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.
Regular Expressions 101
Regular Expressions 101 – or RegEx101 – is an online tester for regular expressions in JavaScript, PHP, PCRE, and Python. It breaks down the regular expression you supply and explains it piece by piece. It also offers suggestions when it finds an error, and supplies a quick reference for basic and advanced strings.
Mailrox
Mailrox is an online tool for web developers and designers that makes building HTML emails simpler. You upload your design and then slice your layout into individual pieces – text boxes, images, etc. Then you add any text or custom HTML and export your email template to services like MailChimp and Campaign Monitor. Mailrox also lets team members collaborate while building emails, and create, apply and update CSS text styles quickly in Mailrox’s text editor.
Mousetrap
Mousetrap is a simple Javascript library designed to handle keyboard shortcuts in JS. It’s lightweight (at just 1.9kb minified and gzipped) and includes support for keypress, keydown, and keyup events on specific keys, keyboard combinations, and key sequences.
Lego Calendar
Vitamins is a “design and invention studio” that doesn’t just innovate for its clients. They’ve come up with a creative way to keep track of projects both visually and digitally. Their Lego Calendar tracks projects, hours, and people in their company. To update project statuses, their designers snap the differently-colored legos (representing different projects) and individual lego people (one for each person on the project) into place, take a photo, and email it to their calendar software. The software behind the calendar then uses the image to update their digital calendar.
Lego Calendar
StackEdit
StackEdit is a free, open-source Markdown editor that stores your documents in the local browser storage – which means those documents are saved locally and are accessible offline. It also syncs with Google Drive and Dropbox so all your documents can be found in one place, and it can publish your Markdown doc on GitHub, Gist, Google Drive, Dropbox, or any other SSH server.
iSketchnote
The iSketchnote iPad cover is marketed as a gadget that fuses the natural experience of pen on paper with the power and potential of an iPad. To use it, you place your paper or sketchbook on top of the open iSketchnote cover. The sensors in the iPad cover view and recreate your sketches in real time on your iPad as you draw with an iSketchnote pen.
Alfred Workflows
To explain Alfred Workflows, you first have to know what Alfred 2 is. Put simply, Alfred 2 is an app- and file-launching utility that uses hotkey commands. It’s like Spotlight, but more advanced. Alfred Workflows is a collection of commands that do everything from converting HEX/RGB/HSL colors, to filtering keywords in Dash, to launching iOS Simulator without launching Xcode.
The Voice of Siri
This article on The Verge delves into the process of recording, dissecting, and synthesizing TTS (text to speech) voices like Siri. It is a complicated process, to say the least – not only do voice actors have to record hundreds of thousands of words, they have to say many of them several times with different inflections. The article describes the whole TTS system and offers a few interesting videos to supplement readers’ understanding of the process.