Category: Applications
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Facebook Messenger’s “Instant Video” Lets You Simultaneously Use Video and Chat
Continue Reading: Facebook Messenger’s “Instant Video” Lets You Simultaneously Use Video and ChatThe messaging wars continue! Today Facebook Messenger added “Instant Video” to it’s iOS and Android app, allowing you to easily share live video while still in a text chat. Facebook has had “video calling” since back in May 2015, but that requires both parties to answer the video call in the same way that Facetime, Wire and every other video app does it.
“Instant Video” is different:
VIDEO STARTS OUT ONE-WAY – Only the video of the person initiating “Instant Video” is shown. The recipient sees the video of the sender, but their video connection is NOT enabled. Now, the recipient can start sending video, but they don’t have to.
AUDIO IS OFF INITIALLY – When the sender starts their video, the recipient receives the video without any sound. They can easily start getting sound by tapping on the speaker icon on the video, but this is great because often you are having a text conversation precisely because you don’t want to use audio.
YOU CAN STILL SEE THE CHAT – The video overlays the upper right corner of the chat window, but that’s it. You can still see the chat messages and continue having your chat.
This last point…
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Facebook Messenger Launches Group Conference Calls (Audio-only)
Continue Reading: Facebook Messenger Launches Group Conference Calls (Audio-only)Continuing their efforts to be THE communication platform you use, the Messenger team at Facebook rolled out “group calling” this week within the Messenger app on iOS and Android. The new feature was announced by David Marcus, head of the FB Messenger team. Right now this is audio-only (i.e. not group video) and per media reports is limited to 50 participants.
I had to go to the AppStore and upgrade the Messenger app on my iPhone to the latest version, but once I did, I suddenly had a phone icon in the upper right corner of a group chat:
Tapping that phone icon brought me to a screen where I could choose which of the group members I wanted to bring into the group call:
After tapping “Call” in the lower right, Messenger launched the call and gave me feedback about who it was connecting, etc:
It then connected those who were available and four of us were in a group conference call:
As you can see in the screen captures, I had the standard buttons to mute my microphone and to activate the speakerphone.
AUDIO QUALITY – The audio quality was quite good. I couldn’t find any technical info…
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Talko’s Purchase By Microsoft Shows The Challenge Of The Directory Dilemma
Continue Reading: Talko’s Purchase By Microsoft Shows The Challenge Of The Directory DilemmaToday Microsoft announced that they acquired the technology of Talko, a communication app created by Ray Ozzie and launched back in September 2014. Fortune has an article on the acquistion, as do a good number of other media sites.After Talko first launched, I wrote about my initial experience – and the problem I had of Talko working through my home firewall. But I was intrigued by the possibilities laid out in a Medium article about how Talko could change communication and integrate voice, chat and messaging in interesting ways.
The reality, though, was that Talko was a classic case of suffering from the Directory Dilemma – as I said in that article:
People will only USE a communication application if the people they want to talk to are using the application.
And that was true for me… I tried out Talko, as I try out many apps. I used it for a while. And then… I stopped.
The people with whom I communicate were not regularly using Talko.
You can see the recognition of this dilemma in today’s front page of Talko’s web site:
However, as engaged as many of you have been, the reality is that the broad-based…
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Giving Up On The iPad2
Continue Reading: Giving Up On The iPad2I finally gave up. After months of trying to continue to use my older iPad 2 with first iOS 8 and then iOS 9, as chronicled in several blog posts, I finally gave in and bought a new iPad Air 2. These two blog posts, and the many comments left both on the posts and on social media, show I am clearly NOT alone in wanting to continue using my iPad 2:
- Will iOS 9 Make My iPad2 Usable Again? (June 2015)
- UPDATE: Will iOS 9 Make My iPad2 Usable Again? (Reports after the upgrade.) (September 2015)
What finally did it for me is that after the iOS 9 upgrade, I was no longer able to use a specific application that I use all the time.
To explain a bit more, I coach a competitive girls Junior Curling team that my daughter is a member of. As part of that, I’ve been using an app call “iCurlStats” to track the actions and statistics in curling games so that we can be able to go back over them afterward. When I tried to use it in a recent curling tournament (a “bonspiel”) it kept crashing all the time… and at terrible…
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UPDATE: Will iOS 9 Make My iPad2 Usable Again? (Reports after the upgrade.)
Continue Reading: UPDATE: Will iOS 9 Make My iPad2 Usable Again? (Reports after the upgrade.)Back in June, I published a post titled “Will iOS 9 Make My iPad2 Usable Again?” that seemed to strike a nerve with the legions of iPad2 owners out there wondering about the future of their device. There have been a good number of comments on the original post – and I’ve received a fair number of private email messages asking how my upgrade went. The question now being asked is:
Does iOS 9 make your iPad 2 run BETTER?
Sadly, the best answer seems to be…
maybe.
Reports have been decidedly mixed, both in the media as well as in the comments to that June blog post here. Some people reported improvements while others said it was the same (or worse).
A couple of people (one example) have reported that after upgrading to iOS 9 and then doing a factory reset the performance dramatically improved. The issue there, though, as I understand it, is that you lose all your apps, settings, etc. and would basically need to completely rebuild how you have the iPad 2 set up. However, if the alternative is not using it, I guess that’s an…
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Firechat Enables Private Off-The-Internet (P2P) Messaging Using Mobile Phones
Continue Reading: Firechat Enables Private Off-The-Internet (P2P) Messaging Using Mobile PhonesThere was a fascinating article posted on Medium this week by the CTO of messaging app Firechat:
In the text he outlines how they do decentralized “off-the-grid” private messaging using an ad hoc mesh network established between users of the Firechat app. It sounds like the app instances join together into some kind of peer-to-peer (P2P) network and then do normal “store-and-forward” messaging.
Of note, the apps do NOT need an Internet connection, or even a cellular network connection – instead they can use the Bluetooth and WiFi radios in the mobile phones to create a private mesh network and connect to other users of the Firechat app.
Naturally, having spent some time exploring P2P networks back when I was playing around with P2P SIP and distributed hash tables (DHTs) and other technologies, I immediately jump into the techie questions:
- How are they routing messages from one user to another?
- How is the “directory” of users in P2P mesh maintained?
- What addresses are they using for the communication? Is this still happening over IP addresses? Or are they using some other kind of…
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Updated “Directory Dilemma” Article Now On CircleID…
Continue Reading: Updated “Directory Dilemma” Article Now On CircleID…Back in December, 2014, I published a post here called “The Directory Problem – The Challenge For Wire, Talko And Every Other “Skype-Killer” OTT App“. After receiving a good bit of feedback, I’ve now published a new version over on CircleID:The Directory Dilemma – Why Facebook, Google and Skype May Win the Mobile App War
I incorporated a good bit of the feedback I received and also brought in some newer numbers and statistics. Of note, I now have a section on WebRTC where I didn’t before. You’ll also notice a new emphasis in the title… I’m now talking about the potential winners versus the challengers. I also chose “Directory Dilemma” not only for the alliteration but also because the situation really isn’t as much a “problem” as it is an overall “dilemma”. It may or may not be a “problem”.
I’m not done yet.
I’m still seeking feedback. I intend to do yet another revision of this piece, but in doing so intend to:
- Change it from the informal tone at the beginning to more of a “paper” style;
- Include a bit more about potential solutions.
Comments and feedback are definitely welcome… either as comments here on…
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Will iOS 9 Make My iPad2 Usable Again?
Continue Reading: Will iOS 9 Make My iPad2 Usable Again?I have one very simple question amidst all the media hype about Apple’s WWDC announcements yesterday:
Will iOS 9 make my iPad2 usable again?
Yes, all that other stuff announced yesterday sounds cool… but I have this more basic question.
You see, I made a mistake.
I believed Apple when they said that iOS 8 would run on an iPad2. I mean, the device is from 2011 – it was “only” three years old when iOS 8 came out last year. It was still working very well with iOS 7 and I was excited to try out iOS 8.
To be crystal clear, Apple is correct – iOS 8 does “run” on an iPad2. But…
… it… r…u…n…s… s… o… o… o… o…. o…. o… o… … g… l… a… c… i… a… l… l… y… … s… s… l… l… o… o… o… w… w… w… l… l… l… y… y… y…
… that it’s hardly worth using. It takes a long time to open up applications, to bring up the keyboard, to switch between applications, etc. It is so slow that I’ve really stopped using it for almost everything but…
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Wow! Cisco To Acquire Tropo’s Communications Application Platform
Continue Reading: Wow! Cisco To Acquire Tropo’s Communications Application PlatformWOW! In companion blog posts today Cisco and Tropo announced Cisco’s intent to acquire the Tropo team and platform:- Cisco blog: Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Tropo
- Tropo blog: Tropo joins Cisco to Power next-gen collaboration APIs
As someone who was at Voxeo in 2009 and helped launch Tropo (and wrote many of the early blog posts about it[1], as well as some of the python samples), I’m thrilled for the team there now that this is happening.[2]
Congratulations to all involved!
Over the years since leaving Voxeo, I’ve written about Tropo from time to time and continued to watch its progress. I’ve continued to be very impressed by what they’ve done over the years. They’ve truly made it easy for people to create powerful applications using simple programming languages.
It looks like the Tropo website is struggling right now so here is a snippet of their announcement post:
Six years ago we launched Tropo with the idea to make it easy to power phone calls through a simple API. Since then, we’ve empowered thousands of developers to add voice and messaging to their applications.
From our very first sign-up in 2009, to powering thousands of mobile and…
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Wire Launches WebRTC Voice/Chat Web App For Windows, Linux, more – Includes High TLS Security
Continue Reading: Wire Launches WebRTC Voice/Chat Web App For Windows, Linux, more – Includes High TLS SecurityYesterday the team over at Wire launched a new WebRTC-based “Wire for Web” app that lets people on Windows, Linux or any other platform now communicate with people using Wire on iOS, Android or OS X. You can get to it simply at:https://app.wire.com/
If you already have an account you simply sign in with your credentials. If you don’t have an account you can easily create one.I’ve been running both the native Mac OS X client and the web client for a bit now (I was part of web beta program for Wire) and it is truly amazing how well the team has made the web experience to be seamless between the web and native client. Here’s a screenshot showing both side by side (click/tap for a larger image):
In the web view on the right you have the browser bars at the top and one of the images did not go the full width of the column, but otherwise the experience and visual display has been essentially identical between the two platforms. The synchronization between the two is nearly instantaneous and all the features work really, really well.
Notifications in the web browser (if you allow…
