This week, SyncAssist has been hard at work. On Tuesday, we presented our current prototype and testing plan to the QRB 2 committee, where we received valuable feedback from our coach Dr. Grant and other IPPD coaches about our scope of work and our presentation skills. By the Prototype Inspection Day, we’ll be sure to have all their advice internalized and nail that demo!
On the development side, we’ve made strides in several areas. First, I (Mai) was able to finally deploy our website to the AWS server, so now anyone can access it at dev.ippd-jitsi.com! The deployment is automated so that any time we make a change to the main branch of our repo, the website is automatically updated.
With the website deployed, Lucas and Johnny were able to set up some tests using Selenium to simulate users joining a meeting. We plan to use these tests to see how many users can join without audio/video quality degrading or straining the server too much and then report these findings back to our liaisons.
On the mobile side, Anh has been working to add video tracks using the react-native-webrtc library, and we are now able to add the mobile user’s camera to the conference! We’re having a bit of trouble with having the remote tracks display properly, but we’ll continue debugging and report back next week. And over the next few days, the whole team will be renewing our focus on mobile development and hopefully get to implementing remote control, the main feature that our liaisons are requesting from us.
On the topic of remote control, we’ve encountered some strange issues regarding global shortcuts. Jose has been working to add a C++ native hook to block global shortcuts on the controller’s side, but found that having a single local audio track makes the hook break. After hours of debugging, we finally found the issue: getUserMedia in Chromium blocks the native hook when an audio channel is active. Fortunately, since other developers have encountered this issue before, we were able to replicate their solution and are now able to disable native Windows shortcuts!
That’s all for now, until next time!