December 2020 Summaries

We've developed a prebuilt UI to make it easy for developers to embed production-quality video calls into their applications within minutes. Our initial English-only interface was quickly followed by the addition of support for multiple languages, with new translations added regularly. Today, our prebuilt UI is available in fifteen different languages, including Swedish, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, Georgian, Japanese, Norwegian, and Polish. Developers can set their language preference using the REST API, front-end code, or from the Daily dashboard, and we're grateful to our translators for helping bring these new interfaces to life. With over a dozen languages available, developers around the world can now easily add video chat to their applications.

This tutorial provides a step-by-step guide on building a custom Chrome extension to add a feature to the Daily video call platform. The extension allows users to mark themselves as having gone in a call, without requiring manual updates to the code base. The process involves creating a manifest file, adding content scripts and icons, updating the DOM with buttons for each video participant, and styling the buttons with CSS. Once all the code is written, the extension can be loaded into Chrome by going to chrome://extensions/ and selecting the project directory.

We'll explore how to overlay text or small images on top of a video element in Daily, a video calling SDK for developers. To do this, we first need to arrange and stack elements with CSS. We set the position property to relative for the parent container and absolute for child elements like the name tag, allowing us to control their layout. Then, we use the z-index property to stack our elements, positioning them in order of importance. Next, we'll pass participant names as props from the Daily call object to a React component, displaying them on top of video streams. We create a custom React component called Tile that displays each participant's name and other information. By using CSS and React, we can customize the look and feel of Daily calls, adding features like text overlays or small images to enhance user experience.