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.
Sqwiggle
Sqwiggle is an online collaboration tool that works a lot like Google Hangouts and Skype. Like its competitors, Sqwiggle lets you participate in group video and group chat, and lets you share files with your team. However, it also includes a few other features that give it an edge over the competition: Sqwiggle has “instant video” which connects you immediately to a member of your team, it sends you periodic updates on your teammates, and it uses much less bandwidth than Hangouts or Skype.
Mondrian
Mondrian is a free, web-based vector app that allows users to create, modify, and export SVG files. Some of its basic editing capabilities include a pen/crayon tool, shape manipulation, typography, and point manipulation.
Why You Need a Daily Prioritization Meeting
In a recent article from 99U, author Scott McDowell stressed the importance of prioritization in the fast-paced, always-switched-on world we live in today. In order to combat the false sense of urgency some of us feel with every new task that appears, McDowell suggested holding a daily prioritization meeting with yourself. He uses a series of questions to determine what is really urgent that day; these include “Do I really have to do this now?”, “Is someone waiting on me for this?”, and “Is this ‘The Most Important Thing’?”.
Why You Need a Daily Prioritization Meeting
Paper
Facebook’s recent app, Paper, is a new way to share and view stories in a simple, gesture-based mobile platform. It displays both stories from your friends and world news, along with other, customizable areas of interest.
Drone
Drone is a cloud-based, continuous-integration platform for Github and Bitbucket that monitors your code for bugs. Although Drone has been around for a while, its creators recently redesigned and rebuilt their software to produce an open-source version of Drone, which integrates with popular open-source technology Docker.
UI Fonts
UI Fonts is a web app that simplifies finding design icons. Instead of hunting for icons, you install UI Font, type a keyword, and the icon appears in place of the text. UI Font’s kit includes 688 icons in 2 different font sets (lined and filled); these icons include everything from the standard (like ‘resize’ or ‘zoom’) to the more obscure (like ‘pizza’ and ‘umbrella’).
UI Fonts
Layoutit!
Layoutit! is a web-based tool used to kickstart web page design layouts. This web app uses a drag-and-drop function to make front-end development with Bootstrap 3 much faster and simpler. It also comes with 3 basic templates you can build on if you want to get even more of a head start.
XVim
XVim, simply put, is a Vim plugin for Xcode. More specifically, XVim makes Xcode behave more like Vim, so developers won’t have to give up any of their Xcode features. File-local and Global marks are supported through XVim, and so are features like motion support, text objects, Ex commands, and yank/put.
The Pleasant Places to Live
In his recent post, Kelly Norton uses aggregate NOAA data to create an interactive map of the US which marks the areas with the nicest weather. Norton defines “pleasant” to be: a mean temperature between 55° F and 75° F, the minimum temperature above 45° F, the max below 85° F, and no significant precipitation. Given these standards, it’s unsurprising that the coastal cities of California–particularly Southern California–scored the highest with up to 183 pleasant days/year. The least pleasant places were a mix of the extremely hot–Reno, NV–and the extremely cold–Clancy, WY. These locations had only about 15 pleasant days/year.
Stripe Updates
Stripe, which has always offered subscription billing, has now implemented a new feature where users can create, retrieve, list, update, and delete multiple subscriptions. Stripe has also recently internationalized its services: it now accepts and converts transactions with 139 different currencies (an increase of 135 from the original 4).