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…

One of our clients asked me about the possibility to create a tool for salespeople to help them to create brochures, catalogs, and other printed materials. The idea was quite simple. Create a template with placeholders and allow users to fill placeholders with images, text logos, etc. The solution was required to be implemented as a Web application accessible from tablets and desktops. My first estimate was about a month of work for one developer plus some QA, management, and…

It's not news anymore that JavaScript is the most cross-platform and cross-tier technology today. Let's take a look at it. JavaScript can be efficiently used on the server part of Web-server and can be used to create modern micro-services. JavaScript is the only technology for now that allows building mobile applications for ALL mobile platforms with 100% the same code of UI and logic for every platform with Apache Cordova technology or with React Native from Facebook. JavaScript allows building…