The Objective Blog

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

Fusion Radar: April 24, 2013

April 24th, 2013 - 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.

RailsPanel

RailsPanel is a Chrome extension for Rails development. Its most basic function is to end your tailing of development.log, and it also provides insight to db/rendering/total times, parameter list, and rendered views.

https://github.com/dejan/rails_panel

Psddd.

Psddd is a collection of resources from Dribbble, and it’s a great place for designers who are looking for inspiration and freebies to go. You can scroll through the newest resources, or search in categories like UI Kits, Modals, PS Elements, and others.

http://psddd.co/

Drawscript

Drawscript is an extension for Illustrator that generates graphics code (Obj-C, C++, JavaScript, Processing, ActionScript 3, JSON, Bezier array) from vector shapes. It’s great for skinning UIs, creating vector assets, and learning more about vector graphics programming.

http://drawscri.pt/

HapiFork

The HapiFork is the latest in a long line of “SmartThings”: it’s a fork that HapiLabs has designed to communicate with your smartphone. As its aim is to help users lose weight, the fork will actually vibrate in your hand if it detects you are eating too quickly, and it measures and records the number of bites you take and how long it took you to finish eating. It then sends the information to a HapiLabs app on your smartphone and offers advice on how to improve your eating habits.

http://www.hapilabs.com/products-hapifork.asp

Firefox OS Smartphone

Web developers with an interest in mobile programming and HTML5 will likely be excited to hear about the new smartphone specifically designed for Firefox OS. Geeksphone is the first group to design and build a mobile device with Firefox OS at its heart. Their phones are currently available for purchase as developer preview devices, and they offer two different models, the Keon and the Peak.

http://www.geeksphone.com/

Mantis

Micromagic Systems (a robotics and animatronics company) has spent the last four years (and hundreds of thousands of dollars) building one of the coolest giant robots we’ve ever seen. This all-terrain, two-ton, walking hexapod robot can be piloted or controlled via wifi, and is available for private hire over in the UK.

http://www.mantisrobot.com/

Lurpak

Lurpak is a European company that sells butter. Doesn’t really seem all that exciting, does it? Or artistic, or intriguing? But their ad, linked below, is all three. This commercial is so well done.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5PwDjRcFo4

Fusion Radar: April 17, 2013

April 18th, 2013 - 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.

UICloud

Coming up with interesting, interactive, customizable web elements that still work well and engage users can be tough. UICloud is a (free) service that allows users to submit and search through various UI elements. Dozens of variations on elements like progress bars, download buttons, and even music players are available for anyone to download. Use them on your site, or just peruse the selection for inspiration.

http://ui-cloud.com/

Spiffing CSS

Much of coding syntax requires “American English” – you know, writing “color” instead of “colour”, engaging in questionable grammatical practices, etc. Spiffing CSS aims to correct this problem. It allows users to write CSS and stylesheets in conformance to the Queen’s own English. The best part? Spiffing CSS’s site includes a numbered list of steps to take to use their product the last of which is: 4. Celebrate your well-spelt stylesheet with some tea and scones.

http://spiffingcss.com/

Transitional Interfaces

Pasquale d’Silva, an animation and production designer, is always hyper-aware of how “natural” an app feels. And a large part of feeling natural and intuitive with computers and apps have to do with transitional interfaces – you know, what happens when you swipe, or click, or scroll. This article covers a few do’s and don’ts of the transitional interface world, along with offering a few examples you can use.

https://medium.com/design-ux/926eb80d64e3

Sold.

Usesold.com sells your stuff for you; you just upload an image and description of your items for sale, and they’ll find a buyer, a fair price, and even send you a box to ship your items in.

http://usesold.com/

Inactive Account Manager

Google’s Inactive Account Manager asks Google users: what do you want us to do with your data once you’re dead? Using this free extension, you can tell Google to either delete your account or pass it on to someone else after a certain period of inactivity.

http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2013/04/plan-your-digital-afterlife-with.html

Patients Like Me

Patients Like Me is a site that is trying to open-source health care, treatments, and cures. Anyone (not just members) can visit the site and view what other people have to say about hundreds of diseases. Treatments, symptoms, and other ways of coping are all shared and quantified on this site. It even has an (optional) addition of social networking: if you do join the free service, you can connect with other patients like you on Facebook or on their message boards.

http://www.patientslikeme.com/

Niice.

Sometimes all we need is a little jumpstart to get thinking creatively; sometimes we’re looking for something in particular and just can’t find anything to fit our vision; other times we’re in a rut and need to find something – anything – inspirational to pull us out of it. Niice is a site dedicated to showcasing creative projects – beautiful pieces of design, quirky logos, elegant packaging, anything that might help spark creativity.

http://niice.co/

Microsoft’s Mobile Comeback

Microsoft’s mobile comeback doesn’t seem to be happening, even though the Windows smartphone is a good product. It has many of the same features as the iPhone, and its performance and battery life are all favorable. Unfortunately, it seems like the slumping sales and reputation of Microsoft are hurting its phones as well as its PCs.

http://www.splatf.com/2013/04/microsoft-comeback/

Fusion Radar: April 10, 2013

April 10th, 2013 - 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.

Geo for Bootstrap

The first site we’re going to show you has a design that might make you nostalgic for the ’90s. Or maybe it’ll just make you cringe. Either way, Geo for Bootstrap is a theme for Twitter Bootstrap, from Divshot. It is, of course, an April Fool’s joke, but it did keep us entertained for a while. (The dancing MC Hammer gifs were a nice touch.)

http://divshot.github.io/geo-bootstrap/

Chosen

Chosen is a simple JavaScript plugin that we’re excited to use; it makes select boxes much more user-friendly by allowing users to type for the selection they’re looking for, select multiple items without holding down the control or command button, and grouping terms.

http://harvesthq.github.io/chosen/

IE Browser Testing

We have to hand it to Microsoft – they’re really trying. The site linked below has a few tools that could make testing sites in IE a little less painful. There’s BrowserStack, which tests sites across browsers and platforms; a free Virtual Machine, which allows users to test multiple versions of IE; and finally, there’s Windows 8 with Parallels, which is a quickstart kit for Mac developers.

IE Virtualization Tools

Em Baseline Generator

The Em Baseline Generator is a free tool that lets users instantly see how base font sizes and line heights will interact with various html elements. Just slide along the bars to increase or decrease font size and line height (which the tool lists for you in pixels), and watch the text on the right and the code on the left change in response.

Em Baseline Generator

Distance to Mars

Utilizing one of the longest scrolling sites we’ve ever seen, these guys have created a to-scale model of space travel. It shows the user the relative size of the Earth, the moon, and Mars, and includes facts about space travel as it scrolls you through pixels and pixels to finally arrive at the red planet.

http://distancetomars.com/

Jolidrive

Jolidrive is a online system that allows you to use one login for everything – Instagram, Google+, Facebook, Google Drive, Vimeo, etc.

http://www.jolicloud.com/

WikiHouse

Here’s an open-source movement that doesn’t provide code for developers or even much information at all. Instead, WikiHouse is an open source construction set that allows anyone to design, download, and “print” houses and components. And because all the pieces are designed to slot together, the houses can be assembled without tools by a few people in just a few hours.

http://www.wikihouse.cc/

Neurofiction

All right, now here’s something straight out of sci-fi books: Neurofiction is a new kind of literary experience, which combines tech, machine learning, and customized prose to deliver a different story to each of its users. A headset (officially called an electroencephalography headset) analyzes the electrical activity of its readers’ neurons, and uses that activity to create a new narrative as they read.

http://neurofiction.net/

REI 1440 Project

The 1440 Project is a site REI to showcase your adventures, 24 hours (or 1440 minutes) a day. Users submit pictures of their outdoor adventures – everything from a walk in the woods to kayaking down a river, and the site displays them each minute.

http://www.rei1440project.com/#

Google Ngram Viewer

Google’s Ngram Viewer lets users search for and compare how often terms appear in thousands and thousands of books. Google searches all the books they have indexed and graphs your search terms based on how often your words show up in the text and titles of those books.

http://books.google.com/ngrams

Facebook Home

Rumors of a Facebook Phone have been floating around for years, and last week, Zuckerberg announced the closest thing so far: Facebook Home. Although it’s not a complete phone, Home is an Android overlay that makes Facebook and mobile sharing the priority for your phone. The HTC First is the go-to device for this, but it’ll also be available for free download for Android phones starting on April 12th.

http://www.facebook.com/home

Fusion Radar: April 3, 2012

April 3rd, 2013 - 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.

JsPerf

Using jsPerf, developers can create and share test cases that compare the performance of difference JavaScript snippets by running benchmarks. Users can also browse through tests created by other people, and create their own fork of the test.

http://jsperf.com/

PaperTrail

Adobe Fireworks is a useful tool for developers and designers, but it’s somewhat limited in the file formats it exports. This tool is a simple, fast, and efficient way to export Fireworks pages and states as SVGs, Sprites, CSS declarations, and a few other formats.

Fireworks Export

Motion-Xray

App development can be tricky because a lot of developers use simulators to quickly view and test features for mobile devices. Motion-Xray makes on-device testing simpler and faster; it’s an iOS inspector that runs inside your app, so you can debug and analyze from your device.

Motion-Xray

RiverTrail

RiverTrail’s goal is to enable data-parallelism in web applications. What this means is that it allows JavaScript developers to take advantage of multiple CPU cores and vector instructions within the boundaries of familiar JS programming.

RiverTrail

REST CookBook

The RESTful CookBook is a compilation of “recipes” on how to deal with some of the issues API programmers deal with when they’re trying to create RESTful APIs. The site is full of detailed answers to some of the most common REST questions, and users can also contribute content.

http://restcookbook.com/

Superhero.js

Maintaining a big JavaScript code base isn’t easy, and instructions on how to do so are scarce. Superhero.js is a site that has compiled all the best articles they’ve found on the topic, including everything from organizing your JS projects to predictions of what’s coming next for JavaScript.

http://superherojs.com/

HexColorTool

HexColorTool is a precise way of adding black and white to a particular hexidecimal color. Simply give the site your color’s code, tell it to lighten or darken it by a certain percentage range, and it does the work for you, including giving you the new hexidecimal codes.

http://hexcolortool.com/

Coding Videogame

Hakitzu, a new game from Kuato Studios, was recently released; it’s another versus fighter game, and may not have attracted much attention if it weren’t for the idea behind the game: it’s designed to teach its players code. Instead of using a controller to play, you have to type in command lines to move your characters. The idea is that kids who play the game will be learning JavaScript without even realizing it.

Hakitzu

Lapka

Lapka is a little device that appeals to both innovators and really paranoid people. (You’d be surprised at how often those two categories overlap). It’s an environment monitor you connect to your iPhone, to which it delivers data like radiation readings, EMF fields, and whether or not your food is organic.

https://mylapka.com/

CubeSensors

If you like the sound of Lapka, but aren’t really that concerned about radiation or EMF fields, you may want to look into CubeSensors instead. These also submit data to your phone, but deliver information you may find more useful: temperature, humidity, noise levels, air quality, and barometric pressure.

http://cubesensors.com/