Kiosk applications with HTML/JavaScript

Recently one of our clients asked me about the possibility to build a kiosk application with a Mac mini and a huge display with touch support. The display is really big about 2 meters wide. Why Mac mini, I asked, it’s expensive and makes no sense. The client answered — “we just have one and our admin is like Apple”.

I’ve investigated a little and asked our devs to make a proof of concept. And we found that it’s possible with ElectronJS. You just need to do the following when you initialize ElectronJS window.

win = new BrowserWindow({ frame : false, kiosk : true, show : true}) win.loadFile('index.html')

And that works perfectly on Mac — the application is full screen, and you don’t have access to the dock and menu bar. Don’t forget to add a possibility to exit, I have to shut down my Mac the first time to close it.

Also in Kvinivel we are starting the migration of the big desktop application to Electron for one of our old clients. We were working on this application for about 4 years, and thousands of development hours in WPF will be migrated to HTML/JS and ElectronJS, that should be a challenge!