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The ClickStop UI: Taking a leaf from Remote Desktop’s book

Thursday, June 5th, 2008 by

(Codename ClickStop is my project within the 30 day product challenge. With ClickStop, you can let small children play on your PC without them damaging anything. It puts a “click-proof membrane” across areas of the screen you don’t want them to click.)

I was thinking about the ClickStop UI, and as it turned out, so was commenter Bracken. Once ClickStop is up and running, it needs to present some sort of UI so that you can control it. But it mustn’t take up any significant amount of screen real estate, because it might get in the way of what your child is doing.

This is exactly the problem faced by Remote Desktop (and VNC, and any other remote access product). The same solution applies, as shown in this (slightly rough, forgive me) mockup:

clickstop-bar3.png

Cool. It could do the same slide-up-out-of-the-way thing that Remote Desktop does as well, but that’s probably overkill.

4 Responses to “The ClickStop UI: Taking a leaf from Remote Desktop’s book”

  1. Mike Wilson Says:

    That’s really nice 🙂

  2. Bracken Says:

    I think that looks really nice. Good work.
    You mentioned uses like trade shows or display computers in your other post. You might want to have an option not to show that little description as well, so that people using that computer won’t see it and try clicking it. You could make some convoluted key combination for that purpose instead. Just a thought. 😉

  3. Scott Kane Says:

    Very nice indeed. I really could have used something like this with then kids were smaller.

  4. Mike Wilson Says:

    I could use something like this for me right now to keep me in Visual Studio and off my RSS reader!