The Objective Blog

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

The Radar: June 24, 2015

June 24th, 2015 - by Julie Hale - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with design and technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. The 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 Objective.

The Unexpected Benefits of Anxiety

Don’t be so quick to hate anxiety. Learn how appropriate levels of anxiety can actually improve performance, help you make better decisions, and activate your ninja powers.

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Charles Eames

Quotes by the legendary designer Charles Eames and his philosophy on creativity and education.

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Just Wear Headphones

Open office plans have their benefits, but here are some arguments against it.

Full Article

What is Code?

This is a great, in-depth article (mini-book) about the ins and outs of code.

Full Article

RunC

RunC is an open container standard that is being developed by Docker, CoreOS, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

runC

WebAssembly

WebAssembly is a spec for more efficient code that the browser can read. Some people are worried that it’ll reduce the transparency of the web, since regular Javascript is pretty human-readable, whereas WebAssembly will not be. However, there are plans to allow the Javascript source code to be sent along with WebAssembly, so site’s source code can still be readable.

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ROT—Redundant, Out-of-Date and Trivial Content

How much is your content costing your company?

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The Joys of Printing

This is a visual reminder that printing is easy and nothing ever goes wrong.

Printing is Easy

Presidential Candidates’ Logos

Enjoy a hilarious but insightful design critique of Presidential Candidates’ logos.

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The Radar: June 17, 2015

June 17th, 2015 - by Julie Hale - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with design and technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. The 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 Objective.

The Trend of Subscription Based Services

This article shares 8 great subscription based services that will make your life easier.

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The 7-Step-Paul-Rand Logo-Test

Do you have a strong logo, or a weak one? Take this test and find out. (And it’s Paul Rand, not Rand Paul!)

Logo Test

Airbnb Pricing Recommendation Tool For Renters

This pricing recommendation tool suggests how users should price their rent based on an algorithm. People who are within 5 percent of the suggested price are way more likely to rent their rooms.

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Get a Book a Day for Free

Every day, Packt Publishing has one of their software-related books available to download for free. Someone wrote a script that runs in the background on your computer that will automatically download the day’s freebie.

Free Books

Art Installation: Paula Scher’s, “Philadelphia Explained”

Paula Scher collaborates with students at her alma mater, the Tyler School of Art, to make a handpainted map which spans the floors and walls in the school’s 2,100 sq. ft. gallery

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Handwriting in a Digital Age

Handwriting.io is an api for rendering handwritten copy. It has many uses for both developers and businesses alike.

Handwriting.io

Easy on the eyes

This mobile reading app automatically filters out blue light in the app as it gets later in the night. “Studies show that nighttime reading on devices that emit blue light can suppress our bodies’ production of melatonin, keeping us awake and making us less alert the next morning. Lumin reduces the blue light coming from your screen as the day turns into night.”

Lumin

What is Code? (The condensed version)

This article is a summarization of a 38,000-word article on Bloomberg that attempted to explain code, but took too long to do it.

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Drones and Cheating Students

They will be using drones to detect students that are cheating on China’s national college entrance exam.

Full Article

World’s Largest Vector Icon Collection

Streamline version 2.0 now includes 4000 vector icons.

Streamline Icons

The Radar: June 10, 2015

June 10th, 2015 - by Julie Hale - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with design and technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. The 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 Objective.

Is your website optimized for mobile?

The mobile revolution isn’t over. Be ahead of the curve by not only building a mobile-friendly site, but also understanding consumers’ changing behavior and expectations. In short, you have to infuse your marketing strategy with a “mobile mindset.”

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Mobile-Friendly Test

Use this test to see if your webpage is mobile friendly, as judged by Google. It also provides resources to help you improve your site if it is not.

Test

The 4 Types of Productivity Styles

Interesting read on productivity styles, how to identify them and tools that can help each type.

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How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality?

This is a six question test to see if you can tell the difference between 128kbps, 320kbps, and uncompressed audio.

Take the Test

Next Version of OS X

Apple announced their next version of OS X, to be called El Capitan. The new OS includes, among other things, pinned tabs in Safari (finally).

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Renewable, Clean, Cheap Energy

These giant kites use the jet stream winds up to 3,300 feet in the air to produce 3 times more power than a wind turbine.

Full Article

SaaS Analytics for Stripe

Baremetrics is an analytics program that provides valuable metrics for your stripe account.

Baremetrics

GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

GitTorrent allows you to host git repositories via BitTorrent, so there isn’t a single server that everyone downloads from. The author also proposes using the BitCoin blockchain to keep track of which user claimed a username first, so your git repository can be associated with a username without having a centralized site to keep track of everyone’s logins.

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The Radar: June 3, 2015

June 3rd, 2015 - by Julie Hale - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with design and technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. The 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 Objective.

EmailHooks

This is a SAAS based tool for sending dynamic emails triggered by Stripe events.

EmailHooks

Rubocop

How to integrate rubocop into your development workflow to make your code cleaner (or to keep it clean).

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Read and Understand Code Faster

Fira Code is a font that extends Mozilla’s popular Fira Mono font.  By making use of ligatures this font combines common character sequences that represent single logical tokens into one character.

Fira Code

Huggable: A Robot for Pediatric Cancer Wards

Huggable is a stuffed animal robot with phone app placed inside it so it can emotionally connect with young cancer patients. It’s primary objective is to make sure that the children feel comfortable.

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JSBlocks

This is a new Javascript MVC framework with a syntax like Angular, but is faster than both Angular and React. It also gives clear and concise debugging output. JSBlocks looks like it has some nice features and a small learning curve, but with so many similar projects already out there, I’m not sure if developers are willing to pick up yet another one.

JSBlocks

The Internet Revolution: Third Wave

Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, explains the evolution of the internet and how it is about to change again. Get ready, the third wave is here.

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Font Solutions

Fontstand is a Mac app that lets you try fonts for free or rent them for a month.

Fontstand

Need Heat?

Host a cloud server in your home and get free heating.  It is called the Nerdalize eRadiator. (Oh, but you’ve got to move to the Netherlands first.)

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