John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged tools · everything

Bounce – A fun and easy way to share ideas on a website

Bounce was a feedback tool that let users capture screenshots of webpages, annotate them with contextual notes, and share them for collaborative review before the feedback could be passed back and forth. The product has been retired and replaced by Helio, which expands on Bounce's core concept by enabling designers to gather real-time feedback from thousands of users and generate actionable insights more quickly.

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Ben Alman » jQuery doTimeout: Like setTimeout, but better

doTimeout is a jQuery plugin that simplifies managing delayed code execution, polling loops, and debouncing by maintaining an internal cache of timeout IDs so developers don't have to track them manually. It offers a cleaner API than native setTimeout while remaining fully jQuery chainable, allowing for easy cancellation, forced execution, and complex behaviors like polling until a condition is met or debouncing repeated events. The plugin is tested across major browsers and provides practical examples for common use cases like window resize handlers and typeahead search inputs.

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Subtle Patterns | High quality patterns for your next web project

This is a collection of downloadable pattern designs from various creators, including traditional Japanese patterns like seigaiha (concentric wave arches symbolizing good fortune) and asanoha, as well as contemporary textile and decorative patterns. Each pattern is credited to its designer and dated, with brief descriptions explaining the inspiration or style—ranging from fabric textures to weather-themed designs to colorful waves.

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Panabee: Name Generator

Kroger's Q2 sales growth was driven entirely by price increases rather than volume gains—identical store sales excluding fuel were flat at 0.2% as unit volume declined—while the company faces mounting capital pressure with cash reserves down 50% year-to-date despite a pending $1.65 billion acquisition. The report reveals how nominal sales growth masks underlying weakness in customer demand and inventory levels.

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Glyphish – Great icons for great iPhone & iPad applications

Glyphish is a collection of carefully designed icons available in multiple formats (PNG, SVG, PSD, AI) and sizes optimized for iOS, Android, and web applications, with vector source files that allow developers and designers to scale and customize them while maintaining crisp resolution on any device. The full icon sets are available for purchase without attribution requirements, while a free 50-icon sample set requires attribution under Creative Commons licensing. The service includes Sketch source files for easy color customization and supports user requests for additional icons.

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Some slight modifications to the codeigniter profiler to dynamically display session vars, and to add EXPLAIN to all queries. — Gist

This is a modified CodeIgniter profiler class that adds two key debugging features: it displays session variables in a dedicated table during profiling output, and it automatically runs MySQL EXPLAIN queries on all SELECT statements to show query execution plans with details like table access types, key usage, and row estimates.

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ScraperWiki

ScraperWiki rebranded both its product and company: the platform became QuickCode, a Python and R environment for data analysis aimed at economists and statisticians without coding experience, while the parent company became The Sensible Code Company. The rebrand reflects the platform's evolution beyond its original scraping focus toward general data analysis and processing.

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How You Doin? 5 Free Ways to Check Your Site Performance « Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog

This roundup covers free and freemium tools for benchmarking website performance across multiple dimensions: competitive traffic metrics (Google Analytics, Coremetrics, Compete.com), backlink analysis (Open Site Explorer), social media sentiment tracking (Twittersentiment, Socialmention, Twittratr), business ratings aggregation (Google Products), and site speed testing (WebPageTest). The piece argues that combining these quantitative metrics with qualitative feedback helps identify whether performance issues stem from industry-wide trends versus company-specific problems, and reveals competitive opportunities in link building and customer satisfaction.

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Beautiful web-based timeline software

This is a marketing page for Tiki-Toki, a browser-based timeline creation tool that distinguishes itself through 3D visualization, multimedia integration (YouTube and Vimeo), color-coding by category, and collaborative editing features. The page outlines various use cases from personal diaries to corporate histories and legal presentations, and offers tiered pricing from a free single-timeline account to premium options supporting up to 25 timelines with embedding capabilities.

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