Mixture: The Web Developer’s Life Just Got Easier

At The Industry, we try to view the digital world with an eye critical to design. While others were covering the actual release of iTunes 11, we were talking about how iTunes and iOS are converging from a user interface perspective.

There are times when we’re able to talk about a seemingly utilitarian application or service can be looked at from a similar perspective. These applications aren’t what you’d typically call sexy at first glance. These are the type of applications that almost shock you with their usefulness. Well, we’ve definitely found another one of those. Today, I’ll give you a look at the latest preview version of a new application called Mixture.

Mixture is beautifully simple application built specifically for web developers. It is designed and built by Neil Kinnish, Mike Kus and Pete Nelson. It is purposely minimal and keeps itself almost entirely out of the way while still maintaining an incredible level of usefulness. The application is in a private preview state at the moment. I’ve had access to it for a bit now and I’ve been playing around and I think it’s feature set has gotten to the point where it is worth talking about. Let’s take a closer look at this lovely little utility.

View the full post at The Industry.

Front-End Learning and Exploration with CodePen

Front-end designers and developers learn from each other. The community is essentially built around this attitude. The more experienced folks in the field help to teach the next crop coming up through the ranks, and so on. It’s an incredibly open and engaging field. However, looking at source code and reading blog posts only goes so far into explaining web design and development techniques.

A fairly new development in this area has been the introduction of more interactive type web apps built specifically to help us play in the code. The live interaction makes a world of a difference to understanding what is happening and why it is happening. This playing around is a huge part of learning all this front-end trickery and today we’re going to take a look at a new playground in the neighborhood: CodePen.

Read the full article at The Industry.

Mixture: Mixes for the Masses

Mixture.fm began in the mind of a computer science student and after several diversions, a few years and all sorts of learning experiences the app has finally received an influx of new life and it is quite impressive.

Eric Kreutzer began his interest in the world that is DJ mixes a few years back and wanted to build an application in this space. Eventually, he had built one called Mobile Disco which eventually became derailed after witnessing a competitor deal with some legal issues and because he decided to take on an agency job. This app would die, but the idea held strong. And as luck would have it he also met his future co-founder, Jordan Brown, at this agency job.

Read the full article at The Industry.

Paymesh: Instant Payments with the Privacy of Cash

You go out to dinner with some friends one evening, and instead of asking the waiter to split up the check seven ways, one of your pals picks up the check and you all agree to pay him back later. I essentially avoid carrying cash and rarely have more than $20 on me at any given time so paying that person back can be a real pain.

Ninut, a software engineering lab, made up of Michel Triana, Joe Wurzburger and Mohsin Bari, are working on something called Paymesh that could drastically change the manner in which transactions like these can take place.

Read the full article at The Industry.

WorkFu: Connecting Talented People with Great Opportunitie

Update: Since this was published, Workfu has unfortunately decided to halt future development. It is still in service and totally worth checking out however. 

The process of finding good jobs in just about any industry is, for the most part, a really painful experience. Searching is a mess and most services that claim to do this well are fostering such awful overall experiences that it’s difficult to tell whether they’re actually dealing out useful information or not. Thankfully some folks in our line of work have noticed this issue and are crafting much better ways to connect those talented folks with those awesome companies.

WorkFu is the latest to tackle this issue. They’ve been live to a certain extent for a while now, but just recently launched a second, and really very key aspect to their service.

Read the full post at The Industry.

Squarespace 6: A Look into the Private Beta

A couple years ago I heard of this thing called Squarespace. At the time I was in need of a personal website and thought I’d check it out. I’m still using the platform for my personal website and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience. When I became aware of a completely new, revamped version I immediately threw my name in the hat to be a beta tester. I received my invite and about a month ago, decided to move my entire site over to Squarespace 6, the next iteration of this amazing platform. Though it isn’t yet ready for prime time, let’s take a peek at where things are at so far.

If you’re not familiar with Squarespace, in their words it’s “a fully hosted, completely managed environment for creating and maintaining a beautiful website, blog, or portfolio.” That sums it up quite nicely. Squarespace provides a platform for just about anyone to build an extremely nice website. It caters to a range of people from those who just want a solid website up quickly to those that want to support for deep personal customization.

Read the full article at The Industry.

Wikibot: Your Wikipedia Companion

Yes, the World Wide Web has unleashed a flurry of information on us all and we now have the World’s knowledge at our fingertips. I think we can all agree, that is awesome. There is, however, one problem.

The amount of information available on any topic imaginable is daunting, and we gravitate to sources that have some resemblance of organization and credibility to locate what we’re looking for. Wikipedia has become this source for a lot of people and we turn to it as the place for reference material or just to wander and learn. Wikibot is an iPad application that takes the core Wikipedia experience and attempts to add some functionality to make the resource even more useful. Let’s take a look at Wikibot and see just how successful it is.

Read the full article on iPad.Appstorm.

New Rdio: Meet The Latest Version of The Popular Music App

Online streaming, subscription based music delivery services are making an attempt to become the golden ticket solution for music lovers everywhere. Having access to a gigantic library of music is well worth the subscription fee for a lot of people and as the music libraries of these services grow they continue to gather steam.

The two big competitors in this field right now are Rdio and Spotify. Rdio released a major interface update recently that is a big step forward to separate itself from Spotify (only paid subscribers get a sneak peek). The interface changed substantially for the better with new features added and others more prominently placed. Not only is the update quite beautiful, it makes discovering new music an even more social experience. Let’s take a spin through the new Rdio.

Read the full article at Mac.Appstorm.

All-in Yoga: Your At Home Yoga Companion

I don’t think we can necessarily say something like "yoga is all the rage these days" anymore, but it is safe to say that yoga has become a fairly steady, mainstream workout activity for many people.

We have resources all around us and make no mistake about it, there are plenty covering the wide variety of yoga disciplines. And as you would have guessed, the next progression is to venture into applications. There are many applications that are available on multiple platforms that either walk you through a yoga workout or help to teach you yoga. I searched for one in this category and decided to give All-in Yoga a try.

Read the full article at Mac.Appstorm.

Eufloria: A Beautiful, Semi-Organic Sci-Fi Strategy Game

Games are meant to be a reprieve from our daily lives. Games are meant to entertain us and give us a little break from reality. Everything from a simple puzzle game to an engrossing console game. The basic purpose is the same.

The iPad has definitely proven itself as a valid gaming device of sorts and boasts many titles that serve the exact purpose I describe above. Most do this to some degree, but you could say some games are naturally better at this than others. I was searching for that completely engrossing experience and I decided to explore a game called Eufloria hoping to find just that.

Read the full article at iPad.Appstorm.