The Objective Blog

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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/