Tutorials (4)

Part three of this tutorial will guide you through creating a splash screen animation, an onboarding animation for an empty messages screen, turn-taking animations in chat messaging, and animating emojis. You'll use our iOS Chat SDK sample application to get you up and running. Since this is the final installment of our prototyping in SwiftUI

What is SwiftUI? SwiftUI is a user interface toolkit that allows developers to design iOS apps declaratively. With SwiftUI, developers determine what they'd like their user interface to look like and how it should function, and SwiftUI makes it happen as users interact with it. Declarative Swift syntax is easy for developers to read and

You can have a look at the final result of this tutorial in the main branch of the accompanying GitHub repository, and a packaged version of the game with a few additional features in the latest release of the Stream Chat Unreal Plugin. Prerequisites Before you get started, make sure you've installed the most recent

Choosing between UIKit or SwiftUI to be your main implementation framework is a big decision. We will explore some of the characteristics of both frameworks and list their pros and cons. So let's dive right in and help you determine which approach is best. UIKit vs. SwiftUI: Starting a New Project Today is the day.

In part two of this series, you'll use our iOS Chat SDK sample application to prototype several gestures that you'll use for refreshing page content, adding seamless swiping and pagination to message lists and photos, revealing in-app actions to messages in message channels, and more. You'll also apply modifiers to these gestures so you can

Angular is a UI framework for building mobile and desktop web applications. It is built using TypeScript and can support single-developer projects to enterprise-level applications. You can create amazing client-side applications using HTML, CSS, and Typescript using Angular. At Stream, we use it to build chat applications and more. Interested in joining the ranks of

Animated message reactions, like the ones found in iMessage, offer you a way to quickly respond and add your sentiment to a single chat message. In this tutorial, we will focus on making animated message reactions more lively by adding animations to the reaction icons and their container. We will go through the process step

To get started, you'll learn how to customize the chat features you build with Stream's Compose Chat SDK. Specifically, you'll work with Stream's Compose ChatTheme component to define these features so that your app truly looks and feels the way you want it to. You can find all the code in this article on GitHub.

Many chat apps today implement /slash commands for their end-users. When done right, these commands can be both practical and engaging, serving a variety of use cases. For this tutorial, you'll create a custom /gcal command that will populate your app's chat channel with your upcoming Google Calendar events and call it with a webhook

This tutorial will focus on designing the elements that make up the ChannelListView and ChatsView components. In parts two and three, you'll build on these components by adding interactions and animations, creating a more seamless chat experience. Resources You can download the Xcode project containing the SwiftUI source code from GitHub to follow along. The

Our original implementation to track file upload progress worked, but it had some in-code usability and UX issues that we wanted to clean up. The following account gives an up-close look into the process we had, the problems we encountered, and what we did to improve. Warning: As this is a story of mistakes we

The Stream Chat SDK for Jetpack Compose makes extensive use of slot APIs, which allow you to provide pieces of Composable layout that you can then use within one of the chat components provided by the SDK. For this post, you'll use the MessageList component and its itemContentparameter to completely change how message items are

WebSockets are at the core of every chat app. At Stream, whenever you connect a user to a channel, you create a WebSocket connection. That means for every connected user, there's at least one connection open. But, did you know it's possible for a single user to connect multiple times? This is what we refer

The Problem Recently, as a result of Stream's work on the stream_feed_flutter sample application, it became problematic to not have some kind of "mock" authentication system in place to better test the application. After all, what good is a social feed if there's only one person in it? The stream_feed Dart package (upon which stream_feed_flutter

When designing and prototyping touch interactions for iOS devices, designers typically rely on interaction design tools such as Framer, Origami Studio, Adobe XD, Figma, InVision, Flinto, Principle, and ProtoPie. While there is nothing wrong with these design tools, they create an extra step for developers who must translate animations and interactions built with these tools

Specifically, this tutorial will cover: What an AttachmentFactory is Creating a custom AttachmentFactory Customizing Stream Compose UI Components Sending custom files as attachments Adding previews for your custom attachment Note: Stream recently announced their Jetpack Compose UI components, which are currently in beta. This follows the announcement of the stable version of Jetpack Compose. You

Did you know you can integrate Stream's Android SDK with other open-source libraries? To show you just how easy it is, in this tutorial you'll leverage data from Stream's Chat API to power the messaging UI from ChatKit. Specifically, this tutorial will cover: Stream Setup Implementing the ChatKit Interfaces Building the Channels Screen Building the

Many chat applications today allow users to send voice notes as messages. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to send voice notes, or audio attachments, in your Stream Chat Flutter app. By the end, your app will feature a chat experience similar to the shown here. This tutorial will cover the following sections in detail:

Building a chat app that is both feature-rich and scalable can be difficult and time-consuming. But in just under four hours, this YouTube video by JavaScript Mastery demonstrates how to build and deploy a telemedicine chat app designed for a medical or hospital setting using the Stream Chat API. We love this tutorial because it

Stream now offers two separate Android UI implementations that you can use to integrate Stream's Chat API with your app: Compose UI Components (preferable if you're using Jetpack Compose) UI Components (preferable if you're building XML layouts) In almost all cases, you should use the library that's native to the rest of your app's UI.

Adding a peer-to-peer payment integration to your Flutter application creates a richer in-app experience for your end-users. However, you need to make sure your payment process is fast and secure. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to integrate a peer-to-peer payment solution in your Stream Chat Flutter application using an in-app digital wallet that provides

When you communicate over a chat application with another person or group, you may exchange sensitive information, like personally identifiable information, financial details, or passwords. To ensure that your data stays secure, a chat application must use end-to-end encryption. In this tutorial, you'll learn the basics of end-to-end encryption and how to use it in

A stand-out feature of the most popular messaging applications is the ability to share a user's location quickly and conveniently with trusted peers. Using Stream Chat and Flutter, we can implement a similar feature in very little time. In this article, we will build a small location-sharing chat feature using Flutter, Stream Chat, and the

Stream's Android Chat SDK supports sending custom attachments with messages. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to send location data as a custom attachment. Note: This tutorial assumes you already know the basics of the Stream API. To get started, check out the Android In-App Messaging Tutorial, and take a look at the Android SDK

In today's world, chat or instant messaging apps have completely superseded traditional text messages. We all use chat app to communicate with the people around us due to the capability of the chat application to provide features such as message read receipts, user presence, reactions, typing indicators, etc. As a result, users enjoy and hardly

Music has always been an oasis for me while coding and writing. I love chatting for hours on end with my friends, exploring our peculiar music taste. What if we had an app where we could listen to music and discuss with a like-minded community? This tutorial will create a music chat app where you

Stream's Chat SDK for Android provides a way for you to add reactions in your application in a matter of minutes. The SDK has a free trial, and it's free to use for small companies and hobby projects with a Maker Account. In this tutorial, you're going to learn how to do the following with

Messages in Stream Chat can contain a number of attachments. The UI Components library for Android renders these by default depending on their type. Images are rendered in a gallery layout, files are shown in a list, and links show rich previews of the content they're leading to. You can render attachments in a custom

Stream now provides a fully-featured Jetpack Compose Chat SDK that you can use instead of the basic approach described in this article. Check out the Compose Chat Messaging Tutorial and give it a try today! Intro and context In our previous article about Jetpack Compose, we shared our initial impressions and recommended some learning resources.

Authorization is one of the essential parts of any iOS application. Once a user is logged in, it's your authorization scheme that will make sure users can't interact with your app in ways they're not allowed to. Without a robust authorization scheme, hackers could easily access sensitive user data and engage in other damaging activities

In this tutorial, we'll build a functional clone of iMessage using Stream Chat Flutter SDK. Building a chat in your app at scale is not an easy task; but in this tutorial, you'll get a chat experience up and running in roughly 20 minutes! You can follow this tutorial without a deep knowledge of Flutter,

Message Markup Language (MML) enables you to build an interactive messaging experience. MML supports embedding elements as simple as a button to your message or as complex as date pickers and custom forms within your chat experience. MML also supports images, icons, and tables out of the box. The goal for MML is to provide

Livestreams are everywhere these days, from popular gaming sites such as Twitch to more casual everyday apps like Instagram. Apps use live streaming and live video to help connect users and add another level of interactivity to their platform. This post is still useful, but out of date. Stream now offers a Live Video Streaming

When you're modeling and building an API, storing ID references to other documents to create relationships between types of data within your domain is paramount to efficient querying, scalability, and even your own sanity. Imagine you're building the backend for a blog platform and want users to be able to search blog posts by category.

In most cases, when building a chat app, it's essential to provide adequate privacy and security to your users. This can be done using cryptographic methods such as end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption is becoming a mainstream expectation, as it's featured in the biggest chat apps, such as WhatsApp and Telegram. In this article, you'll learn

When adding live video to your applications on Stream, we recommend checking out our newly released Video API! Using Stream Video, developers can build live video calling and conferencing, voice calling, audio rooms, and livestreaming from a single unified API, complete with our fully customizable UI Kits across all major frontend platforms. To learn more,

This tutorial demonstrates how to set up notifications for these events using a Stream Feed in conjunction with AWS S3. We will walk through a basic set up that shows how to create a timeline (flat feed) to display a list of events tied to an AWS S3 bucket - think user uploads, downloads, and

In this tutorial, we'll build a chat app with a dashboard that allows an admin user to switch between one-on-one customer chat channels in the same window. As a busy customer support representative, you don't want to be stuck with a chat app that opens each chat in a new window, forcing you to cycle

In this tutorial, we'll build a chat app that sends a copy of a chat transcript in an email using SendGrid. Imagine being able to automatically inform your sales team when one of their clients has chatted with your support team. This app sends a transcript of that chat directly to the salesperson's email address

Can you imagine viewing your sales chat transcripts in real time from your sales CRM? Would your chat applications improve with more timely handling of customer chat inquiries? This post demonstrates how to leverage the powerful Stream Chat API to take action with a chat transcript as the chat takes place, response by response. The

Did you know you can use Swift in the backend to build a chatbot and deploy it to AWS? We've recently published an Open Source project called Swift Lambda to make the process easier. In this tutorial, we'll use Swift Lambda to build a chatbot that can reply to user messages automatically using Stream's powerful

This post will demonstrate how to configure a Lead creation in Zendesk from a customer inquiry via a landing page/sales chat widget. We'll build a full-screen experience that can be embedded on your homepage or landing pages. Our chat experience will start with a simple user registration to lead capture. It will ask for first

In this tutorial, we'll build an iOS app for livestream events where attendees and speakers can interact in a virtual conference room using Stream Chat, to deliver fully featured chat components, and Dolby.io, to provide quality live-streamed audio and video for large audiences. By the end, we'll have an application similar to the screenshots below.

When adding live video to your applications on Stream, we recommend checking out our newly released Video API! Using Stream Video, developers can build live video calling and conferencing, voice calling, audio rooms, and livestreaming from a single unified API, complete with our fully customizable UI Kits across all major frontend platforms. To learn more,

Android Studio makes it easy to push changes to your favorite Open Source, professional, or personal projects on GitHub. In this tutorial, we'll learn how to use GitHub with Android Studio. We'll use an Open Source contribution for context. Android developers use Open Source projects to speed up development or enable functionality that is otherwise

In Part 1 of this series, we created a simple chat application for iOS and macOS using SwiftUI and Stream Chat's Swift SDK, but it only had a single channel. In this tutorial, we'll improve on it by implementing a channels screen with three features: join, create, and search channels. Although Stream Chat provides a

In this post, we'll create a simple social network, called "The Stream", that allows a user to post messages to followers. The app will allow a user to post a message to their followers. Stream's Activity Feed API, combined with Android, makes it straightforward to build this sort of complex interaction. All source code for

When adding live video to your applications on Stream, we recommend checking out our newly released Video API! Using Stream Video, developers can build live video calling and conferencing, voice calling, audio rooms, and livestreaming from a single unified API, complete with our fully customizable UI Kits across all major frontend platforms. To learn more,

In this tutorial, we'll build encrypted chat on iOS using Swift. We'll combine Stream Chat and Virgil Security. Both Stream Chat and Virgil make it easy to create a solution with high security with all the features you expect. These two services allow developers to integrate chat that is zero-knowledge. The application embeds Virgil Security's

As we seek to still connect with friends and family while we all #stayhome, live streaming and video conferencing have become insanely popular. These technologies have always been great tools for connecting with coworkers and loved ones who are not located nearby; however, we are now seeing incredible growth in their use for connecting with

An updated version of this tutorial exists! Angular devs can now use our dedicated Angular Chat SDK to build in-app messaging experiences faster than ever. You can still skim the post below for inspiration, but our new official Angular Chat App Tutorial is the place to find up-to-date info and a much simpler approach.

In this post, we'll be creating a simple social network with SwiftUI, called Stream Flutter, that allows a user to post messages to followers. The app will allow a user to post a message to their followers and view updates from people they follow. Stream's Activity Feed API, combined with Swift, make it straightforward to

In the second part of our series, we'll implement direct messaging between users by integrating Stream Chat. This post assumes you've followed along with part 1. Leveraging our code from part 1, we'll modify the backend to generate a Stream Chat frontend token so our mobile application can communicate directly with Stream's Chat API. The

In the third part of our series, we're building group chat into our social application. This allows users to chat with multiple people at the same time. We leverage Stream Chat to do the heavy lifting. This post assumes you've gone through part 1 and part 2. Using our code from part 2, we only

In this series of tutorials, we'll create a simple social network, called The Stream, that allows a user to post messages to followers, chat either 1-on-1 or in groups. Stream's Activity Feed API and Chat API, combined with Swift, makes it straightforward to build this sort of complex interaction, with far less overhead than creating

Language barriers can hinder growth and build a wall between your business and its potential customers, ultimately limiting your market and costing you money. If a customer reaches out to you by chat in German or Spanish, but you don't understand the language, wouldn't it be nice to still be able to win them over?!

Are you thinking of building a chat application in Go? You've come to the right place! This post will walk you through everything you need to know to make a chat app with the Stream Chat API and will show a working example server that ties all the concepts discussed in this tutorial together. The

Communicating with an AI chatbot can be a frustrating experience. However, with advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, there is no excuse for not providing a positive experience for chat users. AI assistant advances allow machines and computers to process, understand, and reply to human messages in a genuinely useful way to the human

Customer support live chat is an incredible tool for collecting valuable feedback from your customers and increasing your website engagement rate. With that said, it can take weeks or even months to build a functional, scalable, reliable real-time chat application. Luckily, Stream Chat makes it super easy to create such an app quickly; you can

In this tutorial, we'll build a functional clone of iMessage using Stream Chat iOS SDK. Building a messaging app used to be difficult; but in this tutorial, you'll get a chat experience up and running in roughly 20 minutes! If you get lost during this tutorial, you can check: The iMessage Clone GitHub repo The

One of the most significant advantages of using Stream to accomplish this feat is that it significantly reduces the time and effort required; Stream's Chat API allows you to build a fully-featured user engagement platform in just a few hours. Source Code Here is a preview of the app we'll be building. You can clone

Apache Cordova is an application development framework that allows you to develop cross-platform apps using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Its main advantage over traditional app development workflows is that it allows for the use of a single codebase for Android, iOS, and the browser, which significantly reduces the time and cost

As previously mentioned in a blog post by Stream, Pusher recently announced its intention to shut down their real-time messaging service, Chatkit, effective April 23rd, 2020, to narrow its product focus to Channels and Beams. Although Pusher Chatkit fulfilled the basic premise of providing a real-time chat solution, their feature set and capabilities were way

This tutorial will take you through how to create a live chat app that responds in real-time, with the help of Dialogflow and Stream's Messaging Platform. We'll be making a chatbot that interprets the intent of a user's input using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and responds appropriately, giving the information it has gathered. Prerequisites You'll

In this tutorial, we'll build an encrypted chat/messaging example app for Android. To do this, we will combine the Stream Chat Platform and Virgil Security. Stream and Virgil make it easy to build a solution with excellent security by combining all of the features you would expect as a developer when creating a messaging app.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an EU data protection law (passed into law in 2018) that determines how companies use and protect EU citizens' data. While you might feel this doesn't concern you, it very likely does! As long as you have EU residents making use of your app, you need to follow

We'll be leveraging AWS Polly's natural speech capabilities to implement this feature and Stream's Messaging API for our chat infrastructure and interface. AWS Polly supports dozens of languages and a wide selection of natural-sounding male and female voices. When you send text to AWS Polly's API, it returns the audio to your application as a

An activity feed is a list of recent actions happening in realtime. In this article, we'll build a simple feed app powered by GitHub WebHooks and Stream Feeds in JavaScript. The app will track the activities of your GitHub organization or personal repositories. So, we'll see what is happening right there from our app. For

This blog post describes an outdated approach to using Javascript against our Chat platform. Javascript developers can now use SDKs specific to their tech stack, like our dedicated Angular Chat SDK. It allows you to build chat experiences with ease. You can still refer to the post below for its concepts and ideas, but

In this post, we'll explore how to do two things: 1) create live chat message bubbles in Android that are similar to WhatsApp and iMessage and 2) customize Stream Chat's UI Components. We'll customize Stream Chat Android's built-in UI components by plugging in a custom message view. This allows us to focus on the text

Let's create a functional chat interface right in the terminal with Node.js! Although building a chat app is no small task, with the help of Stream's fully featured Chat API, it'll only take a few lines of code, as you'll see. Prerequisites Before proceeding with this tutorial, make sure you have Node.js and Yarn installed

There's a newer version of this tutorial! Stream now offers a dedicated Angular Chat SDK, paired with a new official Angular Chat App Tutorial. The new SDK drastically simplifies the development process described below. You can still skim this post for inspiration, but please refer to the new resources linked above for consistently up-to-date

The PHP backend generates a token for the user and sends it to the front end (JavaScript UI) during login or registration. The token helps connect the front end to the chat API, allowing the user to access the chat interface. Prerequisites To follow along with this tutorial, you need to have a basic understanding

One increasingly common feature in chat apps is the ability to send self-destructing messages, also known as "ephemeral" messages. When this feature is enabled, the messaging system automatically erases the content minutes or seconds after the message is sent. This deletion is effective on all the devices that received the message, as well as on

Update: Here is an excellent post on the vision for 2020's tech trends in cloud computing between the CEO of Ionic, Max Lynch, and CEO of Stream, Thierry Schellenbach. There is a massive difference between platforms such as React Native and Flutter compared to Ionic. Ionic believes that the open technology that powers today's web

In this tutorial, we will show you how to process webhooks to send a message to a Slack channel! Here at Stream, we are big fans of Chat. With our chat API, we offer a webhook so that you can relay data to an endpoint of your choice. Webhooks are an excellent way to make

Managing microservices manually can get very complicated and takes the focus away from business logic. API gateways help take care of the various collective management and housekeeping tasks necessary for running microservices. One of the most popular API gateways is Kong. As the illustration below shows, Kong takes care of the tedious tasks involved in

This article describes how you can build and deploy a React Chat application powered by Stream's Chat API to Netlify and Heroku. In this case, the React app will be deployed on Netlify, while the accompanying Node server will be deployed to Heroku. At the end of this article, you'll see just how easy it

Unlike an API request that's triggered when a request is sent, a webhook gets triggered when certain events occur within the cycle of an application. For example, when a new message is added on Stream Chat, the message.new event sends a payload to the webhook endpoint containing data about the message that was just sent.

Many applications today inform users about important messages related to their application by sending notifications - this can be via push or web. With a web notification, a user can click on the notification and instantly get back to the application to further act on that piece of content. For Stream Chat applications, one of

Stream's Chat API provides a JS Chat SDK that you can use to build custom messaging solutions for your application. Requests from the SDK are authorized via an access token provided by a backend API. Due to the restriction of having to generate a JWT token on the backend, you will need an API that

React hooks, released in February 2019, have huge benefits when implemented in your application. Whether you've used hooks before or are just learning, this post aims to show you just how simple it is to implement them with Stream Chat. The Basics Using hooks with Stream Chat is as simple as it sounds. Wherever you

In this tutorial, we will build a chat application that'll allow users to participate in a group discussion similar to how channels work in Slack. We'll handle user authentication, and management using Auth0's Authentication-as-a-Service solution that allows developers to add authentication to any application without breaking a sweat easily. At the end of this article,

Conversational UI is a user interface that emulates a human to human conversation, while in reality, the human is interacting with a computer program. We've often seen this with the integration of AI chatbots and AI assistants. Conversational UI that involves speaking allows you to interact with a voice assistant, while typing allows you to

In this post, we'll be creating a simple social network, called Stream Flutter, that allows a user to post messages to followers. The app will allow a user to post a message to their followers. Stream's Activity Feed API combined with Google's Flutter makes it straightforward to build this sort of complex interaction. All source

As healthcare technology advances, secure real-time telemedicine communication is becoming increasingly crucial to any modern medical application. It's essential to provide the technology experiences customers expect while protecting their privacy and data, like through HIPAA compliant chat. HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act which aims to provide and maintain data privacy for

When adding live video to your applications on Stream, we recommend checking out our newly released Video API! Using Stream Video, developers can build live video calling and conferencing, voice calling, audio rooms, and livestreaming from a single unified API, complete with our fully customizable UI Kits across all major frontend platforms. To learn more,

Being able to communicate with a group of people in real-time over chat is one of the most powerful features of modern messaging. Real-time messaging with groups of people can have live general discussions across the board as though it were a one-to-one chat, which makes sharing general information fast and easy. In this tutorial,

Building a real-time chat messaging application can be daunting and time-consuming for project and development teams. One reason is that the backend and frontend infrastructures must handle many aspects, like security and scalability. To build the Python app, we will use Stream's API for chat to handle WebSocket connections and other heavy lifting using Go,

Create a React Native Chat App with Gifted Chat

When building a chat application, your head tends to spin in terms of what functionality you need. When building in-house, this process can turn into a nightmare.Thankfully, there are companies out there such as Stream that provide chat as a service as an API. In this tutorial, we will explore how to build a real-time

Is your chat going global? Worry less about the language barrier when you pair Amazon Translate with our real-time messaging API. When powering a chat product in a global environment, multilingual support should be top-of-mind. Doing so allows you to ensure that the communication barrier between yourself and the user on the other end is

Stream enables you to listen to fee changes in near real-time using SQS, webhooks or websockets. In this tutorial, we will discuss how to use AWS SQS & Lambda to respond to feed updates. While websockets are the preferred method to listen to changes, SQS notifications have a special spot in the feed infrastructure. Stream

Are you ready to elevate your React and Redux skills to the next level? Look no further than Cabin, an immersive tutorial series designed to empower developers with the knowledge and expertise needed to build feature-rich, scalable social network applications. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting your journey with React and Redux,

In this tutorial, we will make a Twitter clone using Django and Stream, a hosted API for newsfeed development. By the end, you'll see how easy is to power your newsfeeds with Stream. For brevity, we leave out some basic Django-specific code and recommend referring to the Github project for the complete runnable source code.

In today's digital age, staying updated with the latest news, articles, and podcasts can feel like a daunting task. With an abundance of information scattered across various platforms, managing and consuming content efficiently has become more important than ever. Enter Winds - an innovative open-source application powered by Stream that redefines how we engage with

Getting started and integrating with a technical solution, like the Stream activity feed API, can be exciting. Sometimes you just want to rip open the proverbial box and get started. When implementing a new API I rarely want to read pages and pages of (sometimes boring) documentation - so here's your TL;DR version of the

These days, activity stream and feeds (ex. newsfeeds) are ubiquitous. The most obvious examples are the Twitters and Facebooks of the world, but feeds are also being adopted by companies such as Google and Amazon. We've even noticed that many companies are basing their entire application off of a dynamic feed structure, but don't even

Here at Stream, we're helping thousands of companies build and scale their activity feed, chat, and video technology. In this guide, we share best practices to make designing an activity or notification feed with world-class UX easier for you. Remember this: feeds are fun! They're really one of the best UI patterns for sharing and

Introduction As part of our "best practices" series, we wanted to describe our best practices for setting up activity feeds for a simple photo sharing application. These feeds allow users to upload photos, follow other users, like photos, and see notification and aggregated feeds. Of course, how you use Stream depends greatly on the kind