The Objective Blog

Keep up with what we're thinking, reading, and doing.

Fusion Radar: February 26, 2014

February 26th, 2014 - 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.

SocialRank

SocialRank is a Twitter analytics service that tells you more about who your Twitter followers are. In addition to offering monthly reports on all followers, SocialRank also identifies your most valuable, most engaged, and best followers on Twitter. The service also offers a paid option that produces daily and weekly reports, plus demographic and geographic data.

SocialRank

Wolfram Language

The Wolfram Language is a highly symbolic, knowledge-based programming language that Stephen Wolfram has been developing for the past 30 years. Although the complex language has not been fully released, you can check out Stephen Wolfram’s preliminary version or his video to learn more about it.

Wolfram Language

Should I Use a Carousel?

According to the authors, the answer to this question is no. Check out ShouldIUseACarousel.com for stats and other reasons why they believe carousels are not a good idea for your site.

Should I Use a Carousel?

Mooshimeter

Mooshimeter is a “smart” multimeter that works as a wireless extension of your smartphone. For anyone not familiar with the term, a multimeter is an electronic measuring tool that is a combination of an ammeter, voltmeter, and ohmmeter. They’re used to measure electrical quantities like frequency, capacitance, and temperature. The Mooshimeter is a step up from traditional multimeters since it publishes its readings directly to your phone, creating graphs and displaying quantities as it goes.

Mooshimeter

ArnoldC

ArnoldC is a programming language based on the one-liners of Arnold Schwarzenegger. In ArnoldC, basic keywords are replaced with quotes from different Schwarzenegger movies; for example, “False” becomes “I lied” and “MinusOperator” is “Get Down”. And, of course, “Return” becomes “I’ll be back.”

ArnoldC

Waygo

Waygo is an iPhone app that allows you to instantly translate Chinese. Unlike the Google Translate app, you don’t have to have an internet connection for Waygo to work. You just point your phone at whatever needs translating and Waygo shows you the translation and pronunciation of the Chinese symbols.

Waygo

Selfiecity

Selfiecity is a study of selfies in five different cities around the world (Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York, and São Paulo). The study displays the demographics of people taking selfies, along with their poses and expressions; this includes an analysis of head-tilt angles and the degree to which people smile.

Selfiecity

RandomUser

RandomUser is a free API and Photoshop extension that generates random user profiles, complete with photo, name, and email address. All photos are copyrighted under a Creative Commons license, and are legal to use as placeholders in web mockups.

RandomUser

Things that are cheaper than WhatsApp

In light of the $19 billion Facebook acquisition of WhatsApp, someone created a Tumblr full of things that are cheaper than WhatsApp. This includes the Large Hadron Collider ($6.5 billion), the Burj Khalifa ($1.5 billion), and the American Revolution ($2.4 billion, adjusting for inflation).

Things that are cheaper than WhatsApp

The 3Things Lecture Series

February 20th, 2014 - by Objective - Salt Lake City, Utah

3Things Lecture SeriesWe’re excited to announce a new lecture series that we’re launching, called 3Things! The format for each event will include 3 brief presentations (~20min each) given by industry experts whom we invite to present.

The lecture series will cover a wide range of topics including marketing, technology, design, branding, management, entrepreneurship, and more. Naturally the event also provides opportunities to network and meet others within the industry as well.

Our first event is Tuesday night and will feature presentations on marketing topics, so please check out this flyer and RSVP if you’re interested in attending. We’d love to see you there.

Fusion Radar: February 19, 2014

February 19th, 2014 - 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.

Structure

The Structure Sensor is the first mobile 3-D scanner. It clips onto your iPad and projects lasers in the form of infrared dots onto objects and spaces around you. Then Structure records the pattern of those “dots” onto photos from your iPad’s camera to create 3-D renderings of objects. It also allows users to play augmented reality games and create apps that interact with real-world objects.

Structure

Bup

Bup is an efficient file backup system that uses the git repository format, along with its own tools, to make backing up large files simpler. It’s capable of doing fast incremental backups of virtual machine images; it uses a rolling checksum algorithm (similar to rsync) to split files into chunks so that only changes are backed up.

Bup

SlickLogin

SlickLogin — which was acquired by Google just 5 months after launch — is a security startup with a unique, sound-based login system. In order to verify a user’s identity and log them in, a website plays a unique, almost inaudible sound through your computer’s speakers. An app on your smart phone would then pick up the sound, analyze it, and send your credentials back to the site’s server, logging you in.

SlickLogin

Peek User Testing

Peek is a new site usability testing program that records site visitors’ questions, reactions, and activity as they explore your site. Peek then sends you the video recording so you can analyze and improve your site’s performance. And since it’s still in beta, it’s currently free to use.

Peek

Forgotify

Forgotify is a site dedicated to exposing the 4 million songs on Spotify that have never been listened to. Site visitors just click the “Start Listening” button, and Forgotify begins playing one of the forgotten songs — no Spotify download or account needed.

Forgotify

Customer.io

Customer.io is an online platform businesses can use to manage communications with their clients. It has a few cool features, including the ability to send emails only to particular segments, and to automatically send customers emails when they leave a chat session. Customer.io also offers customer analytics services that include email performance stats and on-site user behavior data.

Customer.io

Hemingway App

Hemingway is an online tool that analyzes your writing and works with you to create a clear, concise draft. It highlights sentences it thinks are too long, as well as adverbs you can remove, uses of passive voice, and words or phrases that have simpler substitutes.

Hemingway App

GitFixUm

GitFixUm is a fairly comprehensive guide that describes how to undo, fix, or remove commits in GitHub. It’s a self-described “choose-your-own-adventure” guide that asks users a series of questions before directing them to the section of the guide that can help them with their problem.

GitFixUm

Waterlogue

Tinrocket, a development company known for their photo editing apps, has released another app that’s getting a lot of attention. Waterlogue is their new iOS app that transforms mundane cell phone pics into beautiful watercolors. These watercolors come in a variety of styles, including a “rainy day” look and a luminous option.

Waterlogue

Broccoli

Broccoli is the newest JavaScript-based framework for building applications that run in your browser. This fast, reliable asset pipeline supports constant-time rebuilds and compact build definitions. It’s a lot like Sprockets, except that it isn’t tied to Rails and uses more modern architecture.

Broccoli

Fusion Radar: February 12, 2014

February 11th, 2014 - 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.

Sqwiggle

Sqwiggle is an online collaboration tool that works a lot like Google Hangouts and Skype. Like its competitors, Sqwiggle lets you participate in group video and group chat, and lets you share files with your team. However, it also includes a few other features that give it an edge over the competition: Sqwiggle has “instant video” which connects you immediately to a member of your team, it sends you periodic updates on your teammates, and it uses much less bandwidth than Hangouts or Skype.

Sqwiggle

Mondrian

Mondrian is a free, web-based vector app that allows users to create, modify, and export SVG files. Some of its basic editing capabilities include a pen/crayon tool, shape manipulation, typography, and point manipulation.

Mondrian

Why You Need a Daily Prioritization Meeting

In a recent article from 99U, author Scott McDowell stressed the importance of prioritization in the fast-paced, always-switched-on world we live in today. In order to combat the false sense of urgency some of us feel with every new task that appears, McDowell suggested holding a daily prioritization meeting with yourself. He uses a series of questions to determine what is really urgent that day; these include “Do I really have to do this now?”, “Is someone waiting on me for this?”, and “Is this ‘The Most Important Thing’?”.

Why You Need a Daily Prioritization Meeting

Paper

Facebook’s recent app, Paper, is a new way to share and view stories in a simple, gesture-based mobile platform. It displays both stories from your friends and world news, along with other, customizable areas of interest.

Paper

Drone

Drone is a cloud-based, continuous-integration platform for Github and Bitbucket that monitors your code for bugs. Although Drone has been around for a while, its creators recently redesigned and rebuilt their software to produce an open-source version of Drone, which integrates with popular open-source technology Docker.

Drone

UI Fonts

UI Fonts is a web app that simplifies finding design icons. Instead of hunting for icons, you install UI Font, type a keyword, and the icon appears in place of the text. UI Font’s kit includes 688 icons in 2 different font sets (lined and filled); these icons include everything from the standard (like ‘resize’ or ‘zoom’) to the more obscure (like ‘pizza’ and ‘umbrella’).

UI Fonts

Layoutit!

Layoutit! is a web-based tool used to kickstart web page design layouts. This web app uses a drag-and-drop function to make front-end development with Bootstrap 3 much faster and simpler. It also comes with 3 basic templates you can build on if you want to get even more of a head start.

Layoutit!

XVim

XVim, simply put, is a Vim plugin for Xcode. More specifically, XVim makes Xcode behave more like Vim, so developers won’t have to give up any of their Xcode features. File-local and Global marks are supported through XVim, and so are features like motion support, text objects, Ex commands, and yank/put.

XVim

The Pleasant Places to Live

In his recent post, Kelly Norton uses aggregate NOAA data to create an interactive map of the US which marks the areas with the nicest weather. Norton defines “pleasant” to be: a mean temperature between 55° F and 75° F, the minimum temperature above 45° F, the max below 85° F, and no significant precipitation. Given these standards, it’s unsurprising that the coastal cities of California–particularly Southern California–scored the highest with up to 183 pleasant days/year. The least pleasant places were a mix of the extremely hot–Reno, NV–and the extremely cold–Clancy, WY. These locations had only about 15 pleasant days/year.

The Pleasant Places to Live

Stripe Updates

Stripe, which has always offered subscription billing, has now implemented a new feature where users can create, retrieve, list, update, and delete multiple subscriptions. Stripe has also recently internationalized its services: it now accepts and converts transactions with 139 different currencies (an increase of 135 from the original 4).

The Stripe Blog

Fusion Radar: February 5, 2014

February 5th, 2014 - 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.

GitPoints

GitPoints is a new way to encourage code collaboration between developers and improve code culture at your company. It gamifies coding by syncing with GitHub and giving points and badges for reviewing code, sending pull requests, increasing the code coverage, etc. It then displays the points, badges, and progress on an online dashboard accessible by everyone on your team.

GitPoints

Multicolr Search Lab

The Multicolr Search Lab is a tool from TinEye that allows you to search for images on Flickr by individual colors — and by multiple colors at once. You select up to five colors and TinEye analyzes millions of photos on Flickr for those hues; you can even type in the exact hex number of your color if you’re looking for something really specific.

Multicolr Search Lab

UX Crash Course

UX (User Experience) design is a term some people tend to throw around without knowing exactly what it means or how it’s different from UI (User Interface) design. Joel Marsh, owner of design site The Hipper Element, wanted to fix that. He posted a brief article every day in January that addressed one element of UX design; linked below is his complete crash course of 31 UX fundamentals.

UX Crash Course

Sizzlepig

Sizzlepig is a powerful tool that enables users to resize multiple photos into multiple sizes all at once. Users create a blueprint that outlines the sizes and formats they need for each image, then Sizzlepig does the rest of the work. It’s also possible to resize images manually after Sizzlepig has finished but before you export your work.

Sizzlepig

Internet Users Ditch “password” as Password, Upgrade to “123456”

SplashData, a maker of password management software, analyzed passwords leaked by hackers in 2013 and revealed the 25 most commonly used passwords. It turns out that “123456” was the most popular password last year, surpassing the previous champion (“password”) by over a million instances. The top 25 also included variations of the two, like “123123” and “password1”, in addition to passwords like “sunshine”, “monkey”, and “princess”.

Internet Users Ditch “password” as Password, Upgrade to “123456”

A Really Good Article on How Easy it Is to Crack Passwords

While we’re on the subject of password security, Bruce Schneier, a privacy and security authority, recently published an article about how easy it is to crack even recommended passwords that contain numbers, symbols, and capital letters. He explains a bit about how hackers get into your account, and offers advice on how to make your passwords more secure against the usual cyber attacks.

A Really Good Article on How Easy it Is to Crack Passwords

The Zebra

The Zebra is a site designed to make getting car insurance quotes easy (and spam-free). You just give The Zebra the most basic information–your car’s make, model and year, and your zip code–and it produces dozens of results. Although the quotes aren’t always 100% correct, it’s a great way to explore the car insurance options near you without giving out any personal information.

The Zebra

Perfecting the Art of Sensible Nonsense

Programmers and cryptologists have generally thought that the idea of obfuscating computer programs (masking programs’ inner workings so that people could use them without being able to figure out how they work) was impossible. Recently, however, a team of cryptologists, scientists, and other researchers developed what they think is the first step towards true obfuscation. Simply put, they break the programs into small pieces (like a jigsaw puzzle), and then introduce random elements that make each individual piece look meaningless. So as long as you have prior knowledge of the program and run it in the intended way, the randomness cancels out and the pieces fit together to compute the correct output.

Perfecting the Art of Sensible Nonsense

Speaking.io

Speaking.io is a side project by Zach Holman, a GitHub tech speaker. The site has over 20 different articles all about public speaking – from how to begin writing a speech to how to handle the Q&A after the talk. Holman also categorizes the articles into five categories of public speaking: planning out your talk, designing and building  visuals, preparing to speak, delivering, and reflection.

Speaking.io