AcaniChat - HTML5 WebSockets & Node.js chat on the iPhone

An open-source version of iPhone's native Messages app

Features

Currently, AcaniChat features message persistence with Core Data and a chat view that allows you to send chat bubbles to yourself. Next, we'll implement sending messages over the network through the Acani chat server.

• ConversationsViewController: List of conversations (UITableViewController)

  • Coming soon...

• ChatViewController: One-on-one Chat (UIViewController)

  • chatContent (UITableView)
    • Identical UI (colors, layout, and font size) to iPhone's Messages app
    • Conditional timestamps (only shown every so often)
    • Delete edit-mode: Delete one message at a time or clear all at once
    • Trims whitespace on ends of messages; prevents sending blank messages
  • chatInput (UITextView)
    • sendButton.enabled = [chatInput isEmpty] ? NO : YES
    • Collapses & expands (between one & four lines) with content
    • becomes scrollable after content exceeds four lines

iOS Technologies

• UIKit

  • UINavigationController
  • Custom UITableViewCells
  • Core Data

• Coming Soon

  • ZTWebSocket & AsyncSocket

Design Practices

AcaniChat is simple yet modular, implementation-agnostic, and extensible.

• Create views programmatically

Authentication: Facebook Connect & NSURLConnection

AcaniChat will implement authentication through various third-party accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, etc.

Connection: HTML5 WebSockets - ZTWebSocket & AsyncSocket

AcaniChat will soon be able to connect to web servers that support HTML5 WebSockets. It will use ZTWebSocket, built on top of AsyncSocket, to support a WebSockets connection.

Server: HTML5 WebSockets - Node.js & Redis

Using [Node.js][] & [node-websocket-server][], we built a chat server called [acani-chat-server][] (coming soon) that supports HTML5 WebSockets connections.

Chat: Redis PUB/SUB

The Acani chat server uses [Redis][] & the [Redis PUB/SUB functions][] to implement chat. Each user subscribes to the channel named after her username.

Contributors

• Matt Di Pasquale
• Peng Wan
• Abhinav Sharma
• Nick LeMay
• Eugene Bae

Related Projects & Links

• SSMessagesViewController
• Twitterfon
• Video Tutorial on SMS style bubbles
• StackOverflow: Implement view like standard iPhone SMS-chat bubbles view
• StackOverflow: Creating a “chat bubble” on the iPhone, like Tweetie.