How often in software development do you think about rewriting some 3rd party module from scratch? The popular vision of the problem says that we should not reinvent a wheel and use existing paid or free components. That is right in general. How often something existing exactly fits needs of your project? From my experience, I would say, “never”, especially if we are talking about some complicated UI elements. If my post is too long for you, you now can…

Modern web applications are full of rich features. What about stream voice recognition? Not there is no "HTMLvnext" feature for voice recognition, but there are different services like AWS Transcribe, IBM Watson, and Google Speech to text. All services seem to be very good, they at least can handle my English with East-Ukrainian accent very well. But one thing makes IBM Watson special, it supports WebSockets, so you can stream directly from the browser without sending a stream to your…

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…

The technologies I'm going to describe here are several years old, but taking into account our client's questions, I decided to write this post. Imagine you need to build an online classroom solution. The core functionality will be online video, online whiteboard, online presentation, and other features that allow teachers to share materials in real-time. Let's first take a look at video streaming. We can use WebRTC to make it possible to stream video from a web camera (or any…