The Objective Blog

Keep up with what we're thinking, reading, and doing.

Fusion Radar: November 28, 2012

November 28th, 2012 - by marissa - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. Fusion Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Agency Fusion.

Mozilla’s 3D View

Visually explore the inner workings of websites with Mozilla’s 3D view. It shows you the page you’re on with nested blocks of HTML. By clicking and dragging, you can also view different angles, view HTML code in the Style Panel, and change which element is selected in the 3D view.

3D View

PopcornMaker

Mozilla’s PopcornMaker is a user-friendly audio and video editor. Users import files, and then add “events” to the video, like text, popups, loops, and even Wikipedia entries and Google maps.

PopcornMaker

Chillipear

Chillipear is a digital studio that offers graphics, plugins, and themes that can spruce up your site.

http://www.chillipear.com/

OpenVDB

It seems like everything is going open source these days–including this library of some of DreamWorks Animation’s production and design techniques.

http://www.openvdb.org/

La Cura

And speaking of open source, here’s a site where a developer diagnosed with brain cancer made his diagnosis and medical records “open source” to the online community. He hoped to find a cure–and succeeded–by opening up to everyone online, and received thousands of replies, some by doctors, researchers, and other scientists.

http://artisopensource.net/cure/

IE10 Developer Guide

We’ve mentioned time and time again how much we dislike Internet Explorer. But as long as it’s around, every developer needs to know its features and quirks. Hence, this guide.

IE10 Developer Guide

PickFu

PickFu is a simple, lightweight tool entrepreneurs, product designers, and marketers can use to implement market polling. It seems like it would be ideal for getting feedback on logo designs, marketing materials, and product ideas.

http://www.pickfu.com/

ABC Conjecture Solved(?)

Here’s an article for the math and science nerds. Mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki has apparently solved the ABC conjecture, a ridiculously complex 27-year-old proposition that Mochizuki has been working on for 15 years. The only problem is, the proposition (and Mochizuki’s solution) are both so complex, people are having trouble figuring out whether or not he really solved it.

ABC Conjecture article

Killer Robots and Cambridge

If that last article failed to grab your attention, how’s this: researchers at Cambridge (including experts in philosophy, cosmology, astrophysics, and the co-founder of Skype) are actually going to put time and money into researching whether or not AI would pose a significant risk to the human race. That’s it–there’s no punchline. Now go check out the article; it’s worth reading.

Cambridge Assesses AI Risk

Fusion Radar: November 21, 2012

November 28th, 2012 - by marissa - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. Fusion Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Agency Fusion.

Presentz

This user-friendly javascript library seems like it would be a great tool for reproducing presentations and conference talks. It’s a mashup that merges things like YouTube, Vimeo, Slideshare, and Speakerdeck, as well as images, video files, and video tags.

http://presentz.org/

Hammer

Aside from being Thor’s weapon of choice, Hammer is a web development tool designed to build out static HTML sites. Designers and developers who get frustrated with the difficulty of updating sites will be thrilled with this free app.

http://hammerformac.com/

Charles

Charles is a javascript based HTTP proxy whose many talents include debugging and testing flash (without uploading your content), xmlhttp and ajax work, and site testing.

http://www.charlesproxy.com/

GatherContent

If you’re like us, you know that organizing and managing web content (and getting that content from clients) can be one of the most challenging parts of web design. Luckily, GatherContent is here with a solution: with a clean interface and customized roles and permissions, it helps web teams plan, structure, and collaborate on content.

https://gathercontent.com/

POP

POP (or Prototyping On Paper) lets its users take the wireframe designs they’ve already sketched out on paper, take pictures of them, and then simulate them and create a storyboard.

http://popapp.in/#overview

Bloc

As we’ve pointed out before, one of the most valuable qualities at Agency Fusion is the desire to keep learning. And for those who are looking to learn a bit more about web development, Bloc is a great tool. Their 12 week course offers an overview of development tools like Rails, Javascript, Wireframing, Git, and Ruby.

http://www.bloc.io/

Google’s Internet Service

The title of this article reads, “Google’s Internet Service Might Actually Bring the U.S. Up to Speed”. And boy, we hope they’re right. Right now, Google is testing a new high-speed fiber (think gigabit-per-second) Internet service in a test city. If it’s successful, it might not be long before we’re all surfing the net at hundreds of times faster than our current speed.

New Google Internet Service

Captive Media

Captive Media’s system takes the idea of advertising to a “captive audience” to a whole new level. They’re advertising to customers who literally cannot step away from the ad – because it’s playing directly above a urinal. Even better (or maybe worse, depending on the way you look at it), the screen allows users to play a game by “the direction of their stream.”

http://www.captive-media.co.uk/

AdTrap

AdTrap, which just hit its funding goal on Kickstarter, announces that it is “bringing back the only thing that was good about the 90’s!” That is to say, the internet free of ads. This small, zero configuration box removes ads–all of the ads, ever–from your internet connection before they can reach your devices.

AdTrap Kickstarter

Bounce Imaging

And finally, here’s one of our cool gadgets we found this week. Although it isn’t intended for civilian use (since when has that ever stopped us?), Bounce is a small ball police or soldiers could roll into an unseen space, that relays panoramic video and sensor data back to them in real time.

http://bounceimaging.com/

Fusion Radar: November 14, 2012

November 14th, 2012 - by marissa - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. Fusion Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Agency Fusion.

5 More HTML5 APIs

David Walsh has plenty of useful tips and articles, but we especially liked this one. He discusses 5 lesser-known HTML5 APIs, like the Fullscreen API, Page Visibility API, getUserMedia API, Battery API, and Link Prefetching.

http://davidwalsh.name/more-html5-apis

Pandoc

Pandoc is a universal document converter, and can take documents in markdown, reStructuredText, textile, HTML, DocBook, or LaTeX to HTML formats, word processor formats, Ebooks, TeX formats, PDFs, Documentation formats, and Lightweight markup formats.

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

Jekyll

Jekyll is your best friend as far as blog aware static site generators go. It can take a template directory, run it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and produce a complete, static website.

https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll#readme

Swagger

The Swagger framework solves server, client, and documentation/sandbox needs – all at once. It’s a specification and complete framework implementation for describing, producing, consuming, and visualizing RESTful webservices. It makes deploying, managing, and using powerful APIs simple.

http://swagger.wordnik.com/

IcoMoon App

This useful web tool lets you browse vector icons to download or make a font/icon-font (don’t worry, this HTML5 app allows you to import your own vectors too).

http://icomoon.io/#app-features

Taurus.io

It’s only in demo right now, but we can’t wait until taurus.io is readily available. It helps developers create product tours for their web application in just 15 minutes. Since product tours and tooltips are important for usability and user retention, this tool seems like it would be indispensable.

https://taurus.io/demo/QJiaDM0B

Fresh

This one’s pretty simple: fresh keeps your dot files fresh. It’s a tool to source shell configuration (aliases, functions, etc.) from others into your own configuration files. It also supports files like ackrc and gitconfig.

https://github.com/freshshell/fresh#readme

Lawnchair

Lawnchair is lightweight clientside JSON document store that has adaptable persistence, collections, and pluggable collection behavior.

http://brian.io/lawnchair/

Arq

This is something everyone should be interested in. Arq pairs with Amazon Glacier to give you a low-cost alternative to other off-site backups. You pay $29 – once per computer – and then it’s only $.01/GB per month to backup all your files. The catch is that it’s more expensive to retrieve those files, and it can take a long time retrieve them (think days or even a week).

http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

Google Now

Google Now is the latest in search technology – so modern, in fact, that it’s just the littlest bit creepy. Google isn’t content to just answer our search queries anymore – no, now it’s trying to anticipate what we’ll search for before we ever touch our keyboards. By looking at your email, calendar, and past search queries, Google will send cards to your phone that have information it thinks would be useful to you.

http://www.google.com/landing/now/

The Useless Web

The Useless Web takes internet procrastination to a whole other level. If you’re not content to waste time on Facebook or iwastesomuchtime.com anymore, check this site out, and keep pressing their “Take me to another useless website please” button.

http://www.theuselessweb.com/

Snapheal

If you’re sick of all the crappy Photoshop alternatives that really can’t do much (we know we are), you might be interested in Snapheal. For $15, you get tools like Erase and Clone & Stamp, both of which are designed to retouch your less-than-perfect photos.

http://www.snapheal.com/

Fusion Radar: November 7, 2012

November 8th, 2012 - by marissa - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. Fusion Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Agency Fusion.

Javascript Territory

Javascript Territory is the ultimate Javascript source, where you can find nearly 900 different JS libraries, along with useful tools and applications.

http://jster.net/

Google Refine

This is a useful power tool for anyone who has ever been wrestling with messy data. Google Refine helps you clean up data, transform it from one format into another, extend it with web services, and links it to databases like Freebase.

http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/

Mover

Connect cloud storage to your apps without hassle using Mover, an API that gives you one integration for every cloud storage. While it’s not free, Mover seems like it’d be a useful tool for anyone who’s frustrated with learning the intricacies and arbitrary ruls of dozens of different APIs.

http://mover.io/

Zapier

Automate tasks, make your business software talk to each other, and create integrations that push data between dozens of different web applications without having to write any code, with Zapier.

https://zapier.com/

PayLinks

PayLinks allows anyone to create single or recurring payment requests, and then generates a link you send on to customers. They then authorize payment, and the funds are deposited into your bank account. It’s sort of like an individualized PayPal.

https://gocardless.com/how-it-works/

Sendy

Along with Amazon SES, Sendy  is a self-hosted email newsletter application that lets you send trackable emails, complete with reports, subscriber, and list management. There are other services identical to Sendy, but they are much more expensive.

http://sendy.co/

WorkableHR

WorkableHR simplifies your hiring process by letting candidates apply with just their LinkedIn profile. That’s convenient all by itself, but that’s not all this system does. It also allows you to make customizable career pages, create custom screening questions and requirements, provides keyword matching, and keeps your hiring data organized and simple.

http://workablehr.com/

The Presenter

Of all the things in this week’s blog post, this has got to be the most impressive. The Presenter touch wall (not touch screen, touch wall) is a massive 65″ LED LCD HD display with 32+ touch points, an integrated i7 computer, and a width of just 2″. It seems perfect for just about anything: board rooms, presentations, museums, and even as a distraction for kids.

http://ideum.com/touch-walls/presenter/

Worldwide Browser Market Report

Ars Technica just published an article with vital statistics on different browser usage, mobile browsing, and browser adoption trends. (Much to our chagrin, IE still holds nearly 50% of the market share.)

Worldwide Browser Market Report