The Objective Blog

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

The Radar: September 30, 2015

September 30th, 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.

Linux in the Browser

Full, root-level access to a Linux box from your mobile phone browser.
Icebergs

React Native

Step outside of your iOS developer comfort zone and you may just find something even better than before—React Native.

Full Article

Basic Design Principles

Roman Mars is obsessed with design….and flags. In this humorous talk, Mars reveals the five basic principles of flag design and shows why he believes they can be applied to just about anything.

Video

Most Expensive Book

How an automatic pricing algorithm on a book about flies got out of hand—$23,698,655.93 to be exact!

Full Article

Noir Films

Open Culture has posted the 5 best noir films in the public domain—from Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street to Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker.

Full Article

Spicy Foods

A huge observational study conducted in China by Harvard researchers suggests that eating spicy foods more often reduces the risk of death.

Full Article

C# Inception

This is a brief overview for using the new Rosyln compiler and C# to analyze .NET code.  The presentation underscores that this allows developers to analyze their code with code much like you can unit test your code with code.

Presentation

Brand Battles

This article chronicles the stories behind five infamous brand battles—how they came to fruition and where they stand today.

Full Article

Style Guides

This explains the reasons why style guides are not only helpful, but are efficient and necessary.

Full Article

ES6 Array Extensions

A lot of new methods are being added to Javascript for creating and manipulating arrays.
Full Article

Picking Passwords

The Ashley Madison hack shows that when users choose predictable passwords, it makes security measures worthless.

Full Article

The Radar: September 23, 2015

September 23rd, 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.

Analytics & Insights for Stripe

One click and you get hundreds of metrics & insights from your Stripe account that you wish Stripe had in the first place.

Baremetrics

23 Must-Follow Design Feeds

This is an eclectic collection of Twitter, Instagram, and RSS feeds as well as great websites and blogs that focus on multiple aspects of art and design.

Full Article

Netflix Introduces Lemur

Netflix has released an open source certificate generation/management tool, called Lemur.

Full Article

To Rebrand, or Not?

Before you go rebranding, you should really evaluate if it is necessary and what you are trying to accomplish. Here’s an example of what NOT to do.

Full Article

Searchable Speech

Will recording every spoken word help or hurt us?

Full Article

Letterspacing Web Type

John D. Jameson shares some solid guidelines for letterspacing web typography to increase readability and aesthetics.

Full Article

Porcupine Programmer

A Directed Acyclic Word Graph (or DAWG) is a way of storing a large number of words, such as the entire dictionary, without taking up much hard drive space. It takes advantage of the fact that most words share some sequence of letters with other words.

Full Article

iOS9

Check out this summary of what’s new for developers in iOS 9.

Full Article

The Radar: September 16, 2015

September 16th, 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.

Thimble Relaunch

Mozilla relaunched Thimble, an online code editor for teaching the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript with a major redesign and a slew of new features.

Full Article

Internet Explained via Emoji

Using emojis, Bill Nye explains how everything is and will continue to be connected to the internet and the explains the need to think differently about how all these things work together.

Video

Largest API Marketplace

Mashape makes it easy to distribute, monetize, manage and consume cloud APIs. They are building a world-class marketplace for cloud APIs, driven by a passionate community of developers from all over the world.

Mashape

Date Picker UI

The in-depth article “UI Mechanics of a Date Picker” breaks down the importance of small details in that little UI widget on your website, the date picker.

Full Article

Symbols in Javascript

Symbols are used to name and identify objects (like the keys in an object), similar to a string. However, it’s not a string, so it doesn’t have the various methods that a String object has.

Full Article

Advanced Routing and Resolves

This brief guide explains the benefits of routing in an Angular application.  Proper routing helps separate logic, promote code reuse, and simplifies debugging.

Full Article

Daily UI Elements

This site gives you inspiration for 100 days straight on how differently you could design elements on websites. A great inspiration resource with fresh ideas.

100 Days UI

Passwords are Passé

A really ineresting an unique appraoch to two factor, zero password authentication using Waltz + Cleff to make your digital life easier.

Waltz   Clef

RITE + Krug

This article explains how the RITE+Krug combination of methods results in better usability testing during development for more agile design.

Full Article

20 Awesome Slack Integrations

This list of awesome bots and integrations for Slack will help with communication, development, productivity and more.

Full Article

Mobile UX Lessons

41% of apps are abandoned after only a single use. Learn what to do early on, to avoid your app from falling victim to this unfortunate statistic.

Full Article

The Radar: September 9, 2015

September 9th, 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.

Digital Privacy

The UN’s new privacy chief, Joseph Cannataci, raises concerns about broken privacy on the Internet and expresses a desire to build a Geneva Convention for the Internet.

Full Article

Object Literals in ES6

Read up on some new Javascript features that will keep your code a little shorter.

Full Article

iPhone Evolution

In honor of the new iPhone 6s, this article outlines the evolution of technology and features of the iPhone from 2007 to today.

Full Article

Typographic Patterns in Emails

If you’re sending email newsletters, then this study is interesting and provides good style defaults for the most aesthetic and readable emails.

Full Article

How Long to Read

How Long to Read is a book search engine that helps you find out how long it will take you to read a particular book and provides reading time data that is tailored to you.

Reading Timer

Work/Life Balance

Are you a “geek” who loves technology? For a programmer, the mad pursuit of solutions seems to be in their DNA. It just may be this inner drive—more so than any cracked whip—that drives technology forward, yet also makes them have a hard time putting their work away and finding balance when they are off the clock.

Full Article

User Interface Design Patterns

User Interface Design patterns are recurring solutions that solve common design problems. Design patterns are standard reference points for the experienced user interface designer. This gallery of UI patterns is useful for those who want to see how other companies approach certain issues.

UI Patterns

Touchscreen Display

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released a 7-inch touchscreen display for only $60.

Full Article

Preventing User Mistakes

Learn the important difference between user slips and user mistakes, as well as how to deal with each one.

Avoiding Unconscious Slips  vs  Avoiding Conscious Mistakes

The Radar: September 2, 2015

September 2nd, 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.

UI Inspiration

Find UI and design inspiration, as well as the code to implement it with this library of posts.

codemyui

Bootcamps to Careers

While dev bootcamps are generally a good thing, more needs to be done to prepare these candidates for successful careers.

Full Article

Are We in a Bubble?

The tech industry is in another bubble. But this time it’s not a financial bubble. It’s a psychological one.

Full Article

Javvy

Learn how to code in java on the go.  Javvy is a gamified app for Android and iOs with 150+ bite-sized, interactive tutorials. Getting started with programming has never been so easy and so much fun!

Javvy

Beziers

This is an informative tutorial on how to more effectively use the bezier tool in Adobe Illustrator to create better curved lines.

Full Article

R.I.P. Flash

Google is making good on its promise to strangle Adobe Flash’s ability to auto-play in Chrome, starting this month.

Full Article

OnHub

Google’s new OnHub is an easy to use router that cures bad WiFi.

Full Article

Google’s New Look

Google has changed a lot over the past 17 years—from the range of their products to the evolution of their look and feel—and they’re changing things up once again.

Full Article

React JS and Flux

This is a tutorial that shows you how to create a simple application using React JS and the Flux design methodology.

Full Article

Fast-forwarding the Web Platform

The problem is not that we are moving too fast with the web platform but that we still lack ways of providing developers easy ways to do basic things. We’re focusing on the wrong stuff. And that is what we need to fix. Wise words by Nicolas Bevacqua.

Full Article

Empty States

This article explains why we should take more time creating empty states in our applications. They are key to user happiness.

Full Article