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.
Dart
Dart is Google’s open-source programming language specifically designed for writing modern web apps. The language is object-oriented and optionally typed, and its core libraries provide all the basics you’d need for web app engineering. The main advantage Dart has over similar languages like JavaScript is that it is typically much faster.
Mozilla Location Services
Mozilla recently introduced its new Location Services – a pilot program that uses crowdsourcing to collect data about geo-location lookups. Although the project is still in the early stages and not much data is available, Mozilla Location Services will use publicly-observable cell tower and WiFi access point information to provide geo-location services. Since it’s such a young project, anyone can contribute to the data collection process by installing the MozStumbler app on their phone.
Lightbeam
Lightbeam is a Firefox add-on that uses interactive visualizations to enable users to see the first- and third-party sites they interact with on every webpage. Although Lightbeam isn’t incredibly user-friendly, it is interesting (and a little scary) to see all the sites that follow you as you move around online.
Sourcing.io
Sourcing.io is an online service that uses the combined social network of all of your company’s employees to find the best candidates for any software engineering openings you may have. The software analyzes your company’s social graph to provide you with referrals for candidates who fit your needs. You can also sort through the results it provides with filters for language, skills, and location.
Codrops
Codrops is a web design and development blog that publishes articles and tutorials, and provides free demos and downloads of interesting animations and effects. Linked below are two examples of Codrops demos.
Creative Button Styles and Animated Checkboxes
We Don’t Need Daylight Saving Time
Time changes can be tough to adjust to – and they might be even tougher once you visit this site and realize that there’s really no reason for them to exist. We Don’t Need Daylight Saving Time is a site dedicated to educating people on the negative effects of DST, and it even has a petition people can sign to ask the government to eliminate the time change.
We Don’t Need Daylight Saving Time
Sentry
Sentry is a realtime event logging platform designed to log errors and notify you whenever users experience them. Although there are multiple platforms out there that perform similar services, Sentry specializes in monitoring errors and extracting all the information needed to review and correct them without using standard user feedback loops. It’s fairly cheap, and it supports many popular languages and platforms (including Python, JavaScript, Node.js, and others).
Sketch
Sketch is a professional vector graphics design app that offers much of Adobe Creative Suite’s functionality at a fraction of the cost ($50 compared to $1,300). Sketch, however, is geared more towards web and UI design, although some do use it as an alternative to Photoshop. Its best feature may just be the fact that it updates automatically – after the initial $50, every iteration of Sketch is free (while upgrading CS typically costs upwards of $300).
SimpleWebRTC
SimpleWebRTC claims to be the simplest and easiest library available for WebRTC (an open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications capabilities via JavaScript APIs). It’s designed to make building apps with WebRTC easy for front-end developers. There’s an example of what SimpleWebRTC can do here.
3 Essential Tasks
Productivity is a commonly-discussed topic here; we’re always trying to find a way to make our workdays more efficient. 3 Essential Tasks is one method of ensuring that you finish all of your day’s most important to-dos. You start by writing down everything that needs to be done, then analyzing all those tasks and finally deciding on the three most urgent things that have to be done that day. Then put those at the top of the list, and don’t do anything else (no meetings, phone calls, emails, etc.) until those items are complete.
PhoneBloks
PhoneBloks is a quirky solution to a problem most of us have encountered: our phones only last a few years (at most) before they’re completely obsolete. Phonebloks proposes that instead of replacing the whole phone, we just replace components. Their phone is made up of detachable bloks – the camera is one blok, the battery another, the memory yet another – that can be removed and replaced with the newer version whenever you want to upgrade. Although the idea isn’t in production yet, it’s interesting to consider.