The Objective Blog

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

The Radar: December 30, 2015

December 30th, 2015 - by Michelle Mann - 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.

SpeedRead.io

Really cool speed reading software. I tried it out and was able to increase my reading speed quite a bit. Try it out by reading some classics for free.

Visit Site

How to Run Your Company Based on Metrics

Using metrics to run a company removes a lot of guesswork.

Full Article

Top 10 UX Articles of 2015

Most read UX articles on NN/g’s website for the 2015 year.

View Links

Trump Filter

A Chrome extension that removes any content that might mention Donald Trump from the websites you are viewing.

View Extension

Pre-Commit

The pre-commit project is an tool for enhancing your git pre-commit hooks. It basically has a lot of built-in checks so that you don’t have to write them all yourself.

Full Article

Swagger UI

There’s an interface called Swagger for showing different API calls available for an application. The link below is an example of a project that uses Swagger. It also allows you to try out sample API calls and see what the response would be, which is not included in this example. Different request types are color-coded. It’s much more readable than the usual list of API calls.

View Example

DocumentCSS

This live style guide tool allows you to include things like transitions and animations in your style guide.

Full Site

The Radar: December 23, 2015

December 23rd, 2015 - by Michelle Mann - 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.

UX Mill

A curated list of resources for UX and UI designers.

View Feed

Decorating the Web with CSS Border Images

A good tutorial on how to use new css to create borders from images.

Full Article

Introducing Shrine

Shrine is a new file upload handler for Ruby based on Refile. It focuses a lot on performance, and it uses upfront processing for your files, like carrierwave.

Full Article

EaselJS

Simple JavaScript library that makes accessing and working with the canvas easy.

Get Started

Pattern Lab

A collection of tools to help define, design and develop a suite of UI components, patterns and standards for a project or system.

Learn More

PHP 7 ChangeLog

PHP 7.0 has been released

View Updates

Managing features in Bootstrap

A little geeky, but @mdo explains how he and his team selects which features to build.

Full Article

Rediscovering MVC

A thorough (yet understandable) explanation of the Model-View-Controller concept, without talking about a specific MVC framework.

Full Article

The Radar: December 16, 2015

December 16th, 2015 - by Michelle Mann - 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.

Google’s Angular 2 Release

Google has released version 2 of its Angular JavaScript framework which will extend beyond the browser, letting coders build native apps for iPhones and Android devices.

Full Article

Creating a Tool That Records User Interactions

Jaco’s case study is about building a minimal product, collecting data, and then continuing design on their app once they had validation.

Full Article

The “Blur Up” Technique for Loading Background Images

This article outlines how to improve loading time by showing a blurry low res image while the full size one loads.

Full Article

Refile Github

Refile is a new gem made by the makers of Carrierwave. It uses configurable backends, on-the-fly processing (process when requested, then cache the processed file), and supports multiple file uploads.

View Repository

Computer Science and State Machines

A fun read in which Leslie Lamport explores how various aspects and topics in computer science can all be tied back to state machines.

Read PDF

The Changelog Podcast

A podcast with news and discussions about open source software.

Listen Now

Photoshop CC 2015

You can now import and export SVG files from Photoshop. This article sums up the updates of Photoshop CC 2015.

Full Article

The Radar: December 10, 2015

December 10th, 2015 - by Michelle Mann - 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.

So long MVP

This article outlines the merits of a Minimum Viable Product versus a Minimum Loveable Product. It makes the case that you should be more concerned with the latter.

Full Article

Codie Robot Teaching Kids

Codie is a robot toy that helps kids ages 6 through 15 to learn programming concepts. The app interface uses colorful drag-and-drop blocks which control various actions for the tobot to perform.

Full Article

Flexbox Froggy

A fun way to interact and learn Flexbox.

Start Playing

The Collaborative Interface Design Tool

A cross platform, online design app that lets multiple people work on it at once. You can use team-wide component libraries to share brand assets.

Sign Up

Biggest Image in The Smallest Space

You can compress a PNG file that decompresses to multiple gigabytes. Watch out, because it can be used to attack websites, especially those that don’t check for image upload size.

Full Article

Bite-sized Web Development Training

Collection of free and premium video tutorials covering JavaScript.  It is an excellent resource for Angular, React, and Immutable.js.

Visit Site

Grow Your Userbase with Better Onboarding

Samuel Hulick, author of The Elements of User Onboarding and the man behind UserOnboard.com, gives awesome advise on how to create quality onboarding experiences.

Watch Video

The Nine States of Design

By thoughtfully designing for the different stages of user interaction, you can better create a polished experience.

Full Article

The Radar: December 2, 2015

December 2nd, 2015 - by Michelle Mann - 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.

Startup Playbook

Sage advice for startups from some of the best advisors in the business.

Full Article

Layers CSS

A lightweight CSS framework for building fluid layouts.

View Framework

Building an Enterprise CSS Framework

How salesforce approached redoing their CSS framework.

Full Article

Hedis

The Hedis project is basically a mediator between your application and your database. It caches results from database queries in an attempt to improve performance.

Full Article

Object-Oriented vs. Functional Programming

Quick read that, despite its name, goes over the common patterns shared by both object oriented and functional programming styles.

Read Book

Ruby Tricks, Idiomatic Ruby, Refactorings and Best Practices

A cool list of tricks and tips for using Ruby.

Full List

Freehold

Freehold is an app that provides a web interface for viewing files on a server. You can install it on any server and it’ll give you a URL to use for viewing those files.

View Demo

Static Website Generators Reviewed

A review of Jekyll, Middleman, Roots, and Hugo. Goes over templating engine, asset pipeline, content model and extending.

Full Article