The Objective Blog

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

The Radar: November 30, 2016

November 30th, 2016 - 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.

Browser Frame

This free tool helps you easily wrap screenshots in different browser frames. Supports Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and more.

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CSS Reference

A great visual reference guide for all those CSS properties that you don’t know or forgot how to use.

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Ruby 3×3

A transcript of an interview with Matz, Koichi, and Tenderlove on the progress they’re making on Ruby 3×3 performance.

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React Native Animatable

Animations can be a little bit tricky in React Native. This library helps simplify your life by providing a standard set of animations for your use.

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Amazon Lightsail

Amazon Lightsail is a service from Amazon which provides simple virtual private servers. It’s similarly priced to Digital Ocean.

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React Native Fabric

A React Native package which provides native bindings for both Crashlytics and Answers. Crashlytics reports errors and exceptions thrown by your mobile application and Answers allows you to gather analytics.

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The Balanced Ternary Machines of Soviet Russia

An early Russian computer, the Setun, used “balanced ternary” instead of binary numbers. Only about 50 machines were produced. Ultimately, these machines were replaced with binary counterparts that were able to calculate with similar efficiency but at more than twice the cost of operation.

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Mitsuku Chatbot

Mitsuku has won awards for being the “most human-like chatbot.” One person even spent nine hours straight chatting with it. Mitsuku’s learning agorithm only allows her to learn facts for the user who teaches her. She emails Steve Worswick, her creator, with any information she learns and he decides whether to add it to her permanent knowledge.

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The Radar: November 16, 2016

November 16th, 2016 - 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.

Inspect

This tool streamlines the development process. It helps eliminate design spec guessing, so developers don’t have to ask designers for assets.

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Cybric Helps Developers Build More Secure Applications Automatically

Cybric provides automated security checking each time a build is updated. Don’t let your fast paced app development sacrifice security.

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Comprehensive Guide: When to Use Em vs. Rem

This article outlines how the em and rem unit work and how we should use them. This is useful for responsive design because everything needs to be scalable.

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An Intro to Monkey Testing with Gremlins.js

Ever wanted to know what would happen to your site if a monkey, or a small child, got a hold of the keyboard and mouse? Gremlins.js can simulate this for you.

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Mas

A command line tool for the Mac App Store.

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10 Things We Learned While Building a React Native App

A little outdated, but still solid tips to review when building a React Native app.

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Tal Kol: Building a React Native App for 80 Million Users

A comprehensive presentation about Wix’s transition from a fully native stack to React Native.

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How We Ditched HTTP and Transitioned to MQTT

How to stop using HTTP requests for notifications and start using MQTT, which was specifically created for that purpose.

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True Lies of Optimistic User Interfaces

Send a visual success cue before the server can determine success.

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The Radar: November 9, 2016

November 9th, 2016 - 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.

Works with Stripe

Works with Stripe provides a directory of tools that are integrated with the Stripe payment system. It includes things like analytics, invoicing, and form building.

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Eve

A new programming language that’s “made for humans.” It isn’t a great language for building an operating system, but it could be useful for higher level programming.

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ReactiveX

A cross-language API for asynchronous programming with observable streams.

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20 Resources to Master Photoshop

This article provides 20 tutorial-type resources to help you learn Photoshop and is a good starting point for any beginner.

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Stavro

A flexible file upload solution for the Elixir programming language.

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Creating a Chatroom

A nice little tutorial about how to implement Phoenix, Elm, and Websockets for realtime web applications.

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The Radar: November 2, 2016

November 2nd, 2016 - 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.

Microsoft Teams

As part of Office 365, Teams will be launching in competition with Slack. A notable feature with Teams is that you will have the ability to have threaded comments.

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The Challenge of Constructive Criticism and How to Get It

Having our work criticized is hard, but can be helpful if it is constructive. This article explains how to ask for feedback in a way that will more likely produce constructive critiques.

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So You’re Thinking of Decomposing Your Monolith into Microservices

If you’ve heard all the hype about microservices, you may want to move your monolith to a microservices architecture. Here is a high-level guide of things to consider.

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Redux Actions

Redux’s explicit approach to handling changes in your application’s state is a major boon, but it leads to a large amount of boiler plate code. This library seeks to help reduce that boiler plate.

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React Native Elements

A cross platform React Native UI toolkit ideal for rapid prototyping.

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Plasma, in Your Pocket

A new, open source smartphone operating system. Unlike most others which are based on Android, this one seems to be closer to Linux.

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