{"id":1041,"date":"2008-06-05T01:04:40","date_gmt":"2008-06-05T00:04:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/entrian.com\/wordpress\/?p=1"},"modified":"2021-06-30T17:19:12","modified_gmt":"2021-06-30T17:19:12","slug":"30-day-challenge-clickstop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/30-day-challenge-clickstop\/","title":{"rendered":"The 30 day product challenge: ClickStop"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When <a href=\"http:\/\/uint32t.blogspot.com\/\">Sohail<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/kalzumeus.com\/\">Patrick<\/a> proposed the <a href=\"http:\/\/kalzumeus.com\/2008\/05\/27\/incredible-interest-in-the-30-day-sprint\/\">30 day product challenge<\/a>, I thought &#8220;Bad timing &#8211; with <a href=\"http:\/\/entrian.com\/source-search\/\">Entrian Source Search<\/a> only just out on Beta, I can&#8217;t get involved with this right now.&#8221; I had the perfect project already lined up, but taking that on during this Beta seemed crazy.<\/p>\n<p>Well, call me crazy, but I&#8217;ve changed my mind. I&#8217;ll take on the 30-day challenge, and manage the Beta at the same time. At the very least, I&#8217;ll prove to myself if no-one else that Source Search makes me more productive. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Product: Codename ClickStop<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>One of my 4-year-old daughter Jenny&#8217;s favourite toys is Paint Shop Pro. She loves to sit and paint bizarre and random pictures with it. Sadly, the moment I turn my back she commits bizarre and random acts of damage to my PC &#8211; not through malice, but through being clumsy and poorly trained. I&#8217;ve been developing Windows software for about a dozen years, and she&#8217;s got the PC into states that I wouldn&#8217;t believe possible without kernel-level hackery, just by jiggling the mouse the wrong way.<\/p>\n<p>What I need is a way to allow her to click in Paint Shop Pro&#8217;s picture, and the tools and colours, but <strong>not<\/strong> on the taskbar, the desktop, the &#8220;Print&#8221; button, and so on.<\/p>\n<p>Imagine mounting a click-proof barrier over some parts of the screen. That&#8217;s what ClickStop is &#8211; you decide which screen areas can be clicked, and which can&#8217;t. It also prevents certain keys and key combinations, like Alt+Tab, Ctrl+P, Ctrl+Alt+Delete, and the Windows key. The only way out is to enter a password.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Who needs it?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Jenny and Paint Shop Pro is just an example &#8211; any situation where you have someone who could accidentally mess up a PC is a candidate for ClickStop. Who needs it?:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Parents of small children, like me. But also:<\/li>\n<li>Schools with computer labs frequented by small children<\/li>\n<li>Companies running demo PCs at trade shows<\/li>\n<li>Anyone with a PC in a public place (although I&#8217;m sure they&#8217;re already running a vertical solution)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>(Note that I said &#8220;accidentally&#8221;. I don&#8217;t want to pitch this as a PC security product, to keep your teenage son out of your files. Your teenage son could undoubtedly break it in a heartbeat. This is for untrained, non-malicious users.)<\/p>\n<p>The biggest problem I can see with this idea is that no-one knows they need it. I don&#8217;t know much about marketing, and what little I do know applies only to the internet. This will require offline marketing &#8211; parenting magazines, PC magazines, etc. Do I really want to take that on?<\/p>\n<p><strong>What&#8217;s in a name?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;ClickStop&#8221; could mean anything, and there&#8217;s no chance of getting the domain. Suggestions on a postcard (or a blog comment) for a good name would be gratefully received. Anything that <strong>doesn&#8217;t<\/strong> sound like an Internet Security product would be good&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Where I am<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I already have a (very) early prototype of ClickStop. It&#8217;s just enough to stop Jenny wreaking havoc when my back&#8217;s turned. But it has exactly <strong>no<\/strong> user interface &#8211; you run it, your screen goes dark. It needs a user interface, lots of testing with different applications on different versions of Windows, and a website that somehow attracts people who didn&#8217;t know they were looking for it. Um.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PS.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>As I was typing this blog post, Jenny turned 5. Happy birthday, Jenny!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When Sohail and Patrick proposed the 30 day product challenge, I thought &#8220;Bad timing &#8211; with Entrian Source Search only just out on Beta, I can&#8217;t get involved with this right now.&#8221; I had the perfect project already lined up, but taking that on during this Beta seemed crazy. Well, call me crazy, but I&#8217;ve [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-30days"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1041"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1197,"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1041\/revisions\/1197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}