Modern.IE Helps You Test

modern.IE consists of a number of free tools and resources, including a scanner that checks for common problems that may make a site incompatible with modern and legacy versions of IE. The scanner, Gavin noted, checks a given page to find common compatibility problems with the libraries and frameworks the developer used. It then recommends fixes and provides developers with information about which version of a given framework like jQuery offers the best compatibility.

TC review

Pond5 Stock Media

Here is good source of stock video and photography. Yup, video. They have some awesome clips you may be able to use. I've seen some for $20. They have updated the site and it's easier to find stuff.

Pond5.com

VinylMint, Make Beautiful Music Together

Taking the notion of online collaboration to a whole new level, VinylMint has created a cloud-based solution for musicians to jam and record in real time.
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/vinylmint-online-music-recording/#aIVsc5aW6xA3r4wm.99 

Play My Tone

This is an app that makes creating music as easy as listening to it. Listening to music nowadays is almost universally effortless. But creating it? That's not so easy. Solving that problem is the idea behind Play My Tone, a social music maker that mixes, personalizes, and shares your musical creations.

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/play-my-tone-announcement/#0ufCZpCQl7Mcszrl.99 

Tubifi Stock Footage

Tubifi wants to make it easier to make great videos by using lots of stock footage. But stock footage is only part of the service. With a vital social feature, Tubifi also plans to connect video makers to the marketers that need them. The other big feature of the service is online editing, which allows users to take the stock video they buy and edit it from their web browsers.
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/tubifi-stock-footage/#ZQJk4LwhTfLgUOA7.99 

Almond+ Is A Modern Router

Here is the most advanced router for the consumer available today. It's a router with a touchscreen and only costs $99. It is going to rock my world as soon as I can get one. I would love to make a mobile app that communicates with it.

TC review

The Almond+

Here is a book to help you learn about its protocol Zigbee and Z-wave.

Create n Share Website Mashups

NewHive provides easy tools for making collages of websites to share. It can grab any media to produce beautiful and thoughtful art.

TC Review

NewHive wants to pioneer what co-founder Zach Verdin calls "slow social media". He describes it as "Creating something meaningful that takes more time and thought than just sharing an image. It has more emotional impact on the people creating it and the people consuming it."

Headless Browsers

If you're reading this article, you most likely know what a browser is. Now take away the GUI, and you have what's called a headless browser. Headless browsers can do all of the same things that normal browsers do, but faster. They're great for automating and testing web pages programmatically. There are a number of headless browsers in existence, and PhantomJS is the best.

In other words, the server can now act as the web user. The server-side can interact with any website  from the point of view of a site visitor. The server can submit data, click links, wait for results, and process the results. Very powerful stuff indeed. This is a step beyond web scraping.

Here is an excellent example of what you can do with a headless browser: UpstreamCommerce.com crawls your competitors' websites to compare your pricings to theirs. They may be using some other technology, but certainly using a headless browser would be one way to do it.

Real-time Node Frameworks

The Node crowd is pretty DIY, so many Node developers eschew using frameworks beyond Express. Express gives you the most control, but requires the most development overhead. You have to setup and tie together everything all by yourself - and there is a lot of stuff to tie together. Furthermore, getting everything to play nicely with eachother is much more painful than you'd think. 

Frameworks will tie everything together for you, and will ensure each piece fits the equation properly - so I recommend using a framework if you want to hit the ground running with the least amount of hassle. Conversely, I recommend choosing Express if you're savvy and want maximal control, or (as we'll see) you want cross-platform code (including mobile).

Here are some more recent ones:

NowJS

Firebase

Google search

And here is a more realistic view of the current frameworks.

Modern Web Scraping

Web scrapers are pieces of software which programmatically visit web pages and extract data from them. Web scraping is a bit of a controversial topic due to issues of content duplication. Instead, most web site owners prefer that their data be accessed by publicly available APIs. Unfortunately, many sites provide lackluster APIs, or none at all. This forces many developers to turn to web scraping. This article will teach you how to implement your own web scraper in Node.js.

Other tools are:

Jsdom

Cheerio

PhantomJS
Other Related Projects

Super Javascript Languages

I don't know which one is leading at the moment. I know both CoffeeScript and TypeScript are supported by Node.js, so that's a good thing. Dart is apparently a Google thing. TypeScript is also supported from within Visual Studio, so you know Microsoft is backing it up.

CoffeeScript

TypeScript

Dart

Two excellent editors that support these languages, as well as Nodejs, are Sublime, and WebStorm. Here's a favorable review of Sublime.

Artiphon Touch Sound Instrument

Guitar lovers out there, there's a new electronic musical instrument you may want to keep you ears on, the Artiphon.

Techcrunch says:

This CES has been a surprisingly musical. Aside from the usual headphones and speakers, we've already seen a number of electronic musical instruments including the Artiphon Instrument 1, a well-made electronic guitar analog with a pressure sensitive fretboard.

Unlike the Jamstik, the Instrument 1 doesn't have real strings but instead you play on the raised ridges on a pressure sensitive surface. The iPhone receives MIDI input from the device and you can even plug it into a computer.

The Instrument 1 is made of hardwood and can be played like a guitar, banjo, bass (by tapping on the strings), or even a fiddle. It should cost under $1,000 and will be made in and around Nashville by the creator, Mike Butera.

We spent a few moments playing the instrument on stage at CES 2013.

Best Responsive Web Framework?

Some people think so. Check out Foundation.

Review

Image Placeholders for Wireframing

Wireframing a website and need temporary image placeholders until you get the real images?

http://placehold.it/

http://imsky.github.com/holder/?js

Solutions For Responsive Images

Which responsive images solution should you use?

Here is a third party device detection:

https://deviceatlas.com/