Category Archives: Services and Tools
Aug 21, 2013 by Matt | Posted in Services and Tools
RandomUser is a new API that returns a JSON object with a randomly generated persona—complete with name, avatar and email address—for your testing purposes. The site suggests using it for design mockups, but the fact that it’s an API opens up plenty of possibilities for more programmatic uses. If you need to fill in a couple dozen users to test an application, you could write a script to populate the database with ones pulled from RandomUser.
The API is neat, but a little limited so far. Hopefully it will be expanded in the future with some additional info.
Mar 14
Google announced on Wednesday that Google Reader, the search giant’s RSS aggregator, will be discontinued on July 1st, 2013. Users have until then to export their subscriptions and other data with Google Takeout. This is likely a result of Larry Page’s “leaner Google,” which…
Dec 19
Scratchpad does exactly what it says on the proverbial box. It acts as a convenient place to experiment with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You get a two-pane screen with the page source on the left and a live-updated render on the right. As you…
Oct 31
Google announced the deprecation and closure of several of their APIs awhile back, notable ones including the Translate API, a few search APIs and the FeedBurner API. As of just a few days ago, the FeedBurner API has been shut down. Any application that…
Jun 28
Historically, processing monetary transactions online has been a major pain. Conniving financial institutions would force you to pay tons of extra fees, requiring merchant accounts and other junk. Then Stripe came along, bringing some sanity to the e-commerce world. With Stripe, you get a…
May 28
If someone asked you what tools you commonly use for constructing web designs, you would probably mention the obvious: your favorite text editor and graphics program, the web inspector in your preferred browser, things like that. But what about those nifty web apps that,…
Aug 15
There are already a few services—like CloudApp and Droplr—that allow you to simply drag a file and instantly share it via a short URL. There’s a newer one that I’ve been seeing lately on Twitter. It’s name is Minus. Minus is primarily a web…
Feb 23
If you’ve ever tried a little iPhone development out, you might have run into an inconvenient problem. Apple uses a code signing system on iOS devices to ensure that software that ends up on them has either passed through the App Store (and has…
Feb 14
Last.fm, the music streaming service that uses social tagging to find custom-tailored tunes, will be requiring that users of the iOS/Android/etc. apps pay $3/month for a premium subscription. I have found it convenient to listen to Last.fm on my iPod on more than one…
Sep 13
I just happened upon an interesting new Labs service from Google: Google Storage for Developers. It’s very much like Amazon S3 in concept, but from Google. It’s a cheap, pay-as-you-go file storage service that could be used for anything from backing up data to…
