The Objective Blog

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

Fusion Radar: November 26, 2014

November 26th, 2014 - by Objective - 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.

Firefox Developer Edition

Mozilla created a browser specifically for web developers with features like multi-browser debugging, responsive design view, and more.

Firefox Developer Edition

Protected Method Visibility in Ruby

If you’re unsure whether to use protected method visibility in Ruby, this article is for you.

Full article

Badassify Your Terminal

For terminal users, this article is a must-read. It details how to install zsh and plugins for syntax highlighting and extra auto-completion in the terminal.

Full article

Why Google Split Inbox from Gmail

This article covers the battle of feature parity, unused features, and how engineers usually aren’t the target users. Instead of getting rid of Gmail or trying to build Inbox on top of it, Google decided to build the new product in parallel in hopes of making everyone happy.

Full article

Speeding up Capybara Tests

You may need to blacklist some external URLs in order to speed up your Capybara test performance.

Full article

IEVMS

Instructions and command line tools for downloading Windows VMs for Virtual box. Each comes with a specified version of IE (6-11). You can get them all, specify one or more… and if you need your disk space back, you just `rm -rf` your `~/.ievms` directory.

IEVMS

Animated GIFs of Your Screen

LICEcap can capture an area of your desktop and save it directly to an animated .GIF, which is great for support, testing, etc.

LICEcap

Fusion Radar: November 19, 2014

November 19th, 2014 - by Objective - 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.

 

.Net Goes Open Source

Microsoft is open sourcing the .Net framework in an attempt to woo developers and make their technology stack more cross-platform.

Full article

Stop Breaking the Web

From the article’s author: “This article is where I rant about how we are breaking the web, the not-immediately-obvious reasons why we should stop doing this, and how not breaking the web would be a great thing.”

Full article

Ad Slogans

A look at advertising slogans for some popular brands, and how those slogans have changed over the years.

Full article

Charlie

Assuming you’re trying to get to know someone who has a fairly public profile, Charlie might come in handy.

Charlie App

jQuery DotDotDot

This jQuery plugin makes it easy to dynamically add an ellipsis to content that is too long for its HTML container.

DotDotDot

Weather System

Uniform created three different data-powered devices which react to weather conditions.

Full article

Smarter Link Underlines

If you hate having a link’s underline cross the characters’ descenders, this article is for you.

Full article

Tracking Screen Sizes

Set up your Google Analytics to give you better insight into your visitors’ screen sizes and behavior.

Full article

Sublime Text Plugins

Make Sublime Text extra powerful by adding autocomplete, Git commands, a color-picker, and much more.

Full article

The Spam Backstory

Learn a bit of the backstory behind Russia becoming such a spam powerhouse.

Full article

Fusion Radar: November 5, 2014

November 6th, 2014 - by Objective - 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.

SumAll

SumAll is a social media analytics and business dashboard. All in one place, all for free.

SumAll

 3D Worlds With CSS

Keith Clark has done impressive work showcasing what is possible with CSS 3D transforms.

Full article

Failed Startup Post-Mortems

This is excellent information. Very few startups achieve massive success, many more are only moderately successful, and the majority ultimately fail. “Startup Fever” often needs a dose of reality, and this post delivers with more than 100 post-mortems from failed startups.

Full article

Server Monitoring

If you’re responsible for servers (or a cloud environment) you’ll find this blog post helpful. The team at Bitly lists 10 things they monitor to make sure their production environment is healthy.

Full article

PGWeb

If you use PostgreSQL, take a look at PGWeb, a web-based database browser.

PGWeb

VW Find a Match

Volkswagon launched a new site which features a new “matchmaking” capability. Choose the model and options you want and the site tells you how many vehicles match your parameters at the local dealership(s). This is impressive.

VW Site

Support Details

Troubleshooting a website often requires getting some details from the person who’s experiencing a problem with the site. Support Details aims to make that easier.

Support Details