Design

George shut his laptop and rubbed his sleep-deprived red eyes. "Customers continue to complain about stream freezing; the new fix package did not help at all! What do I do with this (censored) HLS?" he said.

The browser is not only hypertext, but also a streamer

Browsers have had players for a long time, but the story is different with the video encoder and streaming. Now, in almost any browser of the latest version, we can find modules for encoding, streaming, decoding, and playback. These functions are available through the JavaScript API, and the implementation is called Web Real Time Communications or WebRTC. This library built into browsers can do quite a lot: capture video from a built-in, virtual or USB camera, compress it with H.264, VP8, and VP9 codecs, and send it to the network via SRTP protocol; i.e., it functions as a software streamer video encoder. As a result, we see a browser that has something similar to ffmpeg or gstreamer, compresses video well, streams on RTP, and plays video streams.

RTSP is a simple signaling protocol which they cannot replace with anything for many years already, and it has to be admitted that they don't try really hard.

For example, we have an IP camera that supports RTSP. Anyone who has ever tested the traffic with a Sharkwire cable will tell you that first there comes DESCRIBE, then PLAY, and then the traffic begins to pour directly via RTP or wrapped in the TCP channel for instance.

Virtual phone systems and CRM need little introduction to anyone active in the business world. A look at a range of recent studies indicates that close to 40% of American businesses make at least partial use of VoIP today. The CRM software market is also growing rapidly with estimates that it will be bringing in an astonishing $80 billion in revenues in five years time. What do these two technologies share in common?

In the first part, we have deployed a simple dynamic CDN for broadcasting WebRTC streams to two continents and have proved on the example of a countdown timer that the latency in this type of CDN is actually low.

In the second part, we have incorporated dedicated servers into the CDN for performing the task of transcoding in order to provide good broadcast quality to our viewers based on the devices they use and the channel quality. In this manner, all published streams in our CDN are available to all the viewers.

Now, assume that a company is starting to introduce its monetization strategy where a number of streams should be available for free and the rest on a subscription basis. Or, for example, webinars for in-house staff training are broadcasted simultaneously, but each subsidiary has a separate stream, and disclosing the sales techniques used in Southeast Asia to the managers from CIS countries is undesirable.

In the first part we have deployed a simple dynamic CDN for broadcasting WebRTC streams to two continents and have proved on the example of a countdown timer that the latency in this kind of CDN is actually low.

However, besides low latency, it is important to provide good broadcast quality to users. After all, this is what they are paying for. In real life the channels between Edge servers and users can differ in bandwidth capacity and quality. For example, we are publishing a 720p stream at 2 Mbps, the user is playing it on an Android phone using 3G connection in an unstable signal reception area and the 360p maximum resolution that provides smooth picture at 400 Mbps is 360p.

Do you know there were 5 million apps in 2019? Out of these millions of apps, only a few are able to perform. There are many reasons for this but a major factor is the interactivity of an app.

No matter which product you are trying to sell, customers choose the one which allows them to get involved. Interactive apps are in demand for a long time. Are you wondering how can you make an interactive app?

The first thing which comes to our mind when we talk about interactive apps is the concept of single page application. This is because SPAs are known for their capacity to interact with the user by reloading some page elements dynamically depending upon the interaction by the user.

Having analyzed earlier the capacity of standard server configurations in Digital Ocean in terms of WebRTC streaming, we have noticed that one server can cover up to 2000 viewers. In real life, cases when one server is insufficient are not uncommon.

Assume gambling amateurs in Germany are watching real-time horse races in Australia. Given that horse races are not only a sports game but also imply big gains on condition that field bets are made at the right time, the video has to be delivered with lowest possible latency.

Another example: A global corporation, one of FCMG market leaders with subsidiaries in Europe, Russia and Southeast Asia, is organizing sales manager training webinars with live streaming from the headquarters in the Mediterranean. The viewers must be able to see and hear the presenter in real time.

In 2017, Google declared Kotlin as its second official language for Android application development. The language itself proving to be a modern, intuitive and pragmatic programming language. That’s why Kotlin's app development community is growing at a fast pace. For android app developers, using Kotlin with Java can reduce excessive boilerplate code which is a huge win for them.

In order to heighten productivity, Kotlin language comes with amazing functional features that support Java interoperability. It has effectively improved the coding experience of developers by introducing concise expressions, abstractions, and improved syntax.

Setting up the content localization and, thus, configuring the interface language of the product in such a way that the right language is rendered to the right user is extremely important for each digital platform. That’s why we have decided to translate and share with you this expert article by Nicolai Goshin from Hellicht Medien.

And we strongly hope that some strategic points would be valuable for your localization projects!

Background and preliminary considerations

Digital projects targeting audiences in different countries or different language areas are doomed to take advantage of localization strategies. So we must answer the following question: which users should be given which content in which languages? The question at the first sight seems simple. But later in this article we will point out why this topic is, in fact, complex. And, of course, we will also address how to deal with this complexity.

Let's assume a scenario in which content (for example, an online magazine) is available in three languages: German, English, and Arabic. The goal is ideally to provide content to each user in their native language. If this is not possible, the content should be provided to the user in the language that they best understand apart from their mother tongue.

Internet and new tech are currently disrupting many industries, even some that you might not think are prone to such changes. For interior design, which may seem like an utterly offline and personal thing, many people have become accustomed to sharing their homes with strangers across the world for inspiration and to simply show off their style.

Here is a comprehensive list of startups that are changing the whole interior design industry and making everything quicker, more affordable, and more convenient for customers. Let's check them out!

Millions of businesses exchange information on the internet and to interact with their target audience. This helps them make fast and secure transactions over the web. However, business goals can be achieved when the businesses are able to store all this data for the means of presenting quality output to the end users.

Simply put, in the development industry a web application (or “web app”) is more like a program that uses a web browser to handle the storage and retrieval of the information to present information to the users. This allows a user to interact with the company using the online forms, e-shopping carts, CMS, etc. Some more examples of web applications are online banking, online polls, online forums, online reservations, shopping cart, and interactive games.

Learning about web development is kind of like having too many things on a plate. This guide serves as a way to get your acquainted with the world of web app development.

Recently we at Alconost were producing several videos for games and, in the process of working with clients, we heard questions again that we had heard before: what should we show, should the video have a voiceover or not, how expensive is it to translate into multiple languages, what source materials do we need, how can we capture video of the screen of a mobile device… To answer these burning questions once and for all, we would like to share with you and give specific examples of how we make videos for games.

We think our experience will be useful both to anyone who is trying to produce video independently and to developers who are outsourcing creation of video for their games.

Written by Alconost

Introduction

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Every single one of us gives presentations from time to time. What can be difficult about creating a couple of slides with great UI and nice content, right? Well… not really actually. In real life, things may get difficult.

You want to cover the whole topic and give as much information as fits on a slide. Then you go to Google to find some awesome pictures, and finally, cover it all with some fancy animation. And here is where things start falling apart: how do you balance all this stuff?

Take our helping hand, as we are here to show you how to create a presentation with both perfect user experience and user interface. Let's find out how to create perfect UI & UX design in a presentation.

What one gets easily and for free can be a real struggle for others — these are the thoughts every letter of the «Dobroshrift» [Kindness Font] evolves. It was developed for the World Cerebral Palsy Day with the participation of children with this diagnosis. So we decided to take part in this charity action and changed the website logo till the end of the day.

Due to modern business demands, IBM joined hands with other companies to develop an open-source business blockchain network called Hyperledger Fabric project that is touching the sky. Due to modular architecture, digital keys, and on-demand data retrieval, hyperledger fabric is regarded as the base for the world’s future modular architecture blockchain-based apps. Further benefits of Hyperledger Fabric are given below to facilitate your interpretation.

What is Outsourcing?

Outsourcing has become one of the increasing trends nowadays. Individuals, entrepreneurs, enterprises, and companies hire remote workers to get their project completed at a reduced cost. At the same time, outsourcing helps enterprises frees up time and focus more on core business process. Outsourcing is a process of shifting the jobs or tasks to the external workforce for an ample amount of time.

At the last Tech Train IT festival, we met the legendary John Romero, who designed and developed the iconic Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. We talked about whether game developers need soft skills, which working tools to pay attention to, and which co-founder of Id Software's favorite toys are. Questions were asked by Nikita Tsaplin, the founder of RUVDS.


→ Text and video in Russian

Deep Learning applications have changed a lot of things. Some which give hope for a brighter future, and some which raise suspicions. However, for developers, the growth of deep learning applications has made them more perplexed about choosing the best among so many deep learning frameworks out there.

TensorFlow is one of the deep learning frameworks that comes in mind. It is arguably the most popular deep learning framework out there. Nothing justifies the statement better than the fact that Tensorflow is used by the likes of Uber, Nvidia, Gmail among other big corporations for developing state-of-the-art deep learning applications.

But right now, I am on a quest to find whether it indeed is the best deep learning framework. Or perhaps find what makes it the best out of all other frameworks it competes against.

Nowadays, when VR helmets have become part of our reality and Tesla cars fly in space, you can use all the power of browser engines to create truly interactive, cross-platform and stylish presentations, rather than make a set of PPTX pages or, even worse, a PDF document in "illustrative material for explanatory and calculation report" style.

Since 2015, I have been trying to find the optimal presentation format for myself (apart from graduation projects). And now I think I have almost succeeded. It all started with PowerPoint, and ended with web frameworks based on JavaScript.

There are several JavaScript engines which can be used to create cool presentations: Marp, Reveal, landslide, hacker-slides, slidify and others. In some engines, you can use Markdown, some are embedded in an IDE, and some have their own editors. I have tried the first two engines.

As a demonstration, slide examples and video are available.

Boundary representation (B-rep) is the primary method of representing modeled objects in most geometric kernels, including our C3D Modeler kernel. The core algorithms that edit models, such as applying fillet operations, performing cutting operations, and obtaining flat projections require the precision of B-rep representations. The rapidly growing variety of 3D data in polygonal formats makes the task of model transformations from polygons into boundary representation increasingly relevant. As a result, we developed a new SDK, C3D B-Shaper, which is part of our C3D Toolkit.