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.
Nitrous.io
Nitrous.io is a cloud-based development platform that allows developers to access their development environment from any computer, anywhere. Although it doesn’t offer a production environment, it does take away the pain of setting up dev environments. It allows users to code online with popular languages and frameworks like Node.js, Ruby on Rails, or Python; and it even has a collaborative coding feature.
Saga
Saga is an automatic “lifelogging” app that tracks your location and distance traveled each day to create a log of your day-to-day life. If you choose to let Saga post to Facebook automatically, the app tracks you wherever you take your phone, and posts status updates about your activities. It also integrates with fitness apps like FitBit or RunKeeper, as well as other apps like GoodReads and Mood Panda.
Oyster Books
There’s Netflix for movies and shows, Spotify for music, and now there’s Oyster, a subscription service for ebooks. Users pay $9.95 a month for access to hundreds of thousands of ebooks, making Oyster more or less a virtual (for profit) library. It’s a service that shows a lot of promise, but seems a little underdeveloped for now – their collection of books is relatively small, and so far Oyster is only available on Apple’s mobile devices.
Duolingo
Duolingo is an online language-learning tool that offers specialized courses for speakers of one particular language to learn another. Duolingo is free, since the courses are created by volunteers who are fluent in both the language being taught and the language spoken by their students.
The Social Media Design Blueprint
“The Ridiculously Exhaustive Social Media Design Blueprint” is the full title of this infographic, and it seems pretty accurate. Specs include border, gap, and image sizes (all in pixels) on social media sites ranging from Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn and Pinterest.
The Social Media Design Blueprint
Google Maps for Business
Google Maps for Business is a collection of Maps-based tools that helps you and your customers visualize your businesses’ data. These tools do everything from coordinating the movements of mobile teams outside the office to layering your own data on top of Google’s images to create maps relevant to your business. It’s also available to developers building location-based apps, and enables geocoding for your business.
Optimizing UI Icons
This article is all about UI icons – the theory behind them, the different types out there, and how to optimize them for faster consumer recognition. The author of the article even put together her own study of lined vs. filled icons, so she could determine which type were easier for people to recognize.
JCPenney’s Logo Change(s)
JCPenney is changing its logo–again. For anybody not keeping track, that’s three times in the last three years. The article linked below describes how the brand has tried to change its image since 2010 and the disastrous results of their attempted rebranding. It’s worth reading, at the very least as a cautionary tale.