November 2016 Summaries

Developers are increasingly integrating visual assets into their web and mobile applications, necessitating effective storage, flexible image manipulation, and optimized delivery, which can be efficiently managed using Cloudinary's new PubNub Block. This service enables real-time image manipulation, processing, and transformation over the PubNub Programmable Network, allowing users to dynamically adapt image properties during streaming and deliver them to subscribed channels. The tutorial guides users through setting up a Cloudinary account, creating a Cloudinary Block, and using JSON payloads to test various image transformations such as resizing, cropping, and format changes. By leveraging this feature-rich cloud service, developers can bypass the complexity of building their own image management solutions and instead focus on enhancing their applications with capabilities like collaborative editing, special effects, and dynamic image sharing, opening up a range of possibilities for innovative app development.

AT&T Flow Designer is a user-friendly visual tool for designing, prototyping, and deploying IoT solutions by enabling users to visually integrate data sources, cloud services, and embedded devices. It is particularly compatible with PubNub's Data Stream Network, allowing users to trigger device actions, stream sensor data, send push notifications, and track geolocation in real time. The tutorial explains how to integrate PubNub into Flow Designer, demonstrating the creation of PubNub input and output nodes, and the use of debugging tools within both Flow Designer and the PubNub Developer Console. Furthermore, the text highlights the collaboration between AT&T and Hackster.io for the Real-time AT&T IoT Starter Kit Challenge, encouraging developers to create innovative IoT applications using AT&T's IoT Starter Kit, Flow Designer, and PubNub, with the prospect of winning prizes.

The text introduces a new Chat Resource Center offering overviews, tutorials, and design patterns for building and deploying chat applications, and explains the concept of read receipts, which indicate when a message has been opened and read by another user. Read receipts, while not universally popular, can enhance accountability and transparency in communication by providing proof of message delivery and reducing unnecessary follow-up messages. The text outlines the implementation of read receipts in a simple 1:1 chat app using HTML, JavaScript, and PubNub, detailing the main components required for this functionality, such as a unique ID for each message, an event to trigger upon message reading, and a designated Read Receipts channel. It also describes how to publish and update read receipts to reflect the most recently read message's ID and the user's ID, ensuring real-time UI updates and managing read receipt restrictions, with practical coding examples provided for developers to incorporate this feature into their applications.

In this article, the development of a web application with voice command capabilities using AngularJS and PubNub is explored, focusing on creating Siri-like commands to set alarms and handle time-related queries. The application involves integrating several JavaScript libraries, including Ohm for building a domain-specific language to parse and handle voice commands. The article details the implementation of a user interface to accept voice commands and outlines how to structure commands using Ohm's grammar and semantics. It also discusses the use of webkitSpeechRecognition for speech recognition and PubNub for real-time message handling. Overall, the project demonstrates how to build a simple yet functional voice-activated application with potential for further development, inspired by existing voice assistants like Siri and Google Now.