AcaniChat

Native iPhone Messages.app with WebSocket & Bonjour over Bluetooth

    

Technology

Client (iOS)

• UIKit framework, mainly UINavigationController & UITableViewController, to display conversations & messages
• Copied images from Apple's ChatKit.framework to beautify the UI
• Core Data framework to persist conversations & messages (stores them to disk in an SQLite file)
• SocketRocket to communicate with the server via WebSocket
• Coming soon: Bonjour over Bluetoothh for peer-to-peer (p2p) communication
• Note: Ability to delete messages was removed after commit b269281 to keep things simple

Server (Node.js)

• Nodejitsu-hosted instance of acani-chat-server
• Node.js ws module to communicate with clients via WebSocket
  • I chose ws because I think Socket.io (recommended by the Node.js website) uses ws. And, I didn't want the extra backwards compatibility that Socket.io offers.
• Redis to store messages in a list

Installation

• Install Node.js & NPM from http://nodejs.org
• Install Redis from http://redis.io or via brew install redis.

Hosting

Heroku doesn't support websockets yet, so I went with nodejitsu. modulus.io is another option. To host with nodejitsu, follow http://nodejitsu.com/paas/getting-started.html.

Getting Started

AcaniChat uses Objective-C literals, so make sure you have Xcode 4.5 or later, which you can download from iOS Dev Center : Beta Downloads.

git clone https://github.com/acani/AcaniChat.git
cd AcaniChat
git checkout edge
git submodule update --init
open AcaniChat.xcproj

License

AcaniChat, except for those images copied from Apple's ChatKit.framework, is released under the MIT License.

How to find Apple's ChatKit.framework images, e.g.:

find /Applications/Xcode.app/ -name *.png
find /Applications/Xcode.app/ -name SendButton.png
open /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator6.0.sdk/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ChatKit.framework

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.