The Objective Blog

Keep up with what we're thinking, reading, and doing.

The Radar: July 29, 2015

July 29th, 2015 - by Julie Hale - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with design and technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. The 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 Objective.

Anroid Hack

A major flaw in Android phones would let hackers in with just a text message.

Full Article

ZNAPS

Finally… a magsafe power cable for your phone—simple, affordable and convenient.

Znaps

App Design vs. App Development

A worthwhile read on the topic of how app design can hurt app development.

Full Article

Short on Excuses?

You’ll never need to worry about coming up with a reason to work from home again—this site generates excuses for you!

Excuses

Fonts to Avoid

You thought Comic Sans was bad? Here are 10 fonts that may be worse.

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Programming Secrets

This is a list of 39 pointers for programmers on how to better design code and what pitfalls to avoid.

Full Article

Lock It Up

This new app for locks your mac or pc remotely from your iPhone or Apple Watch.

Lock It Up

Olympic Logos

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics logos have been unveiled.

Full Article

JSCity

Visualize Javascript applications as a 3D city. Each building is a function. Their height is based on the number of lines of code, and their base area is based on the number of variables. It’s interesting to see different design decisions, shown as one large skyscraper vs. many small buildings.

JSCity

Flip Phones are Back?

LG brings back the flip phone, but it may never make it to US markets.

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Go Set a Watchman Book Cover

Penguin Publishing reveals its designers’ rejected covers for the new Harper Lee novel, Go Set a Watchman.

Full Article

The Radar: July 22, 2015

July 22nd, 2015 - by Julie Hale - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with design and technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. The 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 Objective.

Do You Get Enough Sleep?

Being efficient and effective during the day requires a good night’s rest. Maria Konnikova has published a really interesting 3 part series on sleep:

Why We Can’t Fall Asleep

The Work We Do While We Sleep

The Walking Dead

Get to the Chopper

A programming language based on Arnold Schwarzenegger one-liners.

ArnoldC

The Risky Business of Onboarding

Getting new customers to engage with your app is a lot harder than most people think.

Full Article

Emoji Pizza Ordering

At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Crispin Porter & Bogusky won the “Integrated” category for emoji ordering. They created a way for people to link their Twitter accounts to their Domino’s account and order a pizza by tweeting the pizza emoji.

Watch Video

Hate Meetings?

Everybody hates (and loves to hate) meetings. This guide suggests a few pointers to making meetings more succinct and effective.

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Coda for iOS

Panic released an update to their portable text editor and file manager, Coda, for iOS.

Coda for iOS

Developments in Mobile Technology

A few things are happening among mobile operating systems that aren’t Android or iOS.

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Maps of Art

These unique maps showcase the most expensive painting in each country around the world.

Full Article

Album Artwork in the Digital Age

Is album artwork still important in the digital age? It may not be the same as it used to be—like seeing the new artwork for the first time on a vinyl new release. But we argue that music and art are intrinsically tied together, and even if it’s digital—it’s still important.

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Car Hacks Seize Control

Several researchers have discovered a way to take control of vehicles through radio broadcast signals into their infotainment modules.  I guess I don’t want that cool high-tech car after all…

Full Article

Web Design: The First 100 Years

This is a comparison between the aerospace and web design fields. Outlines for 3 different directions the web can go from here.

Full Article

The Radar: July 15, 2015

July 15th, 2015 - by Julie Hale - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with design and technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. The 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 Objective.

Java and Flash Vulnerabilities

Density People Counter

Ever wonder how busy your favorite restaurant, the gym or the DMV are right now? Then check out this really cool ecosystem (hardware and software) for monitoring traffic/occupancy levels in real time.

Density

Zeplin

Zeplin works with Sketch to make handing off designs to developers easier. This great collaboration tool generates styleguides and resources, automatically.

Zeplin

Movie Dilema

Do you ever sit down and wonder which Nicholas Cage movie you should watch? This site will solve all your problems.

CageWheel

BFED—The Boring Front-End Developer

We all need a little BFED on our team to keep us grounded. Their practicality ensures sites are funtional and user-friendly, not just pretty.

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S2N

Amazon just released their own (somewhat simplified) implementation of the TLS protocol (SSL), called S2N. It is a much smaller codebase than OpenSSL’s (6000 lines vs 500,000 lines), so it’s much easier to review for security vulnerabilities and much easier to maintain. It will be used in their services soon.

Full Article

Lucky Iron Fish

This company is using innovation to change the world—and is receiving many design awards in the process. All you do is boil it in lemon water for 10 minutes and you can get almost a day’s worth of iron. What a great way to help third world countries (and all of us) solve iron deficiencies. Watch this video.

Lucky Iron Fish

History of Innovation

Take this tour through the history of innovation while enjoy its creative design and fantastic animations.

History of Innovation

Kallithea

This is an open source version of the previously open source (and now paid) repository hosting application Rhodecode. It has features similar to Bitbucket and Github, like code reviews and creating pull requests, except you host it yourself.

Kallithea

Think Fast!

This article shows how to make use of heuristics (mental shortcuts) in digital design for better UX.

Full Article

Tracking & Character Spacing in iOS

This is an explanation of the difference between tracking in Photoshop and character spacing in Sketch, how to convert from one to another, and how to represent it in your code.

Full Article

The Radar: July 8, 2015

July 8th, 2015 - by Julie Hale - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with design and technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. The 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 Objective.

Scrumbot is your Agile Assistant

Simply plug into Slack or HipChat and automatically gather up and summarize project status from your dev team on a daily basis.

Scrumbot

Spotify’s Taste Rewind

Spotify’s latest new feature is a musical time machine that finds music from the past that you might like based on what music you currently like on Spotify.

TasteRewind

The Latest Web Design Tools

A brief review of what’s new in design tools.

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The Dangers of Selfies

Just a friendly reminder from the Russians not to take selfies while on train tracks, with a gun in your hand, or in other dangerous situations.

Full Article

Overcome Stress and Anxiety

This article talks about how successful people beat stress. It’s basically a consistent mindset of being in control of your life and empowered rather than a victim. People with this mindset tend to take action rather than getting overwhelmed and giving up.

Full Article

SVG Patterns

Textures.js is an svg pattern library to help make your data visualizations look nice.

Textures.js

Free OCR

This is a pretty accurate OCR (optical character recognition) application. When tested to read the text from some design files (which were JPGs) instead of re-typing it into the HTML page—it was perfectly accurate every time.

OCR

ImageMagick

This is an efficient tool to resize large images for front-end dev, keeping images responsive to various devices.

Full Article

6 Photography Trends

Based on image download data and usage trends from around the world, iStock by Getty Images has released its 2015 trends report detailing the biggest image trends designers need to know about.

Photography Trends

The Radar: July 1, 2015

July 1st, 2015 - by Julie Hale - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with design and technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. The 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 Objective.

The Great Suspender

This is a Chrome extension that automatically puts unused tabs to sleep, freeing up memory and other system resources.

Chrome Web Store

Touchable Laser Images

A Japanese company called Aerial Burton has developed a laser system that displays images in midair that you can touch. The creators expect to use the new system to build bright, interactive signage and even emergency signs that can display easily visible animated warnings in emergency situations.

Full Article

Own-Mailbox

Check out this upcoming Kickstarter campaign for a personal email server that you run in your house, with all necessary software already installed.

Own-Mailbox

New Input Form Designs

This shows some really cool form and input field designs that will help you WOW your customers.

Full Article

The 10-Minute Marketing MBA

Learn some business school basics without breaking the bank.

Full Article

Create a Content Compass

Read this excerpt from Meghan Casey’s new book, The Content Strategy Toolkit that provides some interesting ideas on how to wrangle and guide a content-heavy project.

Full Article

Atom 1.0

Atom 1.0 has been released. Atom is a desktop editor based on web-technologies.

Full Article