Display Dashboards Full Screen on OS X
Easily display dashboards and status pages full screen on any connected display on OS X with http://lookingglass.unfiniti.com
Written by Ben Mills
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6 Responses
You can also just do this with Chrome. View -> Enter Presentation Mode.
@chadmoran No you can't.
Chrome has essentially 3 modes in which you can display pages. Windowed, Full Screen, and Presentation. If users use windowed, they have to manually size out the window to the screen bounds. Full screen mode obviously shows the page full screen. Presentation shows it full screen without the tab and address bars. Unfortunately, both the Full Screen and Presentation modes render other displays useless with the OS X fiber weave screen.
Chrome has to be relaunched from time-to-time for updates or system restarts. Users are left up to restoring "Recently Closed" tabs and windows or sizing out the window again. Sometimes users "close all windows", "minimize all" or hide the application without thinking about the one containing the "dashboard" view in the background. These inconveniences become distracting and require users to always be careful to remember that they have that one view they never want to dismiss.
Looking Glass was designed to avoid these issues. It doesn't render your other displays useless when presenting a web view full screen. It's meant to be a set-it-and-forget-it solution. Users can still do their normal work without fear of accidentally closing their "dashboard" view. A major concern of web-baseed kiosk application is that it's easy for people to navigate away from the page because the address bar is easily accessible. In Looking Glass there isn't an address bar immediately available for users to change the desired location. In the future, I imagine Looking Glass will also include a password lock feature so the start page URL cannot be changed by anyone who is not an administrator.
I love this project! I'm just curious, what browser does it use? Is there some sort of WebView for Mac, is it Safari or Chrome.
Hope you'll also fix the Silverlight issue, it's a worthless player, although it is often used for broadcasting television shows in the internet.
Mike
Thanks! Cocoa has a WebView component that we utilize for this. It's underlying engine is WebKit.
Silverlight is currently being blocked by sandbox entitlements and we've yet to hear from Apple about what entitlement will enable it to run properly. When we deactivate sandboxing, Silverlight is able to run completely fine.
We're also actively working on a new feature to rotate through multiple URLs.
Nice! After that update you should make more use of marketing, Lion users want this full-screen functionality badly. However this is one of the very few webpages about the app ;-)
If you have ideas, I'm all ears. Feel free to drop by #unfiniti on IRC freenode and we can chat more.
