And while there are some apps that can tell you who unfollowed you, it’s not a built-in feature of Twitter, so it’s all very low profile. But what about the times you want to let someone know why you flew the coop? For that, you need BirdLaunch.

How it Works

It’s really easy. You log in using your Twitter account, then enter the Twitter username of the person you’d like to unfollow. Explain why, and hit submit—after that you’re no longer following them. If they’ve never been unfollowed using BirdLaunch before, a page is generated for them, and your reason is posted on it. If they have, your reason is added to the rest on their page.

Interested in who’s unfollowed who and why? Want to check on your own BirdLaunch page? Simply head to any Twitter user’s BirdLaunch page and you’ll find an always up-to-date list.

An Arc90 Lab Project

BirdLaunch is the ninth of a handful of projects to come out of the Arc90 2012 Hackathon. The Hackathon gives us time to make simple apps that shake things up. If you’d like to learn more about how Arc90 can help your business, get in touch!

A lot of sites have a mobile version that simplifies things, putting important information front and center. Sure, that’s probably just a side effect of designs based on other concerns, like limited time, or slow connections, but it’s super handy. We wanted to bring that ease of discovery to desktop and notebook computers, so we made Glimpse, a Chrome Add-On that helps do just that.

How it Works

Once installed, Glimpse lives on your toolbar. When you click it, an iPhone-sized pop-over appears—you can think of it as a mobile browser for your non-mobile browser. When you visit a site in it, the mobile version loads automatically, giving you quick, easy access to exactly what you were looking for, whether it’s your calendar, reminders, or even a simplified news feed. We recommend exploring and trying different sites out. You’ll be surprised by the lack of cruft and distractions.

Save your Faves

When you find a mobile site that suits your needs, you can save it to Glimpse. All of your saved sites are available with the click of a button anytime you launch the Add-On. Once you’ve added a few favorites to your list, you can quickly find the content you’re after whenever you need it.

Install Glimpse

Just visit the Chrome Web Store to install Glimpse with a quick click!

An Open Source Arc90 Lab Project

Glimpse is an open source Arc90 Lab project released under the Apache 2.0 license. Developers are welcome to play around by visiting the Github repo.

Glimpse is the eighth of a handful of projects to come out of the Arc90 2012 Hackathon. The Hackathon gives us the freedom and time to bend the web to our liking. If you’d like to learn more about how Arc90 can help your business, get in touch!

Remembering dependency chains, especially if they are a few steps removed, is no easy task. We saw that as a problem worth solving, so we made It Depends, a dependency management app.

A Dependable Way to Track Your Dependencies

With It Depends, you can easily define entities, then create “depends on” relationships with the other entities in the system. Entities can literally be anything: circuits, outlets, switches, servers, apps, people, rooms, buildings—you name it.

After creating some entities, and establishing the relationships between them, you can ask questions like “What apps depend on my app?”, “What people does my app depend on?”, “What will be affected if I turn off this server?”, “What are the potential effects of Liz going on vacation?” and be confident in the answer being accurate, even if the dependencies are several degrees removed.

An Arc90 Lab Project

It Depends is the seventh of a handful of projects to come out of the Arc90 2012 Hackathon. The Hackathon gives us time to create tools we want to use ourselves. If you’d like to learn more about how Arc90 can help your business, get in touch!

Creating a Form

Creating a form with EFBE is extremely simple — if you can type, you can do it. First, give your form a name. Then, in the textbox below that, describe your form, one line at a time. So if you’re collecting a first name, last name, and age, your edit screen will look something like this:

To the right, you’ll see an automatically updated preview of your form. It’s handy because you can see exactly what your form will look like, as you work on it. With the current example, it should look something like this:

When your form looks just right, click the Save Form button. EFBE will spit out a link to your completed form. Email it, tweet it, post it to your LiveJournal — how you spread it is up to you. But when people click it, they can fill your form out and you can start collecting information. It’s that easy.

Checking the Results

Checking the results is a breeze too. Simply bookmark the page EFBE sends you to after you click the Save Form button. When you hit that page, you’ll see the current results of your form. If you notice something you’d like to change, you can edit your form too.

An Arc90 Lab Project

The Easiest Form Builder Ever is the sixth of a handful of projects to come out of the Arc90 2012 Hackathon. The Hackathon gives us time to make the smart but simple tools we crave. If you’d like to learn more about how Arc90 can help your business, get in touch!

Even if you took the time to learn all of the markup languages out there, you’d probably still have a favorite. With Marksy, you can write in your favorite markup language and automatically translate it to any other language we support. You can get started on our site, but our Chrome Extension is even handier.

Use Marksy in Chrome

With our Chrome Extension, you can translate markup on the fly. Simply write your comment or post in your preferred markup, then right-click or shift-cmd/ctrl-m to activate Marksy. A panel will appear — select the markup language you want to translate to and you’re all set. It’s that easy.

Supported Markup Languages

• Markdown
• reStructuredText
• Textile
• HTML
• MediaWiki
• ConfluenceWiki (Jira)
• GitHub Flavored Markdown (GitHub)
• Googlecode
• Jspwiki
• Moinmoin
• Trac

An Arc90 Lab Project

Marksy is the fifth of a handful of projects to come out of the Arc90 2012 Hackathon. The Hackathon lets us scratch our own itch, creating useful tools for everyone in the process. If you’d like to learn more about how Arc90 can help your business, get in touch!

When studying and thinking about history, it’s easy to feel disconnected from events that occurred thousands of years ago. It’s also easy to disconnect moments in time from each other, depriving them of their historical context. Recorded history is full of interesting coincidences and overlap, but we often study it based on subjects and movements, so we aren’t aware of the relative timing of historical events. We wanted to change that, so we made Contemporaries.

We’ve collected a bunch of moments in history and put them into three categories: Ancient, Middle Ages, and Modern. Select as many as you’d like, and Contemporaries will put them on a timeline, charting their relative chronology, making it easier to see them in historical context.

We’ve also taken some time to document some fascinating pairs in history. You can click any of them and instantly see where the fall, and how they relate, on the timeline. Once you’ve explored them all, try discovering your own!

An Arc90 Lab Project

Contemporaries is the fourth of a handful of projects to come out of the Arc90 2012 Hackathon. The Hackathon lets us quickly turn ideas into reality. If you’d like to learn more about how Arc90 can help your business, get in touch!

Besides its good looks, JSON Lint Pro brings a new way to edit to the table: split mode. With split mode you can speed up your workflow, and, more importantly, you can diff — something anyone who works with a lot of JSON will find indispensable.

So what are you waiting for? Get validating!

An Arc90 Lab Project

JSON Lint Pro is the second of a handful of projects to come out of the Arc90 2012 Hackathon. The Hackathon is great time to for Arc90 create new tools — and polish up and improve old favorites. If you’d like to learn more about how Arc90 can help your business, get in touch!

Must Read slows things down and raises the bar for posting, making it easy to find awesome articles to read. Choose the one article you think everyone should read—right now—and share it with a note explaining why. That’s it. Until you discover the next one.

Getting Started with Must Read

Posting a must-read is simple. Click the ‘New must-read’ button on the top right, then paste a URL into the pop-over that appears. (Or you can use the handy bookmarklet.) Must Read is powered by Readability, so when you click the +, you’re taken to the next step, where the headline, byline, publish date, lead image, and excerpt have been filled out automatically.

The Why is as Important as the What

But not everything is automatic, by design. On Must Read, you need to provide a note explaining why the article is a must-read, and it isn’t optional. This isn’t just about dropping links into a feed — it’s about sharing great articles and giving them context. When an article is truly a must-read, you won’t have trouble explaining why.

The Life of a Must-Read

When you post a new must-read, it replaces the old one, on your profile and on the list of the people following you. You can add a new must-read as often as you’d like, but we recommend giving them some time to breathe. Think quality over quantity.

If you’ve given your must-read some time to shine, and you want to know how popular it is, you can check the read count on the bottom-left. If you’d like to share your must-read—or anyone else’s—on Twitter, you can do that too, on the bottom-right.

You can also ‘Read Now’ on Readability, or add must-reads to your Reading List if you’ve connected your Readability account to Must Read.

Follow People and Let the Must-Reads Come to You

If you’re looking for new must-reads, or some great new people to follow, head on over to our Discover page. On there, you’ll see the current must-read of every single person on Must Read.

See someone posting excellent must-reads? Follow them. On Must Read, you see the current must-read of each person you follow, and nothing else. It’s a command center for vital reading, handpicked by people you’ve handpicked.

An Arc90 Lab Project

Must Read is the first of a handful of projects to come out of the Arc90 2012 Hackathon. The Hackathon is a great outlet for Arc90 to blow off its technical and creative steam. If you’d like to learn more about how Arc90 can help your business, get in touch!

Choose the League

Getting started with Team Colors is super easy. The first thing you’ll do is pick your league of choice from the drop down menu: NBA, NFL, MLB, or NHL.

Find Your Team

Then, find your team in the list. Under each team, you’ll see their logo—and the colors that make it up, separated out. On every color, you’ll find an extremely useful corresponding HEX code.

Simply Copy & Paste

After that, it’s just a matter of copy and paste. Grab each color’s HEX code and use it while you design. Drop it into your HTML, or use it in Photoshop, or any other app that let’s you use HEX codes to represent and choose colors.

An Arc90 Lab Project

Team Colors is our third Arc90 2012 Hackathon project. Here at Arc90, we think it’s important to experiment and use our creative and technical skills in new ways. If you’d like to learn more about how Arc90 can help your business, get in touch!

But there’s a problem. Using those functions requires you to recompile and preview your work every time you want to tweak a color. And often, you won’t get it right on the first try.

Enter SassMe. It’s a tool that allows you to put in a base color and use sliders to tweak the Sass functions lightness, hue and saturation right in the browser, no compiling necessary. And it shows you the before and after picture side by side, so you can get your color choices just right before grabbing the code.

 You can use SassMe right now by visiting:

http://sassme.arc90.com

We hope you find SassMe as useful as we have. Got an idea to make this tool even better? Fork the code on GitHub and shoot us a pull request, or drop us a line on the Arc90 Blog.

A little backstory: here at the Arc90 office in midtown Manhattan, we have an ongoing problem with static electricity… and an ongoing love of video games. Robert mixes static and zombies to bring us Arc90: The Game. Play it by visiting:

http://game.arc90.com

If you’ve been to our offices in midtown Manhattan, you’re sure to recognize a thing or two. Enjoy!

A collaboration between the Arc90 Lab and Readability, Readlists is a fast flexible service for creating an e-book from any content you encounter on the web.

How does it work?

To create your own Readlist, click the ‘Make a Readlist’ button at www.readlists.com. Then, simply cut and paste a URL from any web article into the empty list you see. Give the collection a title and short description, click ‘Add’, and you’re good to go! Your e-book file will be beautifully formatted and available to peruse on your device of choice. Add as many articles as you like.

One list, many destinations

Once your Readlist is created, you can port it to a host of formats or send it along to your Amazon Kindle, iPhone or iPad. Along the left, you’ll find a host of options for exporting and sharing your Readlist:

• Send to Kindle. Send an entire Readlist to your Amazon Kindle eReader or Kindle Fire device.
• Send to iPhone/iPad. If you’ve got iBooks installed on your iPhone or iPad, send the Readlist as a book to iBooks.
• Email e-Book. Send an ePub file to yourself or your friends. Many devices and apps support the ePub format for reading.
• Download e-Book. Download an e-Book for yourself.
• Share on Facebook. Share the Readlists with your friends or followers on Facebook and Twitter.
• Embed. Similar to embedding a Youtube video, you can even embed a readlists into your own blog post or Tumblr page by pasting the code provided by clicking Embed.

Owning your Readlists.

If you’d like to own and manage your own set of Readlists, simply start by creating a Readability account (you can get a free Readability account here). If you already have a Readability account, select the ‘Log in with Readability’ option in the top right of the screen. Then, you can own and manage as many Readlists as you like.

Also, if you’d like to allow others to edit Readlists you’ve created, you can share a public edit URL. Every Readlist has one. If you share that URL, anyone can add to or modify your Readlist. Just be careful, that URL can be given to anyone.

Underneath the Hood

Readlists uses both the content and consumer API. Our Python API wrapper (available at  https://github.com/arc90/python-readability-api) communicates between Readability and Readlists including authentication handled via XAuth support in the API and API wrapper. Using XAuth allows us to authenticate the user without ever having to store their password.

Readlists is built atop the Readability API. If you’re interested in building apps like Readlists on the Readability platform, you can request an API key here.

Discuss

We’d love to hear your feedback – chime in here!

One of the best features of Git is cheap branches. There are existing branching models like GitHub Flow and Vincent Driessen’s git-flow that describe methods for using this feature.

The problem

Your master branch is typically where all your code lands. All features branches are meant to be short-lived and merged into master once they are completed.

As time marches on, you can build up a long list of branches that are no longer needed. They’ve been merged into master, what do we do with them now?

The answer

Using git-sweep you can safely remove remote branches that have been merged into master.

To install it run:

pip install git-sweep || easy_install git-sweep

Try it for yourself (safely)

To see a list of branches that git-sweep detects are merged into your master branch:

You need to have your Git repository as your current working directory.

$ cd myrepo

The preview command doesn’t make any changes to your repo.

$ git-sweep preview
Fetching from the remote
These branches have been merged into master:

  branch1
  branch3
  branch3
  branch4
  branch5

To delete them, run again with `git-sweep cleanup`

If you are happy with the list, you can run the command that deletes these branches from the remote, cleanup:

$ git-sweep cleanup
Fetching from the remote
These branches have been merged into master:

  branch1
  branch3
  branch3
  branch4
  branch5

Delete these branches? (y/n) y
  deleting branch1 (done)
  deleting branch3 (done)
  deleting branch3 (done)
  deleting branch4 (done)
  deleting branch5 (done)

All done!

Tell everyone to run `git fetch --prune` to sync with this remote.
(you don't have to, yours is synced)

Note: this can take a little time, it’s talking over the tubes to the remote.

You can also give it a different name for your remote and master branches.

$ git-sweep preview --master=develop --origin=github
...

Tell it to skip the git fetch that it does by default.

$ git-sweep preview --nofetch
These branches have been merged into master:

  branch1

To delete them, run again with `git-sweep cleanup --nofetch`

Make it skip certain branches.

$ git-sweep preview --skip=develop
Fetching from the remote
These branches have been merged into master:

  important-upgrade
  upgrade-libs
  derp-removal

To delete them, run again with `git-sweep cleanup --skip=develop`

Once git-sweep finds the branches, you’ll be asked to confirm that you wish to delete them.

Delete these branches? (y/n)

You can use the --force option to bypass this and start deleting immediately.

$ git-sweep cleanup --skip=develop --force
Fetching from the remote
These branches have been merged into master:

  important-upgrade
  upgrade-libs
  derp-removal

  deleting important-upgrade (done)
  deleting upgrade-libs (done)
  deleting derp-removal (done)

All done!

Tell everyone to run `git fetch --prune` to sync with this remote.
(you don't have to, yours is synced)

Development

git-sweep is available on GitHub.

It uses git-flow for development and release cycles. If you want to hack on this with us, fork the project and put a pull request into the develop branch when you get done.

To run the tests, bootstrap Buildout and run this command:

$ git clone http://github.com/arc90/git-sweep.git
$ cd git-sweep
$ python2.7 bootstrap.py
...
$ ./bin/buildout
...
$ ./bin/test

We also use Tox. It will run the tests for Python 2.6 and 2.7.

$ ./bin/tox

Requirements

• Git >= 1.7
• Python >= 2.6

License

Friendly neighborhood MIT license.

Donahue is a web app co-designed and built by Arc90 and Behavior Design. The original idea for Donahue was born out of frustration with the state of (in)attention paid to presenters at conferences. As the project evolved, the tool shifted to one that attempts to break down the wall between the presenter and the audience. By creating a frictionless environment for the audience to react, respond, reject or share the presenter’s ideas, Donahue shifts the standard presentation from a broadcast / consumer approach into a that of a conversation. And this is precisely the reason that people attend conferences – to engage in conversations.

Donahue – a new and unique presentation tool powered by Twitter – was unveiled at SXSW 2011, in a talk co-presented by Arc90′s Tim Meaney and Behavior Design’s Chris Fahey. Tim and Chris delivered the talk, titled “Toss the Projector: Redefining the Audience / Presenter Dynamic“, via Donahue. The ideas explored in this talk were reinforced by Donahue, including:

• Conference talks, like all media, have been transformed from broadcast to conversation.
• The technology of the conference presentation is broken.
• The audience insists upon having a conversation in real-time about the presenter’s ideas, and the presenter should embrace this.
• A presenter’s goal for a talk should be to start a meme.
• Our collective concept of attention is changing.

Donahue uses Twitter as its conversation medium. Each “slide” unveiled in Donahue is actually a tweet sent out in real-time by the presenter. The audience reaction (i.e. the “back channel”) is collected and displayed by Donahue in a unique presentation console that participants – whether present at the talk or anywhere in the world – can enjoy and use to directly engage. The result is a uniquely intimate and engaging experience that is markedly different from the typically passive experience of sitting through an exposition accompanied by a slide deck.

Another premise behind Donahue is that while presentations have a beginning and end point, the chatter lingers on long after. Donahue leaves behind a permanent record of the speaker’s ideas, and the audience’s reaction to their points. This eliminates the abstraction of uploading the slides for later review by the audience, as the speaker’s ideas are immediately and always available online.

As a real-time platform for having a conversation around a conference presentation, Donahue had to be extremely scalable and performant. The possibility for a huge amount of curious participants was very real, as Donahue reaches out immediately into Twitter (what we internally called The O’Reilly Effect, where one retweet from Tim O’Reilly could bring in tens of thousand viewers to the presentation). Donahue achieved this level of performance with an architecture built upon real-time consumption of the Twitter API, dedicated node.js servers for the presenter and projector views of the content, a replicated farm of node servers for serving content to participants and directly connected clients using WebSockets instead of aggressive polling. The kick-ass development team behind Donahue will be sharing the architecture and technical thinking behind Donahue in future blog posts.

Arc90 and Behavior are exploring options for moving this project forward, follow @donahueapp on Twitter to stay informed of any news. For further information about the project read Conversation is the New Attention.