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.
Project Naptha
Naptha is a Google Chrome plugin that allows users to select, copy, translate, edit, and even delete text found in images. Ordinarily, it’s impossible to perform any of those functions on text found in comics, document scans, photographs, infographics, memes, etc. However, Naptha helps Chrome identify and then read text in images, allowing us to highlight and interact with it as though it were plaintext on a page.
Velocity
Velocity is a jQuery plugin that claims to be the best of jQuery, jQuery UI, and CSS transitions combined. It re-implements all of $.animate()’s features to produce significantly better performance (making Velocity also faster than CSS animations), and it includes several new features to improve animation workflow. These new features include tools like color animation, transforms, loops, easings, class animation, and scrolling.
One Startup’s Struggle to Survive
This article from Wired is a long editorial piece that details the struggles of Boomtrain, a small startup in San Francisco. The article explores multiple viewpoints–from the founders to developers to investors–and is worth reading, especially for anyone interested in entrepreneurship.
One Startup’s Struggle to Survive the Silicon Valley Gold Rush
Digital Shadow
Although Digital Shadow is a promotional piece for the new video game Watch Dogs, it can be a bit scary when you see how easy it is for the site to grab and analyze your info on Facebook. Your “Digital Shadow” shows you the words you most frequently use, the friends you view (and who views you), and even tries to guess your password based on the information available on your profile.
How the Internet Works
This article (the full title of which is, “How the Internet Works and Why It’s Impossible to Know What Makes Your Netflix Slow”) is an in-depth but surprisingly understandable explanation of how the internet gets from its origin as a pile of fiber optic cables and servers all the way to you, the end user. It also touches on and briefly explains some of the “net neutrality” arguments that have been making headlines recently.
Endless
Endless is an iOS app that sends users interesting and unusual articles that educate them about the world around them. Some of the articles are random, and some are hand-picked by the team at Studio March (the creators of Endless).
The User is Drunk
“The User is Drunk” is a great video that takes just 4 minutes to explain what UI is (and what it is not), and how to build the best one possible. The video’s creators, the team over at Squareweave, suggest thinking of your users as drunks – they’re not paying much attention to their surroundings, they often need you to repeat what you’ve said, and although they’re impatient and sometimes pedantic, they aren’t stupid.
Google Street View’s Historical Imagery Feature
Google’s latest upgrade to Street View enables users to go back in time a few years and see how a given street or area has changed. The update rolled out just a week ago, and is being hailed as “Google Time Travel”. Viewers have used it to check out how rapid urban development has changed their city or how natural disasters have affected their area.
Google Street View’s Historical Imagery Feature
Nerdy NFC Tags
Kevin Purdy, from IT World, shared the unique uses he found for a cheap set of NFC tags in his recent article, “How to Nerd Out with NFC Tags.” While he admitted that NFC tags aren’t terribly useful in general (he described them as “trickery for trickery’s sake”), he still found a few ways to make them work for him; these include a tag on his bedside table that sets his morning alarm and turns off notification volumes when he touches his phone to the tag, and a tag on his bicycle that starts up a fitness app that tracks his miles.
14 Google Tools You Didn’t Know Existed
Here’s a quick, fairly recent article that outlines some of Google’s lesser-known tools. We’ve actually used our fair share of these, including the Webmaster Tools, Google Think Insights, and Google Trends. It’s worth reading through, even just as a quick refresher.