first time developement on a mac

Joined
Sep 24, 2008
Messages
3
Reaction score
0
Points
1
I have a computer system which is mostly windows and windows server, with some linux machines running the back end.

We got 4 macs as public computers, but if these work, we may get more.
We have deep freeze and mcaffee virex installed on them already....and set the openfirmware password and the local admin password...

Our machines have secondary logon system that basically checks against windows data on an OBDC database somewhere and installs printers and allows the user to use the computer.

Basically we want to code something similar for these mac systems, but we are not sure about the capabilities and possibilities.

The computer basically logs on automatically to a user with low privaledges on boot and executes a program which brings up a login program. The login program is on-top, it is flagged as a system process so it cannot be disabled with the process manager if you manage to bring it up somehow and autorun is disabled so that no external kill command can be issued.

On the mac I dont know if this is possible and in what language....
Cocoa (C#) or Carbon (C++) ?

On the mac, would it be possible to make a program take up the full screen upon logon.

It should run on-top of any program, such as always on top.
You would not be able to perform any process switching to get the program out of the way.

You should not be able to disable the program via the process manager.
Bringing up the process manager and killing a process should be disabled on the restricted account.

You should not be able to disable the program but that may not matter if you can disable access to the process manager on the restricted account.

When you log on, it should basically be able to install/setup a printer in cups and restart cups so the printer is active, which would require higher privileges for that operation, but the user should not have to authenticate.

Also, when you logon, there should be a button that is stuck to the wallpaper. A large square button, maybe the size of a quarter, that you cannot move on the background, so its basically stuck to the background, but this button does NOT run on top. When a user wants to log off, they would just click the button and it would uninstall the printer and return to the logon screen.

The program authenticates against several servers for the password and username, but that is irrelevant...i guess..


I want to know if mac os supports such functions and what language / dev environment should we use to translate the code.
 
Joined
Jun 25, 2005
Messages
3,231
Reaction score
112
Points
63
Location
On the road
Your Mac's Specs
2011 MBP, i7, 16GB RAM, MBP 2.16Ghz Core Duo, 2GB ram, Dual 867Mhz MDD, 1.75GB ram, ATI 9800 Pro vid
It sounds like you are wanting to write a kiosk type of application. Also note that the Finder is just an application. It can be disabled and replaced. I suppose you would run the replacement as a special user so that the logged in user wouldn't have kill privileges over it.

Cocoa is the obvious development tool, but there are some scripting tools that allow GUI development on the Mac. Also, RealBasic might be a decent choice as it allows development for Mac, Windows and Linux, allowing you to write your code once.

Type, "OS X" kiosk, into Google if that is what you are interested it.
 

Shop Amazon


Shop for your Apple, Mac, iPhone and other computer products on Amazon.
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.
Top