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.
Clever
Clever is an API designed to assist schools with integrating their software and all the online tools they use into one simple system. Companies with a focus on online education – including programs like online grading tools, web-based classes and tutoring, digital textbook delivery, and teacher training programs – partner with Clever; so when schools integrate Clever into their systems, they also get dozens of online educational tools at their fingertips.
Pizza Pie Charts
Pizza is an easy-to-use plugin that helps you build clean, responsive pie charts. Because its main goal was to be super simple, Pizza skips over using JavaScript objects in favor of easy integration via HTML markup and CSS. However, users can still pass JavaScript objects to Pizza if they want to use that option.
Trigger.io
Trigger.io is a development framework designed to enable users to create native mobile apps for multiple platforms from a single codebase. It seems reasonably priced, and has valuable features like cross-platform portability, multi-OS app gallery distribution, and the ability to engage native power and UI. We’ve not yet been impressed with tools like this so hopefully Trigger delivers better on the promise of creating cross-platform native apps.
Storyful Newswire
There were a handful of stories in 2013 about “internet hoaxes.” And a lot of those hoaxes fooled not just the public, but reputable news outlets as well. This is the problem Storyful’s Newswire tool is designed to fix. Media organizations hire Storyful to research and provide them with source information and solid facts behind popular online content. They can then use this information to find and interview sources and further explore the validity of the content.
Storyful Newswire
ColorHexa
ColorHexa is an online tool that provides you with all the information you’d ever want to know about any given HEX color. For example, clicking on a random green color produced information like the hex (#47e53a), RGB and CMYK values, along with a color description (Bright lime green), and swatches of complementary, triadic, analogous, and tetradic colors. And all that is just part of the information ColorHexa provides in a simple, clean format for hundreds of HEX colors.
The Dialect Map Quiz
A few months ago, we talked about Joshua Katz’ dialect map of the USA. It looks like a few editors from the New York Times drew inspiration from his studies, because this interesting – and often quite accurate – Dialect Quiz based on Katz’ work has been gaining popularity online lately.
UI Names & Faces
Here are two great resources for web designers. Instead of pulling random images off of Facebook, or coming up blank while you’re making up test user names, you can go to UI Faces and UI Names, which offer you those things for free. UI Faces in particular offers a wide variety of social network icon photos in a variety of sizes and shapes (square vs. circle).
Find photos and graphics
This SiteBuilderReport article has a handful of other resources graphic designers can use in their work. It includes sites where you can find things like copyright-free photos, thousands of consistently-designed icons, and even free or inexpensive designs, textures, and patterns.
Too Many Social Networks
The real title of this ReadWrite article is, “Are There Too Many Social Networks?” And judging by the article’s main points and the majority of the comments below the article, the answer is a resounding “yes.” Selena Larson, the article’s author, first discusses the booming growth of social networks. There are new social networks popping up all over the place, like Jelly, the Forbes social network (called Stream), and so many others. Larson also examines the possible causes of this social network explosion (the saturation of mobile is a likely culprit) and what we can do to consolidate.
Intel’s Make It Wearable
Intel recently introduced what they call the Intel Edison development board. It has some nice specs, including an Intel Quark processor with two cores and integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth all encapsulated in an SD card-sized board. However, it seems that the minds at Intel aren’t quite sure what to do with it, which could be why they’re having a Make It Wearable contest. Intel wants to see what innovators and engineers can do with small, powerful technology and the motivation of recognition and a few thousand dollars.