Web Tools Weekly
Tools for Web Developers

Issue #531  (Dyte Review, JS Utils, Build Tools, Text Editors)09/21/23

The following intro is a paid product review for Dyte, a platform that provides a powerful SDK to create immersive live video experiences and webinars.

The landscape of technology has changed over the past four years. Video conferencing is now the norm, and many companies are now integrating real-time video communication as an integral feature in their products. Products in domains like educational technology, telehealth, and fitness require these capabilities extensively.

If your team or startup is considering video conferencing solutions for integration with your product, you'll want to check out Dyte.

Dyte

Dyte is a platform that allows teams to easily add custom real-time audio and video experiences to products – whether it's recording, live streaming, breakoutrooms, webinars, live transcription/translation, chatting, polling, quizzes, and more.

Dyte's platform includes a powerful Video Conferencing SDK that lets you configure and programmatically add immersive experiences into your product in just minutes.

There are a number of solutions in the video conferencing space, many with APIs and SDKs that allow you to integrate solutions fairly quickly. But most of these products are hard to integrate and have very low level APIs that require a lot of custom code. That's where Dyte excels.

Customizations in Dyte
Making Customized Experiences in Dyte

With Dyte, custom WebRTC-based video conferencing solutions can be integrated into your product in just a few lines of code. Dyte's developer-friendly UI kit is part of what bridges the gap between typical non-custom solutions and fully-custom ones.

When you create an account, you'll log in to the Dyte developer portal. This gives you access to Dyte's powerful Presets where you can configure your live experiences.

Dyte Presets
Dyte Presets in the Developer Portal

As shown above, if you select any of the existing presets, you'll have access to Dyte's quick meeting setup dashboard where you can choose your meeting type (group, audio, webinar, or livestream) and select the different permissions for hosts, chat, polls, and so forth.

The Stashpad UI on Windows
Dyte's Meeting Setup Dashboard

You can easily theme a live video experience to match your product's brand by selecting colors for all the different parts of the UI, which you can also test in three different device modes.

Custom Colors and Thems in Dyte
Custom Colors and Themes in Dyte

Dyte also offers various plugins that can enhance your video conferencing experience. These Plugins are like modular add-ons that you can easily integrate into your video meetings. Currently, Dyte offers a range of pre-built plugins, including DocSync, streamer, Rustpad, whiteboard, and a few more.

What's even more exciting is that Dyte provides a Plugin SDK, allowing you to incorporate your favorite tools seamlessly into Dyte meetings. This means you can customize your meetings with the exact features and functionalities that suit your needs.

Dyte Plugins
Dyte Plugins

Your product's live experiences can be customized via the aforementioned developer portal or by means of Dyte's API and modular UI kit. The UI kit is available for React, Angular, or vanilla JavaScript Web Components

Dyte's Extensive UI Kit
Dyte's Extensive UI Kit

The UI kit includes components divided into four categories: Atoms, Molecules, Organisms, and Pages. These categories amount to an extensive library of components that allow you to do just about anything when customizing your product's live audio and video experiences.

As mentioned, Dyte's platform is most powerful when it's customized to suit your product's needs. You can add custom buttons, icons, or even text that's based on participant locale, all within the video call interface. You can also integrate plugins to add functionality like a collaborative whiteboard, sharing documents, code collaboration, and more.

Another highlight of the Dyte platform is their excellent documentation. The docs are comprehensive and well structured, so you'll find exactly what you need and the step-by-step instructions are relatively easy to follow. In fact, their docs are featured on Docusaurus as an inspiration.

Dyte's Comprehensive Documentation
Dyte's Comprehensive Documentation

While the full docs do take some time to go through, there are some useful getting started guides that will help you get up and running quickly when building live video functionality, voice conferencing, interactive live streams, and in-app live chat.

A few last things worth mentioning are Dyte's call quality and security. Dyte allows you to embed high-fidelity, low-latency voice calls in your product, to ensure users aren't missing anything in your live experiences. When challenges do arise, Dyte's built-in auto-reconnect and smart bandwidth optimizations ensure things go as smoothly as possible. As far as security, Dyte's SDK and APIs are SOC2 and HIPAA compliant.

Dyte features top-quality voice calls
Dyte Features Top-quality Voice Calls

As mentioned, there are numerous use cases for integrating Dyte's video SDK, many of which are described on the Dyte website. Some examples include:

That's just a small sample. Dyte's SDK and API can be used on just about any platform or app that requires immersive live experiences that require security and quality connections.

Dyte's pricing is based on a pay-as-you-go model and the first 10,000 participant minutes are free.

Be sure to check out Dyte today and see if you can incorporate its powerful set of tools in a custom and innovative manner in one of your startup's products. And one last thing: Dyte is free for tech and OSS communities, which you can read about here.
 

Now on to this week's tools!

 

 

JavaScript Utilities

async-sequential-runner
A runner for async tasks that can pause their execution to ensure each task runs to completion before the next task is started, instead of allowing new tasks to progress while one task is paused.

Untypeable
A first-class TypeScript library that lets you get type-safe access to any API, with a zero-bundle size option.

SlickGrid
A vanilla JavaScript, client-side grid control compatible with Bootstrap where the grid data source is set up as an external object so it's compatible with a wide range of modern data-centric frameworks.

Meco: Free Your Newsletters From the Inbox
The inbox is full of distractions and too many subscriptions lead to inbox chaos. Time to liberate your inbox and move to Meco, a newsletter aggregator built for reading.     SPONSORED 

Plotteus
A themeable JavaScript data visualization library that allows you to tell stories with data using animated graphs, plots, charts, etc.

Plotteus

RocketRPC
A type-safe framework to allow you to define methods on your server, which you can access instantly in your client, with auto-completions and type-checking.

uqr
A dependency-free and tree-shakable ES module to generate a QR Code universally, in any runtime, to ANSI, Unicode, or SVG.

Optics
A scalable state management solution for modern TypeScript applications that lets you read, update, and subscribe anywhere in the global state.

Lithent
An extensible virtual DOM library for lightweight use in a variety of environments.

Rad Event Listener
A TypeScript-ready, simple wrapper for addEventListener() that returns a cleanup function so you don't have to call removeEventListener() manually.

MerkleTree.js
A JavaScript library to construct Merkle trees, which allow efficient and secure verification of the contents of a large data structure.
 

Build Tools, Bundlers, etc.

Create Chrome Extension
A scaffolding tool to start Chrome extension development, with support for multiple boilerplates, TS/JS, HMR, light/dark modes, and more.

Farm
A web build tool written in Rust that boasts faster performance than similar tools like Webpack and Vite, featuring lazy compilation, partial bundling, support for ES5 and more.

dum
An npm scripts runner written in Rust, to replace `npm run` and `npx`.

Sense AI
Automatic hub for all your work resources is now free for individual users.       SPONSORED 

Name Checker
Enter a potential project name and this tool will tell you if the same name is already taken on GitHub, npm, PyPl, Rust Crate, Ruby Gems, and lots more.

create-ink-app
A helper tool that scaffolds out a basic project structure for Ink apps and lets you avoid the boilerplate and get to building CLIs quickly.

npmgraph
An interactive tool that lets you enter an npm module name and it will generate a visual dependency graph where you can also click to view info on any of the packages in the results.

npmgraph

prisma-lint
A linter for Prisma schema files, just add rules to configuration file to enforce whatever rules you choose.

traf
A set of npm utilities that help you find affected dependencies so you can selectively trigger builds and tests only when needed.

On the Release Radar:

VS Code and Text Editors

I usually only include these kinds of tools in my other smaller newsletter VSCode.Email, so subscribe there for this sort of thing each week. I thought I'd include some of my recent favourites here for a change.

Next.Nav
A VS Code extension that allows you to navigate and create routes easily in your Next.js application.

RustRover
A brand new, feature-rich JetBrains IDE for Rust developers, with timely support, regular updates, and an out-of-the-box experience. Currently free while in Public Preview release mode.

RustRover

.ENV Switcher
A VS Code extension that lets you switch .env file content using presets, straight from VS Code's status bar.

Sense AI
Automatic hub for all your work resources is now free for individual users.       SPONSORED 

Giflens
VS Code extension that supercharges the GIF capabilities built into VS Code. It helps you to visualize GIFs at a glance, seamlessly navigate and explore GIF repositories, gain valuable insights via powerful GIFs, and more.

joey
A minimal VS Code theme that helps you code with joy and focus. It has some nice colors for the syntax highlighting, and is easy on the eyes.

flow-view
A visual editor for dataflow programming that's also open source so you can embed it in your own app.

Stylelint for VS Code
Official VS Code extension for Stylelint, the popular CSS linter that helps you avoid errors and enforce good practices in your CSS.

SvelteLab
A supercharged REPL, or playground, for Svelte with tons of features including light/dark modes, a command palette, templates, packages, and lots more.

image.nvim
An experimental Neovim plugin that attempts to add image support to Neovim.
 

Commercial Apps and Classifieds

These are commercial apps, affiliate links, PPC ads, and paid classifieds. Submit yours!
LangSmith – An all-in-one developer platform for every step of the application lifecycle.
Next.js Commerce – A fully open-source e-commerce template with Next.js and Medusa. AD
Aviator – A suite of tools to automate tedious workflows for developers.
Friendly Captcha – GDPR-compliant bot protection to protect from spam and abuse.
Bytes – An informative and entertaining JavaScript newsletter for web developers.   AD
Metorik – A suite of custom reports and email automation tools for e-commerce stores.
Momento – Monitor domains, SSL certificates, nameservers, DNS records, domain availability, etc.

An X Post for Thought

Is this the right way to view custom identifiers in programming?
 
An X Post for Thought
 

Send Me Your Tools!

Made something? Reply to this email or send links via Direct Message on X (formerly Twitter) @LouisLazaris (details here). No tutorials or articles, please. If you have any suggestions for improvement or corrections, you can also hit reply or message me on X.
 

Before I Go...

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Keep tooling,
Louis
webtoolsweekly.com
@LouisLazaris