The Objective Blog

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Fusion Radar: February 5, 2014

February 5th, 2014 - 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.

GitPoints

GitPoints is a new way to encourage code collaboration between developers and improve code culture at your company. It gamifies coding by syncing with GitHub and giving points and badges for reviewing code, sending pull requests, increasing the code coverage, etc. It then displays the points, badges, and progress on an online dashboard accessible by everyone on your team.

GitPoints

Multicolr Search Lab

The Multicolr Search Lab is a tool from TinEye that allows you to search for images on Flickr by individual colors — and by multiple colors at once. You select up to five colors and TinEye analyzes millions of photos on Flickr for those hues; you can even type in the exact hex number of your color if you’re looking for something really specific.

Multicolr Search Lab

UX Crash Course

UX (User Experience) design is a term some people tend to throw around without knowing exactly what it means or how it’s different from UI (User Interface) design. Joel Marsh, owner of design site The Hipper Element, wanted to fix that. He posted a brief article every day in January that addressed one element of UX design; linked below is his complete crash course of 31 UX fundamentals.

UX Crash Course

Sizzlepig

Sizzlepig is a powerful tool that enables users to resize multiple photos into multiple sizes all at once. Users create a blueprint that outlines the sizes and formats they need for each image, then Sizzlepig does the rest of the work. It’s also possible to resize images manually after Sizzlepig has finished but before you export your work.

Sizzlepig

Internet Users Ditch “password” as Password, Upgrade to “123456”

SplashData, a maker of password management software, analyzed passwords leaked by hackers in 2013 and revealed the 25 most commonly used passwords. It turns out that “123456” was the most popular password last year, surpassing the previous champion (“password”) by over a million instances. The top 25 also included variations of the two, like “123123” and “password1”, in addition to passwords like “sunshine”, “monkey”, and “princess”.

Internet Users Ditch “password” as Password, Upgrade to “123456”

A Really Good Article on How Easy it Is to Crack Passwords

While we’re on the subject of password security, Bruce Schneier, a privacy and security authority, recently published an article about how easy it is to crack even recommended passwords that contain numbers, symbols, and capital letters. He explains a bit about how hackers get into your account, and offers advice on how to make your passwords more secure against the usual cyber attacks.

A Really Good Article on How Easy it Is to Crack Passwords

The Zebra

The Zebra is a site designed to make getting car insurance quotes easy (and spam-free). You just give The Zebra the most basic information–your car’s make, model and year, and your zip code–and it produces dozens of results. Although the quotes aren’t always 100% correct, it’s a great way to explore the car insurance options near you without giving out any personal information.

The Zebra

Perfecting the Art of Sensible Nonsense

Programmers and cryptologists have generally thought that the idea of obfuscating computer programs (masking programs’ inner workings so that people could use them without being able to figure out how they work) was impossible. Recently, however, a team of cryptologists, scientists, and other researchers developed what they think is the first step towards true obfuscation. Simply put, they break the programs into small pieces (like a jigsaw puzzle), and then introduce random elements that make each individual piece look meaningless. So as long as you have prior knowledge of the program and run it in the intended way, the randomness cancels out and the pieces fit together to compute the correct output.

Perfecting the Art of Sensible Nonsense

Speaking.io

Speaking.io is a side project by Zach Holman, a GitHub tech speaker. The site has over 20 different articles all about public speaking – from how to begin writing a speech to how to handle the Q&A after the talk. Holman also categorizes the articles into five categories of public speaking: planning out your talk, designing and building  visuals, preparing to speak, delivering, and reflection.

Speaking.io