Just Your Type

Do the Astral Plain General web APIS.io [apis] is a search engine for APIs. Hours of fun! Astral [astralapp] is a way of organizing your GitHub starred repos. KMCGeigerCounter [github] is like a Geiger counter for your animations’ dropped frames. CotEditor [coteditor] is a new plain text editor for OS X, which looks to have all the stuff you need and the ability to load quick smart. frameit [github] is a Ruby gem to easily add a device frame around screenshots of your app or site. nightrain [github] is a PHP packager, written in Python, for to help with creating native apps.

Just Your Type Design A series to keep track of: Design Explosions [medium], combining the insight of John Siracusa’s tech reviews with the warm teaching style of Mr Rogers. The excellent type designer Jessica Hirsche has a new typeface out, based on the one she did for the Wes Anderson film Moonrise Kingdom, and it’s just beautiful [tilda.fontbureau]. Here’s part two in a series about creating gorgeous UI [medium]. Part one is linked to in the intro, don’t worry.

Upstream SitePoint First up on SitePoint today, a good look at Streams in Node.js. Our resident Sass genius Hugo Giraudel takes on multiple arguments, lists and arglist. Then we have a look at different ways to embed Google Maps onto your site. And lastly for this section, here’s a great look at some tricks for building responsive email.

Yahoo Serious News/business Online ad company Google is launching a tool allowing web users to pay sites they like monthly fees and in turn see no Google ads [gigaom]. Instead, the users who sign up will see a message saying, “thanks!” Hey, whatever works. Speaking of Google, here’s an interesting piece on how the company’s new Inbox app shares 70% of its code across iOS, Android and the web [arstechnica]. In a move that will have Google shaking in its boots, Firefox’s default search engine will be Yahoo for the next five years [slate]. Researchers are building molecules that can act as flash storage [arstechnica].

Pastword Off-topic Beam [beamreddit] is an iOS app to make browsing Reddit beautiful and simple. Here’s a site that lets you convert plain text into weird unicode characters [panix]. We weren’t really sure whether it was ethical/beneficial/reasonable to share this one, but we trust you all to act responsibly. Partytime [partytime] is an app that lets you “text bomb” people with thousands of iMessages. It’s a great way to let your soon to be ex-friends know that you care! Finally, here’s the New York Times with a beautiful meditation on passwords, those important things we never talk about but which often contain our innermost fears, dearest memories, or some silly jokes we have with ourselves.