I 💖 emojis, so when I heard about the new Twilio API for WhatsApp I wanted to build something emojiriffic. Inspired by Monica Dinculescu’s to_emoji Twitter bot and emoji translator I decided to build a WhatsApp text-to-emoji translator. You can try it out now by sending your message to our WhatsApp number +441745472072.

Here’s how you too can build this app.

🛠 Tools

I decided to build this project using Node.js, following in the footsteps of Monica’s projects. WhatsApp messages via Twilio result in webhooks, much the same as receiving an SMS message to a Twilio number, so if you’ve built a Twilio SMS application before this will be familiar. For ease of deploying this, I’m going to build this as a Twilio Function.

If you want to follow along with building the emoji translator you’ll need:

• A Twilio account (sign up for a free ...

We’ve looked at how to choose cameras in JavaScript using the mediaDevices API, particularly for the case of mobile devices with a front and back camera, and now it’s time to put that into practice in an application. In this post we will use what we learned to build a camera switcher into a video chat application using Twilio Video.

Getting started

We’re going to build this off a slightly modified version of the Twilio Video quickstart application. In order to build this app you will need:

• Node.js (I’m using the current latest version; 10, but it works with older versions)
• ngrok so that you can visit your development application from your mobile device
• A Twilio account; you’ll need your account SID, available on your Twilio dashboard, and an API key and secret, which you can generate in your console

Clone the repo for ...

We’ve looked before at how to capture a user’s screen in Chrome and Firefox. Good news, another browser has support now, Microsoft’s Edge.

Let’s see how we can capture the screen with Edge.

What you need

• The latest version of Edge, which is currently version 42 with EdgeHTML version 17 (if you’re on a Mac like me, you can get a free virtual machine with Windows 10 and Edge installed to test on)
• A text editor
• A local web server – I like to use serve for things like this
• Either ngrok or an equivalent tunnelling service or TLS certificates set up for localhost (we’ll see why later)

Screen Capture

Whereas Chrome required an extension to be built and Firefox used getUserMedia with a mediaSource constraint of "screen" to get a handle on the stream of the screen, once again Edge uses a different method ...

Most smart phones come with a front and back camera, when you’re building a video application for mobile you may want to choose or switch between them.

If you’re building a chat app you probably want the front camera, but if you’re building a camera app then you’re more interested in the rear camera. In this post we’re going to see how to choose or switch between cameras using the mediaDevices API and media constraints.

What you’ll need

To follow along with this post you’ll need:

• An iOS or Android device with two cameras to test with, if you have two webcams this will work on your laptop too
• ngrok so you can easily access the project from your mobile device (and because I think ngrok is awesome)
• The code from this GitHub repo to get you started

To get the code, clone ...

Here at Twilio we’re fans of using a second factor to protect user accounts, but that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten the first factor. Encouraging users to pick strong passwords is still the first line of defence for their accounts.

After spending years collecting lists of passwords from publicly available data breaches at HaveIBeenPwned, Troy Hunt has made available an API to check whether a password has been used before. This post will show you how to encourage your users to use stronger passwords by checking against the pwned passwords API.

The Pwned Passwords API

In 2017 NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) as part of their digital identity guidelines recommended that user passwords are checked against existing public breaches of data. The idea is that if a password has appeared in a data breach before then it is deemed compromised and should not be used. Of ...

In other posts we have investigated how to capture screen output in Chrome and built a screen sharing video chat application. There was one feature missing though. The Chrome extension made screen capture possible, but didn’t test whether it  had been installed before the application tried to use it. In this post we are going to build a Chrome extension that can be detected from the front end.

Getting set up

We’re going to use the extension we built for screen capture and add the functionality to make it detectable. We’ll then build an example to show handling the two cases, with and without the extension.

Download the source for the extension from the GitHub repo or by cloning the building-extension-detection branch

The extension

Open extension/extension.js and take a look ...

In recent posts we’ve seen how to capture a user’s screen in Chrome and Firefox. Now it’s time to combine this with a real video chat application and share screens as part of a video chat.

What we’re building

In this post we’ll take the Twilio Video quickstart application and add screen sharing to it. When we are done your application will let you make calls between browsers and share screens from one to the other.

What you’ll need

To build this application you will need a few things:

• A Twilio account – you can sign up for free here
• Node.js – we need to run a server to generate access tokens for the Twilio Video service
• The Chrome extension we built in the first post (if you didn’t follow this post, there will be a copy of the extension in the repo later ...

Sending a single SMS with Twilio is a relatively straightforward affair, but what if you had to send 10 messages? Or 10,000?

Imagine you’re an ice cream seller. You want to improve business by sending SMS alerts when you’re in your van so that your customers will know you’re on your way to deliver some sweet refreshment.

Look, I know what you’re thinking: “It’s December, hardly time for ice cream!” But, I’m in Melbourne right now enjoying a toasty 31°C Summer day so icy cold things are on my mind right now.

In this post we’ll look at how to work up from sending the first message to subscriber number 1 to up to 10,000 messages with Node.js.

Getting prepared

To follow along with this post and code the same features you’re going to need a couple of ...

If you’re building web applications with Ruby then you’re probably using Rails. Hanami is a young competitor focused on providing a full featured, modern web framework for Ruby developers that is fast, secure and flexible.

Hanami is a new web application framework for the Ruby community. It has been under development since 2014, initially under the name Lotus. Version 1 was released in April 2017 and version 1.1 was just recently released in October.

As the introduction to the Hanami guide says, “If you’ve ever felt you’re stretching against the ‘Rails way’, you’ll appreciate Hanami.” While this article isn’t a comparison of Hanami and Rails, as we build with Hanami you will see the ways in which they differ and be able to decide which approach you prefer.

Let’s investigate building a web application with Hanami with a tried and tested Twilio ...