so, so much. flash is gone, webrtc is in. iOS and Android native client SDKs. inspector tool to analyze real time control and media data from your sessions. archiving via REST APIs. UI/UX improvements. probably a ton i'm missing...
TokBox Engineer here. We set out to make a high quality starting point for anyone who wants to include embedded RTC in their next app (or crazy idea). Part of that is solving for the client-side concerns, like an easy toolchain, rich APIs for customizability, and some helpful code that shows the best practices our combined experience with the platform has given us (like above, but stay tuned for more!).
But there are definitely more parts, TURN/STUN for network traversal is just the beginning. The OpenTok platform behind this sample app adds dynamic optimizations (like audio fallback), archiving (recording) capabilities, RESTful APIs for eventing and control, etc. Just standing up a STUN/TURN server isn't going to solve the hard problems it takes to make something that can eventually go to production.
Firebase may not have Cloud Code, but since you have use their npm module and deploy to a free hosting service like Heroku, I actually think its more powerful. The big win: once you are in a full node.js environment you can leverage the power of all the npm modules. Parse's Cloud Code is very isolated from the entire ecosystem.
Dev Evangelist from TokBox here. I'm sorry you had difficulties working with OpenTok. Our technology is bleeding edge and is moving terrifically fast so a few bugs are a tradeoff thats worth the ability to be able to innovate in the market. What this means for us as a business is that we've doubled down on our support talent and infrastructure, all of which maintain quite a high level of responsiveness to issues that come in (our premium support customers seem just as happy to have us as we are to have them). I'm curious if you've used any of those channels and if your issues went unanswered - if there's a leak in those pipes that would be very important to us to fix. Lets address those silent errors when initializing subscribers, please email [email protected].
Open sourcing the technology isn't really an option for us, and its not just because the technology we are working on is our IP. Laying the infrastructure and process conventions for accepting patches outside the company while driving a growing internal engineering team is non-trivial. Making a repo public isn't some magical pill that will help you get to your answer faster, there's a lot of planning and documentation needed to make open source work. If anything I'm confident that the number of inbound support queries would increase because of questions about the code itself. This would slow down the response time for developers that truly have an issue we should address quickly. An open source project could work under these conditions but for a team of our limited size it would only slow things down.
That being said we love the community of developers that contribute to open source and we have been trying to do more of it ourselves. Our framework integrations are OSS (PhoneGap plugin, Titanium module, more to come), and we're eternally grateful to participate in projects like Google's webrtc implementation.
TL;DR: Open sourcing the project would slow the development down. If you need support, we're all ears and want to make that experience the best it can be (and the forums are public so you can hold us accountable).
Noting that the interaction you are accustomed to using a Wacom tablet is far more controlled and rich, I don't think thats the point here at all.
Every artistic medium has constraints, and every artist is used to this fact whether he is a painter or a sculpter. The iPad's input device (capacitive screen) is one such constraint here. What I think is great about this app is how great it can be at capturing a good number of important expressive pieces that are possible in the medium and presenting them as easy to understand tools. In using the app for about 30 mins I felt pretty great about what I was able to create in comparison to other apps on the same medium (iPad apps).
I'm thinking about what types of interesting questions we can answer by visualizing the data. If anyone wants to contribute to that effort, fork me on github (https://github.com/aoberoi/jonathans-card) and send me a pull request, i'll update the site.