Setup Mac for kiosk/installation environment

Is there any tool out there to automate the process of turning a regular mac into a kiosk machine? That is... not an internet kiosk but a regular machine with no warning, notifications, popups, etc... removing all start up items, all notifications, putting an app on top and any other secondary tasks.

The idea is not only to keep an app on top of everything else (which is done by software) but tell the OS to not show ANY kind of warning/window/popup.

There's tools out there such as ecrisper and xstand but they're more oriented into letting a user browse online than telling the OS to be silent.

So far, my manual (no software) process is...

  • Telling the software to stay on top of everything else
  • Go fullscreen
  • Removing startup items
  • Remove all notifications

But there's still system warnings (connection lost, secondary software crash, etc...). Any tips on this? Any software?


If you can identify the sources of these pop-ups, you could write a script to automate your kiosk environment on new machines (I imagine the majority of the script would just be executing calls like 'defaults write com.apple...').

Titanium's Onyx and Deeper have some pretty deep customising options, that would be my first point of call.