&yet

Docker is an amazing product. In a very short amount of time it's drastically changed (for the better) how we at &yet deploy our applications. With everything containerized, it becomes very easy to run an arbitrary number of apps on a small cluster of servers.

However, there's one big challenge with adopting Docker for our developers: it doesn't natively work on OS X.

There have been several solutions for this, such as boot2docker and docker-machine. These tools create and manage a virtual machine for you that runs the Docker daemon. This allows you to configure the Docker client to communicate with the virtual machine, effectively allowing you to use containers in OS X.

At the end of 2015, we teamed up with AT&T to write a blog series on UX and WebRTC. We’re excited about the future of communication on the web and hope these posts will help teams get started in creating enjoyable user experiences with WebRTC. Check them out!

Post #1: Getting started with UX and WebRTC
An introduction to WebRTC featuring reasons to include it in your application, a handful of questions to consider during the initial stages of planning, and the importance of consistency and seamless implementation.

Post #2: UX considerations for initiating and joining calls
The first major interaction a user will have with WebRTC is initiating or joining a call. This post covers questions to ask and decisions to consider when designing this part of the flow. How do things like buttons, text, and user expectations affect the experience?

Post #3: UX patterns for transparent voice and video calls
Next, here are some useful patterns and techniques for the voice or video call itself. What information or context could help the user during the call? The theme here is clarity and transparency.

Node.js is a platform for running JavaScript (ECMAScript) that is powered by Google Chrome’s JavaScript engine, V8. V8 pushed JavaScript forward in terms of speed when it was first released, but hasn’t been keeping up with the accelerated pace of the ECMAScript Standard. We’ll likely see a new release of the spec every year, but V8 is lagging far behind Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey and Microsoft’s Chakra in terms of support for ECMAScript 2015 (aka ES6).

Node.js developers that have been eager for ES2015 features that V8 doesn't yet support have turned to Babel.JS for compiling their ES2015 code into ES5 code, but this only works for syntax features like arrow functions. There are features within ES2015 that Babel.JS can’t emulate because ES5 fundamentally lacks the ability accomplish these features in any reasonable way, namely the Proxy constructor and extending built-in objects like Array.

[Update: This controversial statement has been too distracting.] The Node.js Foundation would be wise to migrate to Chakra, because Google’s updates are coming in at a trickle while Microsoft’s are roaring in like a river, but that’s not really the point. The point is that these features are coming regardless, and you can play with them now. With an annual ECMAScript releases adding new features, Microsoft's Node.js Chakra fork will continue to outpace Google's V8 engine by months. So long as Microsoft maintains their fork, we’ll be able to preview features that aren’t yet ready in V8.

In order to use Microsoft's fork, you need a Windows 10 machine with the November update. It’s a huge update, so just because you have auto-updates enabled doesn’t mean that you have it (this messed me up). For the full instructions, look at an individual release on github, currently v1.3.

Nathan Fritz and Sally Mohr will be presenting at the Node Community Convention on January 26-28th in San Francisco, CA.

The Node Community Convention's focus is to provide the learning space for best practices and new techniques to maximize the use of node.js, case studies from developers and companies who are changing the web, and a networking space to build the personal and professional relationships you need.

Nathan and Sally will be speaking on Convincing the Decision Makers to Use Node.

We are excited to see you in SF! Come say hi if you'll be there.

tl;dr: with adapter.js you can write WebRTC code that is spec-compliant and works in all supported browsers. That is the web we want.

We have come a long way since WebRTC was first enabled by default in Nightly back in February 2013 after interoperability had been achieved earlier that month. Since then a lot has happened.

One of the bigger updates to the specifications was the addition of a Promise-based version of the API instead of callback-based API in December 2014. Firefox has supported the Promise-based versions of the getUserMedia and the RTCPeerConnection APIs for quite a while now. Yay!

That means you can write code like this:

Back in June, Apple introduced bitcode as a part of their app thinning strategy, which allows them to implement some optimizations in the future without developers having to resubmit their apps. Unfortunately, bitcode must be enabled for the whole app, including third-party libraries. This is a problem if you use WebRTC as it does not currently have a build option to enable bitcode.

Because the Talky iOS app uses WebRTC, I decided to investigate what it would take to enable bitcode when building WebRTC. For this post, I assume that you're building a Release build of WebRTC with the steps outlined at http://www.webrtc.org/native-code/ios.

Step 1: Get the code

If you haven't already downloaded the WebRTC source, open a terminal window and follow the steps for "Getting the code".

Today I'm pleased to announce the release of a new feature of our video conferencing service, Talky.io. It's called Real-time Text (or RTT for short), and it lets other people in your Talky room see what you are typing into the room chat, as you type. Here's a screen capture of RTT in action:

RTT is not enabled by default as most people are inclined to hide typos or half-finished thoughts, but you can opt-in by ticking the "Send as I type" box beneath the chat input.

So why add RTT to Talky? Because at &yet we believe that software is about people, and there are people who use Talky that are not able to use the voice half of our voice and video service.

A piece of recurring feedback we’ve received is that the Talky web interface isn’t great for smaller screens, especially for those on Android mobile devices. There is a Talky iOS app, but there isn’t one yet for Android, and the web interface was designed for wider (desktop-sized) screens.

With the latest release, we’ve taken that feedback and designed a better experience for small screens. Our primary goal was freeing up screen space for the video streams. We changed the wide sidebar to a much shorter top navigation, but keeping the primary controls readily available. To gain back some space, we moved the less-frequently used controls into an expandable menu and removed the secondary roster of participants.

While these changes were made with mobile devices in mind, you can also see them on your desktop browser. Resize your browser window and free up some of that monitor space.

We’ve talked before about the revolutionary importance of WebRTC, because it brings the principles of the open web to voice, video, screensharing, and other applications that were traditionally closed off to fast innovation. This revolution has been led not by old-style telcos but by web and mobile companies, especially the developers of the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers.

Until recently, both Microsoft and Apple have been standing on the sidelines as this revolution unfolded. Thankfully that’s starting to change, as Microsoft adds these capabilities to its upcoming Edge browser. (Apple, however, is still late to the party.)

There’s a twist to this story, though, because Edge supports an object-oriented flavor of WebRTC called ORTC, which most observers expect will eventually become WebRTC 1.1 or 2.0 or something. :-)

Thus we have a conundrum: in video conferencing apps like our Talky service, cross-browser calls work fine right now because both Chrome and Firefox support WebRTC. But adding Edge to the mix doesn’t automatically result in cross-browser calls to Edge users, since the signaling methods involved have different syntax even though the semantics are the same.

There have been some questions about what to expect at &yetConf next month. Here's a sneak peek at local artist Husaya Hama, from the Urban Poets Society, spoken word piece “Lazer Beams” in response to the themes we’ll be presenting at this year‘s event.

&yetConf Oct 6-8 from &yet on Vimeo.

We’ve also added lots of updates to the conference site (andyetconf.com), among them some very important ones like – the early bird ticket application process has come to a close! Regular tickets are now on sale for $1399, but they’re limited so don’t wait too long.