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.
GitHub and Government
GitHub and Government is an effort from GitHub, the world’s largest open source network, to improve national, state, and local governments all over the world by opening them up to anyone with an internet connection. This particular section of the site has success stories of open source, open data, and open government projects.
Inc
Inc – a Mac app and Chrome Extension – gives its users an alternative to internal emails: a clean, collaborative space for all kinds of information. The software was built around the goal of producing useful internal communication – it allows users within a company to share links and notes, get and send notifications, and collect information as a group, all in one place.
Textbook Drone Delivery
Zookal, a textbook rental company in Australia, is experimenting with a new method of delivery: autonomous drones. They’re actually programming pilotless hexacopters to fly to preset GPS coordinates, where the customer will be waiting to pick up their books. They say it cuts down on both the time and cost of delivery, and claim that their program is the first official commercial use of drones in the world.
At.js
At.js is a free “github-like” autocomplete library. Users simply begin typing in any character and At.js does its best to fill in the blanks. You can check out the documentation and examples of the library at work here.
Facebox.io
Facebox is an ideal product for data engineers, product managers, business analysts, or anyone else in digital business. For $35, you get 50 rights-cleared high-res profile pictures to use in presentations, mockups, prototypes, and diagrams. This saves you the trouble of pulling your own images from a Google search or buying photos on expensive stock image sites.
Lulu
Lulu is a new app that combines elements of the “Hot or Not” game from Facebook with a review-oriented site like Yelp. It’s a private network where girls can read and create reviews of guys they know. Although guys have access to the app, they can’t influence the ratings at all: they can only see if they’re being reviewed, or opt out of the app if they want to.
Lulu
Icon Reference Chart
The Icon Reference Chart is exactly what it sounds like: a quick (and highly useful) resource for finding sizes, formats, and other important information about different types of icons. This includes icons for web clips, documents, toolbars, and a few other applications.
VerbalExpressions
VerbalExpressions is a Ruby library that aims to make difficult regular expressions a little easier to handle. The library helps users construct complicated regular expressions by allowing them to use natural language to explain what they want, and then translating that information into a regex.
Square Cash
Square, the company that made accepting credit cards with ordinary mobile phones popular, has come out with a new way to get paid. This time around, there’s no specific hardware involved, and you don’t even have to have a user name. Just send an email to whoever you want to pay, Cc [email protected], and put the amount of money you want to send in the subject line. Square Cash will send you an email asking you to link your debit card for a one-time transfer, and once you have, they’ll email the recipient a link so they can deposit the cash you sent into their bank.
RemoteStorage
This is a quick way to add remote storage to unhosted web apps. More specifically, RemoteStorage allows the unhosted web apps you’re building to use your personal server as cloud storage. That way, you can develop a web app without worrying about hosting or developing the backend for it as you go.