We're closing in on the end of another year and that means I've gone another 12 months using home-brewed and half-baked accounting system to run my home-based business.
Maybe 2018 will be the year that I'll get serious about my business and get a quality accounting package like FreshBooks.
As someone who uses two Macs and a variety of iOS devices, FreshBooks sounds like the obvious choice. It tracks projects, financial reports, time logs, and invoices and keeps everything synchronized, whether I'm using a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone.
One key element of FreshBooks is the ability to quickly generate and deliver an invoice to a client, which means you're likely to get paid faster.
The invoices are customized with a business's brand and logo and clients get a personalized thank you email. And users can offer their clients a variety of online payment options, which can also make money move faster.
Other tools will record business expenses and track time spent by you and your team members on different projects. The FreshBook reporting features give clients a clear picture of how much time and money you devoted to their project.
And maybe my tax preparer will give me a discount when I give hime reports and summaries instead of notes and spreadsheets.
FreshBooks offers a free 30-day trail and doesn't require a credit card to take the test drive.
For more details, visit the FreshBooks website and check out the video below. You can also follow @freshbooks on Twitter.
One of the many things I liked about the sorely-missed Vine app was the user interface it presented to viewers. Holding your phone with one hand, you could swipe up and down to find an engaging video and you simply stopped scrolling to watch it. It was an intuitive interface that was clearly designed for the mobile phone generation.
I don’t know if the developers at Vuxo, I Corp. had Vine in mind when they created Gfeed, but they were surely traveling down the same highway. Gfeed is an app that brings the same welcome simplicity to the often confusing mail feed generated by Google ubiquitous Gmail service.
Users who download the app for their iOS or Android phone or tablet are immediately presented with this simple instruction for using the program: Keep Calm and Swipe Up. That’s pretty much Gfeed in an nutshell.
After connecting Gfeed to my own Gmail account, my mail was presented in an attractive, page-filling display on my phone. No settings to to wrestle with and no filters to figure out. The app did everything for me in the background.
Each email message reduced to the basics and the the most important elements. A label at the top of each message identifies the sender. If there’s an image in the message, it comes next, resized to fit the screen. Next comes three action icons followed by a summary text, maybe a paragraph or two, in a font and type size that seems to have been selected for fast reading. This is an app that wants to give you a snapshot of your messages and do it quickly.
Junk mail? Swipe up and move on. A photo of your kids? Take a moment to savor it and show the screen to the people around you without tapping or enlarging. A memorandum from your boss? Click the More button to see the entire message.
Those icons in the quick view give you three options: Give the message a star to make it easy to find later, tap an arrow to open a reply window, or send it to the trash can. The full view has arrow to Reply All or Forward.
That’s about all there is to Gfeed and, really, that’s all it needs to be. You surely have other tools to manage a busy mailbox. This isn’t meant to be one of them. Instead, it’s a mail-reading tool for people who have a lot of demands on their time - or maybe just one free hand at a time.
How could Gfeed improve? The full message display sometime shows just a partial view of the message. I encountered that issue when I opened messages that were highly formatted or loaded with graphics. And in one case I got stuck in the reply window and had to close and reopen the app. But those were both minor inconveniences.
And I wouldn’t encourage the developers to add more features. More options and element and user controls would just add weight to an app that already has the best feature: simplicity. If they need to add something, build in support for other email services. Gfeed currently only works with Gmail.
The app is available as a free download - mercifully without ads - in the iTunes App Store and the Google Play Store. Get a closer look at how Gfeed work in my video review below.
The collection includes 25 different resume designs plus cover letters and business card layouts. The designs can be edited and customized using Microsoft Office 2010 or later as well as other programs such as Adobe CS4 or InDesign.
The collection is packed in a ZIP file that also includes free fonts, a font guide and a help file. The whole package costs $49 and can be purchased and downloaded at the Creative Market website.
The days of a lone programmer knocking out a complete application are long gone. Today’s software is so complicated that it is typically written by teams of coders, often in different locations and continents.
At some point, all those segments have to merged, connected and verified, a process that can significantly lengthen the timeline of a project. Implementing continuous integration (CI), a process that makes those connections while the code is being written, can shorten that timeline.
A hosted CI service called flow.ci says it can make the integration process faster and easier to use. While many CI tools need additional coding or other complex set up steps, flow.ci promises two-click simplicity.
The service works with several programming languages, including Ruby, PHP, Python and Android. And it supports plugin for code analysis, notification engines and other elements.
Users can try flow.ci for free until the end of its current beta period. For more details, visit the flow.ci website.
Like many people, I have lists of things I need to do. Some tasks are work-related and some are personal. There’s the written lists my wife dives me almost daily. There are my digital lists scattered among my mobile apps, including Evernote and text editors. And there are the many items that flit in and out of my brain.
If I’m ever going to be more product, my chore lists need to be more orderly, like the ones in Orderly. It's an iOS app that organizes task lists in a way that matches how our brains work and also keeps those lists stored and accessible.
The app has an attractive visual layout that lets users organize their tasks in folders and by topic. You can have a folder for travel planning, one for home improvement projects and others for grocery shopping or daily chores. An especially clever feature lets you set location-based reminders. I would use it to tell meet pick up a box of cannoli when I’m near my favorite Sicilian bakery.
Last fall I told you about Mosspaper, a web-based service that manages contracts and price quotes and helps users quickly and easily produce documents needed to close a business deal.
The program is designed for sales people, freelance contractors or anyone else who works with quotes and contracts. With Mosspaper, anyone can create, sign, track, and accept quotes and contracts anywhere. After all, we’re working - and selling - in a paperless world. The fax machine gave up the ghost long ago.
Now Mosspaper has added a new level of mobility by packing the program into mobile apps for iOS and Android. App users can securely organize, sync, and store important data such as customer profiles, quotes, and contracts in a centralized workspace. The program comes with built-in workflows and the ability to generate email notifications, alerts and reminders.
Creator tools for quote and contract captures important customer information and sends it out for electronic signature. Moss paper’s goal is to give members of a mobile field staff the tools they need to be truly mobile and productive.
The Mosspaper crew will be exhibiting this week at the 2015 Web Summit in Dublin, which runs from Nov. 3-5. If you can’t make it to Ireland, check out the video below and the apps in the iTunes App Store and the Google Play Store.
A webmaster is dining out with friends when he gets an urgent call on his iPhone. A coding error is causing the company website to blow up and it needs to be fixed pronto.
Buffer Editor is a text and code editor rolled into an iOS app. It has an extended on-screen keyboard that includes two rows of special keys. It supports editing in both insert mode or with Vim and it allows users to code in any language supported by iOS.
Speed features include auto-complete for code, auto-indent. and auto-complete brackets. It also offers fixed-width fonts, font size and spacing and, of course, line numbering.
Buffer Editor is currently on sale for $1.99 in the iTunes App Store. You can get more details and see the full list of features at the Buffer Editor website and you can follow @buffereditor on Twitter.
When I went to a large city library a few years ago to do some family history research, I wanted to make copies of several pages from some reference books. The library charged 10 cents per page and before long, I had spent more that $20 at the photocopier.
The next time I need to copy book pages at the library, I’ll do it with MyOffice. It’s an iPhone productivity app that recently added document scanning ability. For the cost of the app - less than $6 - I could have all the pages I want stored as PDF documents.
Scanning is just one of many tasks myOffice can perform. I also like it’s ability to create a spreadsheet file that can be opened and edited in Microsoft Excel. It also opens documents that were created with Microsoft Office or iWork, converts them into PDF files and lets you annotate them with colors, hand-drawn sketches and highlights.
Documents can be shared from myOffice by sending them as email attachments or storing them on Dropbox, Google Drive or FTP sites. And the app comes with templates for creating a resume, meeting notes, business letters and other documents.
For the full list of myOffice’s features, check out the listing in the iTunes App Store.
Microsoft Office has been a valuable application suite for many years, but it hasn’t exactly made a smooth transition to the world of mobile computing. And that turned out to be an opportunity for Mindspeak Software, a company that has produced a series of productivity apps that work with popular file formats.
The app has a buklt-in word processor that lets you create and edit text documents using the rich text file format. You can work on documents when you are not connected to the Internet and sync them with Dropbox, Google Drive or other cloud services when you are online.
For diehard MS Office users, the app will let you open and view Word and Excel files and well as PowerPoint, iWork and other formats.
The app also offers advanced integration with the PDF file format. Users can convert text file to PDF, add comments and highlights and draw draw sketches inside a file. It also supports the ability to sign and email a PDF.
Documents Word Processor and Reader for Microsoft Office costs $4.99 in the iTunes App Store. An enhanced version with extended integration with Dropbox and Google Drive is also available.
Let’s see, where did I store those photos from last summer’s vacation? Was it Dropbox? Google Drive? One Drive? I have so many cloud storage options that it’s hard to remember what’s stored where.
That’s the problem that Halfword Software tackled when it created its new Unify app for iOS devices. Unify lets you collect and manage accounts on six different cloud storage services. It works with Dropbox, Put.io, Box, Copy, Google Drive and One Drive.
The app treats the storage spots like file folders. You can browse, download, preview, transfer files between services and unpack compressed files and groups.
Unify also has it’s own music and movie player with support for divx, mkv and other formats. It also lets you read comic that use CBR or CBZ formats.
When Microsoft built the Office suite of software in 1988, the world already had perfectly good programs for word processing, spreadsheets and business presentations. What it didn’t have was a way for those programs to work together.
The people who built Teenyoffice for the travel industry saw the same unmet need. Travel agents and agencies had to find and learn different software for accounting, invoicing, email marketing and client management. Teeny office brings those functions together in one cloud-based platform.
Some of the functions offered by Teenyoffice include client travel and email history, passport reminders, invoicing in different currencies, and multiple vendor invoicing with commission tracking.
Teeny office costs $340 a year with a $100 fee to upload an existing database. There’s more details at the Teenyoffice website and @TeenyOffice on Twitter.
I’m so busy, I could use a private secretary. Couldn’t you? Someone who would schedule appointments, keep a To-Do list, send reminders to me any my associates and generally keep the wheels holed and turning.
Hiring someone to do that work is not an option, so I’m looking as automated tools to handle those kinds of job. And GigaBook looks very promising.
The cloud-based business service will manage your calendar, send reminders by email or text, update project lists ad handle similar chores. Because it works in the cloud, all the information is available from desktop and mobile devices. The Dashboard shown here puts all the tools in a single view.
GigaBook also offers booking widgets that can be embedded in a company or personal website to accept individual or group appointments or reservations.
You can sign up for a free trial at the GigaBook website or choose a monthly subscription plan for an individual or teams. They’re also on Twitter @mygigabook.
Everyone in our house makes lists. Groceries to buy. Items to take on our next vacation trip. Things that need fixing. Ideas to get rich.
Being a digital kind of guy, I've tried using a number apps and electronic note pads, but we always come back to paper and pencil. Maybe we're overthinking the mission. Maybe we should try something simple like Todoists.
Todoists is a straight and simple task list app for iPhones and iPads. It lets you creats lists with simple totles, like Groceries or Work. Then you add items to each list. And there's this one very useful feature - you can attach a photo to any item. That can be particularly handy when you need the label to get the formula for custom-mixed paint or the dosage for medicine or diet supplements.
That's pretty much all there is to Todoists - and that's probably all anyone would need.
I started reporting on gadgets and gear when Atari ruled electronic games and computers used floppy disks. My weekly column ran in the The Louisville Courier-Journal and online at USAToday.com and ABC News.com. I was a regular at tech trade shows including COMDEX, CES and the CEDIA show for home theater. Follow @GizmoEditor on Twitter and on Facebook. Contact me at ricman@iglou.comI also create short videos for vendors to use on Amazon and YouTube. Click here to see a portfolio of my recent videos.
Video by Gizmo
Need a video to promote your app or product? Check out my gig at Fiverr.com and browse my video portfolio here.
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