One of the problems kids may have running an application on a web browser is that they navigate away to another website or close the browser. Some of our users running the TapToTalk Web App would like to make it harder for the kids who use it to leave the app. This post is about how to do that on Windows.
Most web browsers running on Windows use F11 as a toggle for what is known as full-screen mode. Try it. Press F11 while running your web browser and all the navigation controls disappear. To get them back, press F11 again.
This helps, but a child can press F11 to exit full-screen mode. So here's how to use Internet Explorer in true kiosk mode.
The trick is to start Internet Explorer with a special command line. You can create a shortcut to do this. The command is:
iexplore.exe -k [url]
There are three parts to this line:
iexplore.exe is the actual name of the Internet Explorer porgram.
-k is called a command line switch. In this case, the -k tells Internet Explorer to run in kiosk mode.
[url] is a placeholder for the url you want to run. Don't just type [url]. Replase it with the url you want to run.
For example, here is how to run the TapToTalk Web App demo in kiosk mode:
iexplore.exe -k http://tttdemo.mytaptotalk.com/tttplayer.htm?id=demo&album=101
But how do you ever close the browser when it runs in kiosk mode? The trick is to press Alt-F4.
Note that there are plug-ins available for other browsers to run them in kiosk mode.
Thanks to our users who shared this tip with us.
If you have a TapToTalk idea or story you'd like us to share with other TapToTalk users, please email us at blog@taptotalk.com.
The TapToTalk Team
www.taptotalk.com
blog@taptotalk.com
