The Objective Blog

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Fusion Radar: April 25, 2012

April 27th, 2012 - by brittany - Salt Lake City, Utah

Siasto Project Management

Siasto claims to be “the best way to manage your projects.” We’re still on the fence, as we’ve only been trying it out for the last few days. But with features like Google App integration (Utilizes Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar), Dropbox connection, intuitive design, and pricing that is cheaper than Basecamp, we’re motivated to check it out. Coming from Basecamp, there are two obvious things that we’re missing: there is no “Messages” area (although messages can be loaded as documents) and no time tracking capabilities.

Foresight.js

Foresight.js helps with smart delivery of high-resolution images. Unlike image delivery solutions which automatically send high res images to a device capable of displaying them, Foresight.js checks for a high-res screen AND a speedy network connection, and only if both requirements are filled are the high-res images delivered. This means a user with a retina display iPad and a fast network connection will see the big, beautiful images the iPad is so good at displaying, while a different user who doesn’t have either a high-res device or an adequate network connection will see smaller images optimized for their device.

RequestMaker

If you’ve ever had to build or consume an API that hasn’t been properly tested, you’ll appreciate Request Maker. Our fine friend Drew Wilson, who created the Pictos tool we mentioned in a previous post, made a handy-dandy tool for testing the data an API gives you when you are making a request, or the data you are sending if you own the API. In his own words, “There is nothing complex or special about this service. It just makes testing…much easier.”

Thanks Drew!

Layer Cake

Layer Cake offers to simplify the process of slicing and exporting images/graphics from  your layered PSD. From the Layer Cake website:

Bye bye, “Save for Web/Devices”. To turn PSD elements into images for your website or app, simply flatten, select, copy, make a new document, paste, save; or hide others, measure, crop, save, undo name your layer groups once and let Layer Cake do its magic.

Octogit

The short and sweet of Octogit is that it is an easy-to-use interface for Github from the command line. Developers, you can now use the time you usually spend copy and pasting between command line and Github to grab yourself another Mountain Dew or read the latest dev joke on Reddit.

Octogit also allows you to store your Github authentication data, create repositories on Github and locally, track issues in your repository, and inspect & close an issue.

Efficiency for the win.

Jekyll

Jekyll is a Rails blogging gem we’ve been checking out. Here’s a description copied from the project’s Github repo:

Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server.

Dragscrollable

Dragscrollable is a jQuery plugin we recently used on a project where we needed to “scroll a large nested layer within a viewport using native scroll from the container.” That’s a quote from the plugin page and it worked exactly as advertised. Performance with this plugin is much better than with other similar plugins we’ve tried.

Our team came across this when building a customized map feature for a client. With 10,000 map pages to load, all other tools we used would slow down, become choppy, and some not load at all. Once we implemented Dragscrollable, we got the seamless user experience we were hoping for.

Beercamp

Beercamp is part of the Front-Trends Conference, which focuses on front-end development. Note that their site isn’t using any Flash. It’s great to see developers pushing the envelope of web technologies like this.