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.
24 Pull Requests
If you’ve ever benefited from the open source projects over at Github, ’tis the season to say ‘thanks’ to the developers and maintainers of those projects. 24 Pull Requests is a yearly initiative that encourages developers to send a pull request every day in December till Christmas.
Zeus
If waiting for rake and Rails commands makes you crazy, you’ll probably be interested in installing Zeus. It’s a simple tool that lets you boot any Rails app in under a second.
Honeybadger
Here’s another useful service for Rails: Honeybadger’s goal is to update the way we log and fix errors. Not only is it faster than other error-reporting tools, but it also offer SMS alerts, Github integration, Syntax Highlighting, and organization tools for you and your team.
MailCatcher
MailCatcher (obviously) catches your mail, and then things get good: it runs a simple SMTP server that displays it in a web interface. It also can send HTML for analysis, offers command line options to override the default SMTP/HTTP IP and port settings, and lists attachments and allows separate downloading of parts.
https://github.com/sj26/mailcatcher
A!ertifyjs
Speaking of alerts, Alertify is an unobtrusive customizable JavaScript notification system that also includes a callback parameter handling both OK and Cancel button clicks, as well as chaining (which allows queued dialogs).
http://fabien-d.github.com/alertify.js/
Apps Funder
If you’ve had a tough time getting enough attention on KickStarter, Apps Funder is something you’re going to want to check out. Not only do app builders have the chance to fund their app’s development here, but funders also receive rewards and revenue shares.
Eye-Popping Pumpkin
We’re about a week late with this one (since Thanksgiving was a little while ago), but we still enjoyed the innovation and simplicity of Garrett Winther’s “iPhone Eye-Popping Pumpkin”. With an old pneumatics kit, an iPhone and Arduino, Garrett conceptualized, built, and programmed a wirelessly-controlled eye-popping pumpkin in an hour.
http://labs.ideo.com/2011/12/05/one-hour-prototype-iphone-eye-popping-pumpkin/
Staples’ In-Store 3D Printing
It seems like we’re constantly talking about 3D printers on our blog, and maybe we are – but hey, we’ll stop talking about them when they stop being so cool. Staples seems to share our affinity for them, since they’re starting to offer customers the opportunity to upload their 3D designs to Staples’ website, and then pick up the printed objects (or have them shipped).
http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/30/tech/innovation/staples-3-d-printing/index.html
Droidfooding at Facebook
After years of giving their employees iPhones, Facebook’s made the switch over to Droids, in an effort to get employees downloading and using its apps for Google’s OS.