Five apps for creating a kiosk

Kiosks make it easy to display information about your company, allow users to interact with website-driven company directories, get details about products, advertise your products and services, and much more. But how do you set up a kiosk? Surely they are complex creatures that require much care and attention!

Not even remotely. Kiosks can be created using a standard machine or even a tablet. With simple and cost-effective solutions, you can have one up and running quickly. If you don't want to invest too much time and money into the project, the five kiosk apps listed here are well suited for the task. In some instances, these apps will require you to have the HTML pages already set up and ready to go. Let's dig into them and see if one will serve your needs.

SureFox

SureFox is a great Android and IOS app that locks a tablet into browser mode and allows you to set a whitelist of pages the browser can visit. This Android app is the best in breed for this purpose. SureFox lets you set up categories for users to select and add multiple URLs (and even include subdomains).

Other features include the ability to enable/disable zoom (you can also set the percentage of zoom), complete device lockdown (pro version only), browse privately, prevent auto-suspend, do tabbed browsing, view full screen mode, and configure remotely.

SiteKiosk

SiteKiosk is a more feature-rich kiosk app for Windows and Android. Instead of being limited to a kiosk to display information, SiteKiosk can also be used as an internet cafe tool. With this take on the kiosk app, you can define viewable URLs, add payment devices (for using the kiosk), include session reset, set content filters, view full-screen mode, customize the user interface, and add an onscreen keyboard, among other features.

Porteus Kiosk

Porteus Kiosk is a Linux distribution that only allows usage of a web browser. The configuration is simple, the distribution is lightweight (60 MB), and it has low hardware requirements (so you can make use of those old machines lying around). Porteus is free and open source. You will also be hard-pressed to find a more "locked down" kiosk than this one.

FrontFace Lockdown

FrontFace Lockdown is a simple tool for the Windows platform that allows you to easily set up either a digital sign or an interactive kiosk. Once you've selected and applied a profile, you must select a user for that profile. You might want to first create a specific user for this purpose. (This person must be an admin user.)

Fluxbox

Fluxbox is actually a Linux window manager that I have, on a number of occasions, deployed as a kiosk. It works well as a kiosk because you can easily limit what users can access from the main menu. If you want users to be able to work only with a browser, add that single entry to the menu. You will need a bit of Linux-fu to work this, since the menu is configured via a flat-text configuration file. And once you've logged into the Fluxbox desktop, you'll need to know what you're doing to get to a terminal window to do anything but run that browser.