Riding Light on Vimeo

This made the rounds last week, but I’m just now sharing it here. If you haven’t seen it, this video helps you visualize the vast distances of space by giving you a “photon’s eye view” of light traveling away from the sun.

In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it’s unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective.

I’ve taken liberties with certain things like the alignment of planets and asteroids, as well as ignoring the laws of relativity concerning what a photon actually “sees” or how time is experienced at the speed of light, but overall I’ve kept the size and distances of all the objects as accurate as possible. I also decided to end the animation just past Jupiter as I wanted to keep the running length below an hour. ~ Riding Light on Vimeo

Illustrator SVG Exporter

Exporting SVGs from Illustrator is a slow, laborious process—this script fixes that. The script doesn’t waste your time with GUI or settings you’ll never use. You just run the script, select a location to export and you have your SVGs. We love the concept behind Generator and this script takes a strong cue from it. The script exports any layer, group or path named with the .svg extension. ~ iconic/illustrator-svg-exporter

Matterhorn: Your new project manager

Matterhorn looks to be an all-in-one project management solution that you can adapt to fit your workflows.

Matterhorn is a simple-to use, lightweight project management tool that helps your team keep track of multiple people and projects at once.

It’s got checklists, boards, discussions and a planner, that all work in harmony to keep you and your team focused on what really matters. ~ Matterhorn

Online Mattress Shopping

Did you know you can buy a mattress online? Of course you did. Anyway, the wife and I are mattress shopping right now, and we’re seriously considering a couple of online options. With free shipping and 30+ night trials, getting your mattress online can make sense. Here are two options we’ve been looking at:

  • Tuft & Needle – $600 10″ thick queen, 30 night trial, free returns, 10 year warranty
  • Casper – $850 queen, 100 night trial (This episode of the 99% Invisible podcast features a Casper $50 off coupon at the end. Give it a listen!)

Forgotten Apollo moon artifacts found in Neil Armstrong’s closet – CNET

Quite a find to be hidden away in your closet:

Astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon when he traveled 240,000 miles on NASA’s Apollo 11 mission in 1969. He passed away in 2012, but left behind a legacy full of space, adventure and scientific inspiration. He also left behind a wealth of physical materials related to his travels. A purse full of rare artifacts is now in the spotlight as the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum shares details of a hidden piece of space history. ~ Forgotten Apollo moon artifacts found in Neil Armstrong’s closet – CNET

Glip – Project Management, Replace Your Inbox

As I work on more and more projects with larger teams, I’ve been looking for some good project management solutions. Basecamp is an option, but I’m interested in something else. Glip just might fit the bill:

Glip is your team’s conversation platform to plan, share & organize work. We designed Glip so that teams can jump right in, with zero learning curve, and do better work together. No technical skills are required to use Glip, and it boosts your productivity from the very first user. Glip removes communication barriers with built-in text and video chat and includes file sharing, tasks management, shared calendars and more, all seamlessly integrated.

With Glip, every user can easily see the context of work activities and related conversation. Gone is the frustration with email and other software that wastes your time when you are looking for that important file, or that buried message.

Glip helps you organize your work around your conversations. All the basic tools you need to get your work done are right there in the stream, and you don’t have to worry about where or with whom to share because it all happens naturally, as a bi-product of your communication.

For those still attached to their email, Glip is seamlessly integrated with their inbox. Co-workers and vendors can interact with you right from their inbox, blending right into the conversation, and you still get all the benefits of Glip’s powerful and easy-to-use tools.

With Glip, teams can take advantage of their natural workflow from concept to completion, improving performance and keeping everyone in sync. And that is what Glipping is all about.

~ Glip – About

ActionAlly – Get Started on Work You Care About

Do you suffer from ADD every time you sit down at your computer? ActionAlly looks to help by helping you focus on your most important tasks.

Every time you get to your computer, ActionAlly will be there, ready to channel you into your most important work.

No more sitting blankly trying to figure out what to work on. No more drifting to Facebook.

Now you have an ally that makes sure your attention is being used effectively. ~ ActionAlly

Series: Create a License Controlled Theme and Plugin Update System – Tuts+ Code Tutorial

If you’re looking to sell and license your own WordPress themes and plugins, this tutorial series from Tuts+ Code will show you how build a license and update manager plugin:

In this first tutorial in the series, we will start by creating a WordPress plugin to turn your website into a license management server. In part two, we will continue building the plugin by adding an API to it. In part three, we will use the API to make a WordPress plugin or theme talk back to the license manager for updates. ~ Tuts+ Code Tutorial

Muut – Commenting and forums for your site.

Muut is really hard for me to type. Putting this post together I accidentally typed “mutt” three or four times. But, it looks to be a really slick embeddable forum solution.

Muut is the only embeddable community platform in the market that’s not based on iframes. It becomes a seamless part of your website, brand, and overall experience. Since it’s a collection of HTML elements sitting right on your page, it can be styled normally with CSS. A separate static site is generated for search engines to get the full benefits of SEO. ~ muut – Commenting and forums for your site.