Streamalog

Streamalog

 

Streamalog is a smartphone app used by organizations to facilitate user interactions. Users can be employees, members, or customers. The interactions include text-based chat sessions involving 2 or more users, with optional speech-to-text enabled (or text-to-speech the other way). The user interface and functionality specific to any given organization is built with Jyalog and Jyatags code. Jyalog is somewhat similar to Python and Jyatags is a text markup language.

Business Model

The organization pays a subscription fee of $0.25 per user per day, for each day in a month the user logs in to the app, up to a maximum of $1 per user per month. Users which make use of significantly more than the usual amount of server resources in a given month cost the organization $5 or a maximum of $10 for that month. After an organization has spent at least $200, it has the option of paying a setup fee of $100 and self-hosting, by downloading the APK file from the Streamalog.com website. (Note that iOS is also supported.) Self-hosted organizations and registered charities pay no fees to Streamalog.

Whenever a self-hosted organization wishes to modify any of the Jyalog or Jyatags code, a security code is emailed to the organization. This code must be entered into the code editor before any edits are accepted, and it lasts for 90 days. Only 3 types of email addresses are accepted: <user>@<domain>.<tld>, <domain>@gmail.com, and <some-user>@gmail.com. The <domain>, <tld>, and <some-user> values can never be changed.

Local Mode

In local mode, 2 or more users are in the same room, communicating with Bluetooth. Each user runs either Windows, Linux, or a smartphone. Local mode is handy for teaching math. The student(s) usually run Windows or Linux, and the teacher/tutor runs a smartphone (or sometimes Windows/Linux). Local mode is known as Boardalog, and is implemented before Streamalog. After speech-to-text and text-to-speech are implemented for Streamalog, they are both implemented for Boardalog as well.

Server-Side Jyalog

Since Jyalog is implemented using Java, and Java can be used as a server-side web programming language, so can Jyalog. Jetty is used as a local web server (as opposed to Flask, which works with Python, not Java). Jyalog is used to write server-side code, both locally and on the Streamalog server. This scheme is used to support an image sharing application. Images are stored on a local Windows/Linux computer, or on the remote server, and displayed on a tablet running a web browser.

Document Display

To display documents such as Word or Excel files, they must first be converted into PDF/RTF, or directly into RTF format. RTF and HTML files are automatically converted into Jyatags format. To display a web page, use Select All, Copy, and then Paste into an empty document window. The Jyatags version of a given document supports rich text, but only in a sans serif font in multiple sizes, along with bold, underline and italics. Monospaced text is also supported, useful for viewing program code. The user holds their phone in landscape orientation, and a single-line horizontally scrolling chat window is displayed at the bottom of the screen. To display the cursor, tap on the document text, or press and drag to highlight. Click on the edit mode icon at lower right to toggle between chat mode and edit mode.

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