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.
Flinto
Flinto is a tool you can use to build custom iOS app prototypes quickly and simply. It allows you to create a prototype by linking screens and setting transitions between each screen. It also installs your prototype on your phone’s home screen with a unique icon, so it looks and behaves like a real app before it ever hits the App Store.
Studio for iPhone
Studio is an app (currently available only on iOS) that has been described as the “Instagram of design.” It allows users to create designs (using their own photos as a centerpiece) with features like free shapes, textures, crops, fonts, and photo filters. Something that sets Studio apart from other photo editing apps is that it gives users the ability to take and edit any design from any designer in the Studio community.
Firefox OS Typeface
While many companies tend to carefully guard their style guides, Firefox has actually made their style guide available to anyone online. Not only can you check out the Firefox guidelines for their brand, color palette and typeface, but you can also download and use Fira (their custom font) and the Firefox Stencil PSD.
Arial vs. Helvetica
Don’t spend too long on this site – the constant flickering of text as it rapidly switches back and forth between Arial and Helvetica is bound to give you a headache. However, it is interesting to see just how similar the two fonts are.
Favico.js
Favico.js is an unobtrusive way to catch users’ attention, even when they’re engaged on another tab. Using Favico.js lets you call attention to your favicon with animated badges. These badges have a variety of animation settings and background/text colors.
Solved by Flexbox
Flexbox is a layout mode designed to simplify the arrangement of elements on a page. Solved by Flexbox is a showcase of problems – once difficult or impossible to solve with CSS alone – trivially solved by using Flexbox. Examples include complex grids made simple and user-friendly, intuitive vertical centering, and the Holy Grail layout.
Signal
Signal is a Chrome extension that accesses your email and allows you to edit the content and subject of any email you receive. That means that instead of having a subject line like, “eTicket Itinerary and Receipt Confirmation M6SWG7,” you can edit that to read, “SFO->PDX – 10/14/13 @ 10:20” (the most important information in the email without any fluff). The minds behind Signal are also working on an automated version of this extension, which would scan your emails and automatically alter the subject line to show relevant material from the body of the message.
Signal
Authentication with Sorcery
Sorcery is an almost-magical, super-customizable authentication gem. Although it only offers about twenty methods, it is still full-featured and modular, which means you can choose to enable only the parts you need. It also works at a lower level than other authentication gems, so it leaves it up to you to write the controller and view layers.
Quantcast
Quantcast, besides being the second-biggest name in web trackers, also happens to be an excellent resource for anyone looking for market- or company-specific data. It tracks the biggest sites on the internet, and displays stats like the number of monthly visits a site receives and some demographic information (e.g. gender, education, income, ethnicity, etc.) for those visits.
Second Coming of Java
Java’s had a bit of a rough time since the onset of security problems it had in the 1990s. However, it’s quietly making a comeback as the go-to programming tool and/or foundation for Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and other major websites. The Wired.com article linked below details Java’s comeback, as well as what we can expect to see from Java in the future.