SiteKiosk Android: access the local file system via the "sk://" protocol

SiteKiosk Android has been out now for a (short) while and we've already gathered important feedback. We've learned that customers want to go beyond what is possible in a normal browser, which makes perfect sense given the fact that SiteKiosk for Windows already provides such possibilities to a great extend.

Accessing arbitrary local files is not allowed in a normal browser with pages coming from a server. This makes sense because security would otherwise be compromised. But sometimes you need to access large image or video files from a page and downloading these files from a server and relying on the browser to cache for example mega or even giga bytes of data doesn't seem very feasible.

So with the release of SiteKiosk Android 1.1 we proudly present: the "sk" protocol. Using "sk://" as a prefix for your URLs allows you to address files in a particular location on your Android device. When connecting the device as a USB drive, this particular location is a folder named "SiteKiosk" directly inside the root folder of the drive. The HTML pages you load in SiteKiosk don't have direct access to this folder but instead to a subfolder named "data".

So suppose you want to show a local image named "test.jpg" in one of your pages in SiteKiosk. Here is the HTML snippet for the image you could use in order to achieve this:

<img src="sk:///data/test.jpg"></img>

Notice the three (!) slashes after the "sk:", the last one stands for the sk root folder and is mandatory (meaning it doesn't work if you forget to write it). The image "test.jpg" must be located in "SiteKiosk/data" (relative to the root of your Android USB drive). Important: you have to create both folders "SiteKiosk" as well as its subfolder "data", so don't be confused if you don't find them after installing SiteKiosk (we may add the creation of these folders to the installation process in a future version).

You can use these "sk" URLs with the 'src' attribute of image, script and link tags at the moment (further support might be available in one of the next versions). Make sure the "Enable SiteKiosk scripting" option is enabled for your page, if you restrict the surf area.

If you have any problems using this feature or have other suggestions, comments, etc., please write a comment or contact us via our web page.