', and none of them allow us to include the text information as we
>> would like.
>>
>> We could make each audio file into a video file, with a still image
>> displaying the text information - this is a possible way round this
>> problem (using a video player instead, of course).
>>
>> The main issue is the functionality - being able to stop all tracks
>> playing and return to an overall menu screen at the single touch of a
>> button etc.
>>
>> We're prepared to flash the ROM on these things and install a new OS if
>> that will help, but if anyone has any ideas about how we can get what we
>> want, I would be very interested to hear their thoughts!"
>>
>> So looks to me like they need a locked down tablet so guests can only
>> access the music app, and then perhaps a customisable player, or an open
>> source/free software version that *could* be tweaked in the code
>>
>> Anyone had any experience of this?
>>
>> Thanks
>> David
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> David Carpenter
>>
>> nornir
>>
>> E: david.carpenter at nornir.co.uk
>> Skype: carpenter.david
>>
>> Please save paper and only print this email if you have to.
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Mx Alice Kaerast
> Devops supergirl, agile coach, corporate sysadmin, optimisationeer



-- 
Mx Alice Kaerast
Devops supergirl, agile coach, corporate sysadmin, optimisationeer