So basicaly, we already have a website that allows users to be in the same room to visualize schemas, interact with it, chat about it, all under the control of an admin of the room that monitors what other users see.
We are looking to add an audio conferencing feature, and I'm currently doing a technological watch on which Real Time Communication solution would be the best to fill our needs.
Our problematic is simple.
The admin would have a button "start a conference" to create a room.
When the room's created the other users would see a message like "The admin launched an audio conference, would you like to join."
If user say yes, they would be able to hear and talk to each other.
Our only constraint is to never leave our website.
Could this be done with Twilio ?
I'm not at all part of Twilio, but I'm doing something similar in a project and I would say yes, Twilio is a good choice. Although, Twilio is the only company that I've tried, because my client asked specifically to use it.
See here: https://www.twilio.com/webrtc
Just have in mind, that maybe Twilio is not the cheapest option.
Related
On a ride booking app, it is required communication between driver and user.
Now the case, if user A contacts the driver via website or app, call or sms can be achieved via Twilio, we don't want to expose their contact numbers to each other.
If three users A, B and C contacts the driver and driver has no app installed, in fact the driver wants call back and sms reply. How the driver can reach users on Caller ID.
There could be large number of users and we can't buy separate twilio number for each user.
Please advise the solution.
How many users are likely to need to contact each individual driver at any one time? Not many I wouldn't think.
Buy 10 Twilio numbers, assign them incrementally as users call/SMS their driver and save the assignment for user/driver numbers in your database.
If the driver calls/SMS a number in response query the database and route the call/SMS to the user it was assigned to when they called the driver.
Recycle the 1st assignment once the 11th user calls/SMS the driver, rinse and repeat.
Twilio developer evangelist here.
In order to maintain anonymous communications in this way you need as many numbers as the maximum number of relationships one person in your system has. The best explanation of this is in this article on masked text messaging with Twilio (though it applies to calls too).
Your comment on miknik's answer suggests you want to keep these relationships alive forever. This is not the way that most services build out this feature. They normally give a particular length to the relationship, Uber for example will recycle the phone number a number of minutes after a ride ends.
If you are looking for an easier way to manage this kind of number pooling and masking, check out Twilio Proxy, it handles a lot of the logic for you. It is still in developer preview right now, but you can apply for early access.
I would like to centralize every email from (or to) customers of a project in the Conversations view of a project in Asana. The goal is to keep an archive of all exchanges with a customer in one place for every team member.
I tried to use the project#mail.asana.com as CC in every emails that i send but customers don't have accounts on Asana (and i don't want them to access it) and so they can't save their replies in Conversations. I tried also to create an email group (in Google Apps) and add the Asana email at it but it didn't work.
Any idea to use the Conversations view as an archive ? Or maybe is there an external tool which integrate with Asana that can do this ?
Thanks a lot in advance !
Hmm, that's interesting! I suppose that if you don't have too many emails this makes some sense (otherwise it might make your Asana Inbox pretty noisy - everyone would see in their inbox every conversation)
I think what I would do is to set up a Gmail filter to automatically forward the email to your team. You can do this in Gmail like this: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en. If you set up a good filter (i.e. sent to a group address) it seems like it would be pretty painless.
One thing to note is that the conversation in Asana will appear to come from whoever is associated with the email that's sending the conversation to Asana, so if you have a single POC with the outside world, it may make sense to only forward from their account. Alternatively, you could set up a special Asana user just for this purpose, and your teammates can follow a convention that "mailbot" (or whatever user it is) is just used to forward mail, and you should look at the content to get who the author was.
I currently work at a school and have an idea to create an app that allows students to contact a grown up (for example, the principle) anonymously through an app. The app would quite simply consist of a contact form. I am trying to find out the best, and easiest way to achieve this without setting up servers with a separate API. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to achieve it? Is there any way to set up an e-mail form with a pre set recipient and a built in sender-account? Please guide me in the right direction.
You would need to implement an SMTP client. You can use open source code like skpsmtpmessage
It's likely that their example app could be your solution.
Your biggest problem will be the deployment. You definitely need to pay an $99/y developer account and add all the students device ID's to your account (with a maximum of 100 devices/y) or register all of them as beta tester (I don't know the limitations).
Probably this isn't doable so easily, as it seems you don't have iOS developing experience so far. Maybe you can find something on the app store that works with self hosted databases. But you definitely need to host some kind of webApp/API.
You may want to give Appygram a try to handle the back-end if you are able to set up the contact form itself. While it's a separate hosted API, at least you don't have to build/manage it.
Appygram is a free web service that would allow you to configure all the details such as which adults could be contacted, their point(s) of contact (i.e. email address), and it would process and send all the submissions for you. All your app needs to do is send a form post request.
A nice thing about having this information outside of the iOS app itself is that you can change the contact details on the fly without requiring an update to the iOS app itself. Whether you use Appygram (which, since I contribute to it, I am slightly biased toward!) or something similar, I would say that since this is for students, I would recommend a solution that would allow you to update your configuration without requiring app updates.
Finally, I'd second what Julian said. The challenge here could be with deployment. One possible alternative would be to make this a mobile-friendly web page accessible only via student login or on the school network (or both). Would probably be easier development-wise and wouldn't require installs nor the hurdles that Julian described with device registration, etc. And, Appygram would still work with this setup as well.
Good luck!
Am just about to start doing an iphone application which is supposed to have a multi user private chat. Something like facebook style, where the user has a list of friends and he can chat with them independently. I just need a little direction here
If i have a list of users, let's say i create individual views for the chat, how can I handle these views? If jim is chatting with dick and jane, there should be 2 views, each for one chat window right? Are there any references that i can use.
I am looking for references in socket programming where i can push messages to the user from the server. I have been looking but could not find anything helpful.
If i try to update the user's chat window using local notifications, lets say request data every couple of seconds, will that be battery draining?
I would really like some direction here, i do not want to start something just realize its the wrong way.
Any help is highly appreciated
Those all sound like design decisions. For example, do you want to display each user's messages in a separate view? That's entirely up to you.
You'll want to read about iOS Push Notifications.
If you mean that you intend to poll some server for updates, then yes, that will use a lot of battery. This is exactly the sort of situation that the push notification system was created to help you avoid.
I need to develop an application which should help me in getting all the status,messages from different servers like Twitter,facebook etc in my application and also when i post a message it should gets updated in all the services. I am using authlogic for authentication. Can anyone suggest me what gems/plug-ins i can use..
I need API help to get all the tweets/messages to be displayed in my application and also ways to post the messages to the corresponding services by posting it from my application. Can anyone help me from design point.
Walk through what you'd want to do in your head. Imagine the working site, imagine your webapp working before you start. So your user logs in (handled by authlogic) and sees a textbox called "What are you doing right now?". The user fills in a status message and clicks "post". The status message appears at the top of their previously posted messages.
Start with the easy part. Create a class that posts to two services. Use the twitter gem and rfacebook to post to two already defined services. In the future, you'll want to let the user associate services to their account and you would iterate through the associated services and post the message to each. Once you have this working, you can refactor or polish the UI a bit to round out this feature. I personally would do the "add a social media account to my profile" feature towards the end.
Harder is the reading of the data (strangely enough) because you're going to have to figure out how to store it. You could store nothing but I suspect you'd run into API limits just searching all the time (could design around this). I would keep a little cache of posts associated to the user's social media account. In this way, the data model would look like this:
A user has many social media accounts.
A social media account has many posts. (cache)
Of course, now you need to schedule the caching of the posts. This could be done manually, based on an event (like when they login) or time based. So when the update happens, you load up the posts for that social media account and the user will see the posts the next time they hit the page. For real-time push to the client's browser while they stare at the screen, use faye (non-trivial) and ajax to pull the new posts to the top of the social media stream view.
The time based one is tricky because you'd either have to have a cron job run or have rails handle it all with a gem like clockwork. But then you have to leave rails running. I've also solved this by having a class in /lib do all the work and a simple web call kicks off the update. But it wasn't in a multi-user use case. So that might not work. In any case, you'll want to have some nice reusable code for these problems since update requests can come from many different sources.
You'll also have to deal with the API limits. When pulling down content from twitter, you won't get everything. That will just have to be known by the user or you'll have to indicate a "break in time" somehow.
The UI should be pretty easy (functionally anyway), because you know which source the post/content is coming from. It'd be easy to throw a little icon next to the post to display which social media site it's coming from.
Anyway, good luck, sounds like a fun project.