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Fusion Radar: December 18, 2013

December 18th, 2013 - by marissa - Salt Lake City, Utah

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.

Lookback

Lookback is an analytics tool that allows iOS developers to see how people use and interact with their apps. Once you install Lookback’s SDK, you can send your app to test users, who then select when and how they’re recorded to provide you with feedback. More specifically, Lookback can record the screen, front-facing camera, all touch interactions, sounds (via the microphone), and more; and once the recording is complete, Lookback uploads it to your account for viewing and analysis.

Lookback

CommandLineFu

CommandLineFu is a neat resource for discovering and sharing useful command-line tips.

CommandLineFu

Elementary OS

The creators of Elementary OS wanted a Linux OS that was beautiful as well as usable, and that focus on design has made it “the Apple of Linux OSes,” according to one Wired article.

Elementary OS

Explainshell

Explainshell is a tool that lets users type in a command-line and view what each portion of the command does. It’s a quick, well-designed way to look up commands rather than searching through Linux man pages.

Explainshell

Screenhero

Screenhero is a free app that allows two people to collaboratively share one computer screen. Although there are a lot of other resources to share screens out there, like Screenleap, Join.me, and even Skype, Screenhero is the first one we’ve seen that allows both parties to click, type, and explore simultaneously.

Screenhero

What Screens Want

What Screens Want is an insightful, lengthy exploration by designer Frank Chimero of the past, present, and future of digital design. The article, which is an adaptation of Chimero’s talk at Build 2013, uses a variety of resources to explore what it means to natively design for screens. Although it doesn’t offer a lot of concrete answers, What Screens Want proposes a lot of good questions about what good design should and shouldn’t do, and what it might do for us in the future.

What Screens Want

Ngrok

Ngrok is a tunneling reverse proxy that captures and analyzes all traffic over the secure tunnel it establishes for later inspection, replay, and analysis. It enables users to accomplish a few unique tasks: temporarily sharing websites that are only running on a development machine, demoing an app without deploying it, and running networked services on machines that are firewalled off from the Internet.

Ngrok

Sprite Cow

Sprite Cow is a free resource that helps you get the background position, width and height of sprites within a spritesheet. You simply click or click and drag to select sprites, and then Sprite Cow produces a few lines of copyable CSS for you to use.

Sprite Cow

@NeedADebitCard

“Please quit posting pictures of your debit cards, people,” reads @NeedADebitCard’s Twitter account. This account is dedicated to retweeting photos users post of their own debit cards, presumably to teach them a lesson. They don’t produce any original content because they don’t need to; every couple of days, another clueless Twitter user will post a photo of their card, sometimes including the security code number in the text.

@NeedADebitCard