As you may know, we recently announced an OpenTok Labs solution for adding live video and messaging to your React Native application. In this post, we’d like to take a deeper look at how to use the OpenTok Signaling API to build a text chat application with React Native.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on OpenTok React Native. As the name suggests, it’s a React Native library for OpenTok. As I work with developers at hackathons and other events, I’ve had lots of questions about React Native and OpenTok. So on April 11th I’ll be hosting a webinar where I’ll build iOS and Android applications with live video using OpenTok and React Native.
When I introduced myself at the start of October, I shared my aim of working with TokBox developer community members to maintain and add support for third-party frameworks in order to reach as many developers as possible. I’ve been busy since then speaking to our community and learning about what they need to have a great experience with our OpenTok platform and get creative with live video.
We continue to be excited by the customer use cases that WebRTC on Safari will enable, especially the “spontaneous” customer interaction situations we see in Retail and eCommerce, Customer Service and regulated industries – as we discussed in our previous blog. On June 22nd we held a WebRTC on Safari Developer Workshop in San Francisco to make more information available to local developers about the details of the Apple announcement and how to get started experiencing and developing WebRTC apps for Safari 11.
We are pleased to now provide this information online for everybody!
Almost exactly 5 years ago, we announced the release of the OpenTok iOS SDK. In the years since, the product has evolved and grown into a cornerstone of the OpenTok platform. We are still pushing towards ever more endpoints today, as we were then. Some amazing things have happened over this history; let’s have a look at the highlight reel.
The Apps
Plenty of communications tools were available for end-users back in 2012, but none exposed face-to-face communications to the mobile developer. Within a month of our release, we saw the launch of the first mobile dating app that used our service, Date.fm.
We are excited to announce the release of the OpenTok 2.9 Android and iOS SDKs. We’ve made a number of important changes with this release.
What’s new?
Automatic Reconnect
With this version your client can now automatically reconnect to OpenTok sessions after drops in network connectivity. This feature helps restore connectivity during transitions between network interfaces such as Wi-Fi and LTE, allowing you to expand the duration of the communication and provide a better quality of experience to your customers. You can find sample code showing you how to update your application here.
We’re excited to announce the release of the 2.8 OpenTok iOS and Android SDK. We’ve made significant improvements to audio/video quality, worked on bug fixes, as well as quality improvements introduced in the Google WebRTC M49 release. In order to improve the quality of these SDKs further, we’ve also rolled out some important patches, the details of which are below, including support for IPv6 for iOS.
We’re happy to announce that we recently made available OpenTok mobile SDKs 2.7.0 for iOS and Android. Improvements have been made in three main areas: Xcode 7 and iOS 9 support, quality and reliability and ease of use of the library.
Now let’s jump into all the details:
A beta bitcode version of the OpenTok iOS SDK is now available here. For more information about this update you can check out our blog post. If you have any comments or need to report any issues, please contact us at: ios-bitcode-beta@tokbox.com.
We’re happy to announce the release of the OpenTok 2.7.1-beta.1 Bitcode version.
Apple added Bitcode binary support for developer apps as part of the app thinning process. The reason behind this is to minimize the end user download app size. Prior to Xcode 7 & iOS 9, developers upload the native binary and it’s the final executable that users download.
While blind people are able to go about their day just like anyone else, simple everyday tasks can often present challenges. Whether it’s identifying the right public transit route for a commute, checking the expiration date of a carton of milk, or grabbing the right ingredients from the pantry for a meal, it may require assistance.
Founder of non-profit organization Be My Eyes, Hans Jørgen Wiberg, spent three years working for the Danish Blind Society consulting people about how to cope with visual impairment. Wiberg, who is visually impaired himself, found one common thread among all of the people he worked with: while the visually impaired often lean on friends and family to help them overcome everyday hurdles, they at times feel guilty asking for assistance. If they just ‘had a pair of eyes’ once or twice a day, they could accomplish a whole lot more on their own, without leaning on those closest to them.
