There’s nothing like the taste of real sugar, but since people want to be able to indulge in sweet things without having to worry about the calories, there’s a huge market for sugar substitutes. There’s no shortage of choices — stevia, aspartame, sucralose, sorbitol, acesulfame potassium, saccharin, etc. — some are natural, while others are artificial. However, sugar substitutes tend to leave a weird aftertaste, or they may have undesirable gastrointestinal side effects. There is also some concern that artificial sweeteners may pose health risks. Since no sugar substitute is perfect, the search continues… Here are a few interesting links about sugar alternatives.
Tagatose, which looks, tastes, and cooks like real sugar, may be nearly perfect as a sugar substitute. Marketed under the brand name Naturlose, the FDA-approved natural sweetener is 92% as sweet as table sugar, but it contributes only 38% of the calories. [url]
Xylitol, a natural sweetener, is apparently toxic to dogs. It only takes 3 grams of xylitol to kill a 65-pound dog. When dogs ingest xylitol, it can cause a surge in insulin resulting in a dangerous drop in blood sugar. In higher doses, xylitol may also cause severe liver damage in dogs. [url]
Synsepalum dulcificum, also known as “miracle fruit,” can make sour foods taste sweet. Native to West Africa, miracle fruit is a red berry that contains a protein called miraculin, which binds with taste buds and makes acidic foods taste sweet. The berries, which can cost $2 or more each, have acquired a bit of a cult following, with some fans even hosting “flavor tripping” parties. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.
Big data may be cool, but it’s not pretty. Visual.ly, a startup focused on data visualizations and infographics, has raised a new $2 million round of funding, the company has confirmed to VentureBeat today.
Visual.ly’s platform is like a “basecamp” for design projects that want to utilize big data from multiple sources. It’s clients (brands, businesses, and news organizations) subscribe for access to the platform, which can match them with Visual.ly’s community of over 55,000 designers. Once matched,the designer and the client work together using the platform, with Visual.ly’s team acting as a project manager. Essentially, it answer the question of what do to for companies after they’ve hired a designer and don’t quite know what to do next.
“Right now existing ad agencies are our biggest competitors,” Visual.ly CEO Stew Langille told me in a phone interview. He explained that, in addition to building useful, interactive graphics for clients, Visual.ly is becoming more attractive because it allows designers to earn more money on a project and advertisers to spend less.
Depending on the level of project management, Visual.ly takes anywhere from 10 to 30 percent cut of each project’s total cost. The goal, Langille said, is to improve the collaboration platform for designers and clients to work on their own. And while he didn’t disclose financial figures, Langille did say that Visual.ly’s revenue is increasing 300 percent each quarter, and the number of projects are increasing 200 percent per quarter.
The new round came from previous investors, such as SoftTech VC, 500 Startups, and Giza Venture Capital, as well as strategic investors that include Yammer chief product officer James Patterson and several top executives from the advertising industry that will help Visual.ly build out its presence in New York City.
The additional capital will primarily be used to advance the startup’s data visualization /collaboration technology and hire more talent over the next year. Langille said Visual.ly has held off on raising a larger round, but does plan on raising additional funding in the future.
Langille also said he’d like to use the funding to produce more free data visualization tools that showcase the Visual.ly platform’s potential. For example, the startup’s recently released tool that interfaces with Google Analytics to produce a weekly traffic report, which you can send via email automatically. Also, the startup’s Twitter user battle infographic tool.
Founded in 2011, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup has raised a total of $4.4 million in funding to date. Visual.ly currently has 25 employees, with plans to hire another 10 to 15 people before the end of 2013.
I’ve been looking for ways to energize my creativity in between the longer stretches of time spent on difficult, routine, and less creative work. The thing that has been doing it for me lately is working with static html on some of my smaller production sites.
I was playing around with static html tools for a little side project I’ve been toying with. I was tinkering with Stacey and Kirby. Awesome tools for static PHP page building. I was also playing around with CodeKit, which looked like the most promising tool for little projects. But I figured it was all just playing and there wouldn’t be a real static site project for me to work on for a while probably.
Then last month we launched UX Apprentice using WordPress. We were on a stable server that hosts some pretty massive sites, so I was happy. But then, as web hosts always do, it went down for a short period. Some rare issue on load balancers was the cause we were told. Downtime happens. But then while discussing this issue I said, “Fuckit. This site is so simple, let’s make it static and put it on an S3 bucket.”
A week earlier I was playing with Hammer for Mac, the latest static site builder I had found. Among my options, including just doing it all by hand, this was the simplest of them all. I looked at what I would need to port the site to Amazon’s S3 service for websites with no fuss. All I needed to do was suck the WordPress site down and convert it to static HTML.
I know this is small potatoes compared to the bigger things people are doing out there, but I got a kick out of doing this.
Here’s how I did it, in case anyone out is considering doing the same:
1) Download
SiteSucker pulled the site down for me and converted it to static HTML. You can do it on the cheap with wget.
2) Create a Hammer Project
Look at your downloaded site, and clean out the cruft. Open Hammer for Mac and create your project. Open the source folder.
3) Organize files, use HTML editor to convert PHP to Hammer-smart stuff
I then moved my img, css, and js folders to the new project’s assets/ folder. When Hammer builds, it reads your entire project and then knows where everything is so you can use the @path directive to reference files only by name, and include styles and css simply by name without paths using the @stlylesheet and @javascript directives. I cleaned all files up to use this.
I did the find/replace grunt work using Coda on my CSS and html files. Replaced the PHP that I use in my header to use the @include directive and the $title variable. My SCSS files got picked up and compiled with no problems. I then used the @path helper on images in my SCSS.
About two hours of this clean up and it built with no errors.
All my SCSS was compiled, my includes worked, and my CSS and JS were optimized (combined and minified).
4) Testing
I set up my hosts on my machine so I could test locally in the browser so all the TypeKit would work after I added that domain. I also learned that you can’t test Typekit with a url using the file:/// protocol. Bummer. I already use VirtualHostX which makes simple work of managing multiple hosts on your local machine. It edits your httpd-vhosts.conf and hosts file. I had bought it originally because the web sharing option went away in OS X, and I’m too lazy to edit files just to turn PHP on.
Then of course, I tested on all my browsers and tested the responsive layout. We were ready to go.
5) Publish
Publishing on S3 is pretty simple. A normal person just needs to set up a bucket and use an S3 aware FTP app like Transmit and you’re done. We ended up commiting it to a repository that is watched by a server that kicks off updates to S3 for pages that have changed.
That was the whole mini-relaunch that happened quietly after we launched UX Apprentice. We were live on WordPress for a week, and now we’re hosted on an AWS instance and I expect the uptime will be awesome—as good as any S3 site. We do the same for our main balsamiq.com site and every time I see our blogs report downtime, I feel this wave of relief knowing our static pages on S3 are happily being pushed out without issue.
Anyhow, that made for an exciting day last week. It’s energizing to feel frustrated by something and quickly turn something around that’s better. And for anyone that’s doing UX work that’s looking for a decent HTML prototyping workflow and knows enough SASS and JS, Hammer may be the thing for you.
It seems three Egyptian criminals have given a whole new meaning to the term Internet “phishing.” Three divers were arrested Wednesday after coastguards found the men attempting to cut underwater Internet cables.
The new round came from previous investors, such as SoftTech VC, 500 Startups, and Giza Venture Capital, as well as strategic investors that include Yammer chief product officer James Patterson and several top executives from the advertising industry that will help Visual.ly build out its presence in New York City.
