Apple says there is an app for almost everything in life and that means there are cool apps for freelancers too. Especially to increase freelance or business on the go productivity. Here’s a list of top 10 must have iPhone apps (paid or free) for any freelancer ( designer, developer, writer) from vaked.com. These ratings are taken based on the usefulness to a freelancer and its overall app store ratings.
10. Creative Whack Pack $2.99
What is it? Bunch of creative cards to get you out of that stupid standard thinking pattern. Basically and iPhone version of the infamous Whack Pack.
App store rating: 4/5
Vaked.com rating: 4.5/5 iTunes Link
9. Recorder $0.99
What is it? Use the built in mic in iPhone to record discussions, interviews, and ideas on your iPhone. I sometimes use it to record my podcasts adn then use it with audacity to increase the sound clarity. The app is pretty neat and does a very good job for 99 cents.
App store rating: 3/5
Vaked.com rating: 4/5 iTunes Link
iLounge Review
8. Paypal (Free)
What is it? A nice and clean iPhone app for Paypal. Although you cant do much with it, its stil useful to quickly send and recieve money.
App store rating: 3/5
Vaked.com rating: 3/5 iTunes Link
Appvee Review
Unless you are really looking for a cheap, down to earth slow computer, you should consider building your own pc. It used to be a difficult gig, but things have changed quite a lot. You have well written articles, self help videos and a huge community of builders to help you. All for free. I’ve seen a lot of people shying away from building their own computer. Common reasons:
What about the warranty?
I don’t have time to assemble.
I don’t have time to research and order the right parts.
I think I lack the knowledge.
Now here’s why I think we (you, me, and other freaks) should build our own computer:
Each part has its own manufacturer warranty
Branded computers come with cheap parts
Branded computers come with unnecessary hardware and software that will make the slow system run even slower.
Save hundreds of dollars
If you are too busy to do research, visit anandtech.com and grab some of their already put together configurations.
No time to assemble? Ask your kid to do it, or spouse.
After building your own computer, you get to brag about it in front of friends, colleagues, and blondes
So, assuming you are willing to give a try, here are the steps you can follow:
Check out anandtech.com for some pre configured machine specs. This will give you clear idea
If you decided to do your own config, start by posting in anandtech forums about your ideal comp. Heres a good place to start
Take people’s advice on forums for right brands and specs under your budget
It’s painful when you have multiple computers, multiple development environment and shitty synchronization softwares. I’ve used Mozy (backup and sync) for a while now and I have to say, I DON’T LIKE IT! I know a lot of people who do but it never worked for me. Anyways I am not writing this to slander Mozy but rather to talk about a very cool and free svn service out there that really rocks! Earlier I was hosting my own svn service and backing it up with Mozy and after Mozy started giving me nightmares, I decided to use a paid svn service and put all the code on a secure location. I researched a lot on available sub version hosts and turns out that most of them dont really care about your code but your money and stupid service.
Come in xp-dev.com. A free and premium subversion (svn) host from a true developer who is genuinely interested in helping other developers. xp-dev.com provides both free and premium accounts and both are exceptionally good. I tried its free account for few months before shifting to premium account and I couldnt wait but to write about it in the nitty bitty section.
If you are a freelancer or just a developer working on projects at home, go give a shot at xp-dev.com’s free version. They also provide Project management, issue tracking and role based security too.
I know Google alongside a lot other big companies provide free svn to developers with great tools. But they are all for open source and public projects. If you want use svn on private projects make sure to protect it from public access. And for that you need a private svn host and they are not cheap or at least interested in helping you.
Also, If you see any similar svn hosts like xp-dev, do let me know.
I’ve been using this one chair since years until last week when it started making this weird noise whenever I move. I started to wonder if I became too fat or its just the chair. I made up my mind to think its the chair and decided to get a new one. So I went to office depot and got a nice not so expensive and not so cheap office chair.
Although I loved using the new chair I always felt something incomplete about it. I thought may be I got used to the old one little too much or I am really becoming fat. I used it for a week and I noticed few things. I wasn’t spending as much time as I use to earlier on the desk. I was coming up with reasons to go to starbucks to work. I was less productive. It’s then I realize that my freaken economical chair isn’t working for me. I took the pain of disassembling the chair and returned it to get a new one. This time I had to up my budget and get a little expensive one out there. Its been just a day since I started using this one, but I really like it.
So, the moral of the story is: Get the right chair if you are serious about working from home. This is the reason why most companies spend millions of dollars on getting best in quality products for their offices. If are on the right chair, you will get the job done!
Since most of us are quite familiar with SCRUM (the agile software development methodology), I thought I’ll post a quick video that my manager put up on our sharepoint site for the team. I liked it so much that I wanted to share with my blog readers. You may have already seen this video, but it never hurt to watch it again.
I wonder if we can apply SCRUM in freelance projects?
I fired a client today. It was difficult. This was my first client I had to let go since years. But I think I took a right decision. Things weren’t so good with us and the project was going beyond what I’ve expected. I did work with the client previously on other projects and I never really enjoyed that experience. I tried hard to look for a win-win situation, bent a lot of rules, but never could find it. It was always loose-win.
Today I feel I have taken the most important step in re-structuring the way I do business and like I said, I feel good about it. I am trying to get rid of some client if:
The client doesn’t enjoy working with me but sticks around because either I am skillful or affordable
I don’t enjoy working with the client but I am sticking to him because I dont have anything else to do
When it comes to freelancing I think it all comes down to enjoying the work and not stressing yourself out. Stress is ok if you are a new comer to freelancing world. But for an established freelancer, one must always work with clients you enjoy working with.
Apple has been really mean to a lot of app developers. You can read about it here, here and here. But even then the bottom line will remain same; App developers will continue to worship iPhone with their lousy spent million dollar apps.
Although there are new app stores coming into the market from Nokia, Microsoft, Android (yeah, this ones quite old. I know), etc. the Apple App Store will remain the develooopa favoritiz. There are some good reasons to make a note of:
Apple will make sure iPhone stays consumer favorite. They’ve done it with Mac, iPod and iPhone is already super hot
Growth of iPhone will continue to prosper. Soon, Verizon will join the party. I can see things getting really big for iPhone
Developing for Nokie’s ovi will be a challenge for developers as there will be n-number of devices from Nokia… supporting each will be difficult
Microsoft will try and never find success with WM7. Microsoft has never been good with mobile. Stupid people.
Developing for Apple doesn’t require anything. Seriously, no money, no idea, no programming knowledge (ok, little bit), no purchasing costly IDEs)
So the bottom line still remains the same. App store dogs will continue to serve the master.
Hey, I’m one among them
About myView: myViews are totally my point of view of things I see in the industry. Could be a good analysis or just stupidity.
You’ve been carrying your photos, documents, project files on a removable portable drive for sometime now. But have you ever thought about carrying the whole development environment? Image if you could carry PHP, Apache, MySQL, Perl, Java, NetBeans and Python environment in your USB Thumb Drive. So that all you have to do is, plug your USB Drive to any computer and have all the environment ready to use, code, debug, deploy etc.
PortableApps.com give you open source and free tools to take your favorite applications and/or environments in a portable drive (USB thumb, iPod, External HDD). So that if you are stuck at your friends place without your work laptop, you can just stick in this USB and get all the files, environment you every wanted?
I currently carry PHP, Apache, MySql, NetBeans, FileZilla and Subversion in my pocket and find it really easy to just plug it to either my work laptop or my friends laptop if I have to work on something urgent. I am also trying to load Visual Studio Express and MS SQL Express on my USB drive.
Well how many times dint it happen that we the designers and/or developers had to test our work on different browsers for cross browser compatibility issues. It could be difficult to do so since there are quite a lot of them in different forms and versions. People still use IE6 and some nut cases have already migrated to IE8. Firefox releases a new version every other day and some grand pas’ still want to use netscape 4. Not to forget Safari. Like I said it could be difficult to test out on all these 50+ browsers.
Come in browsershots.org. A neat online tool that shows you how exactly your site looks in more than 50 web browsers with or without flash, javascript, activx, etc. You can also set the resolution of the screen you’d like to view. The premium account at browsershots.org costs about $30 a month but there is free access to guest if they can wait for 30 mins for processing the shot. The guest access could get litre annoying as you are required to extend the timer every 30 mind if you have multiple shots to view.
All in all a nitty bitty pinky tinky tool to capture those boring shots and cry about fixing the never ending cross browser compatibility issues.
A tip for clients: Use browser shots to annoy your developers on cross browser issues. Designers and developers always loose their minds when it comes to cross browser compatibility.
Update: Screw browsershots.org. Use FireFox and get this addon. You can add a lot of browsers to it. Just follow these steps:
To add more than 50 user agents, download http://techpatterns.com/downloads/firefox/useragentswitcher.xml and select “import”! (without the override option!) by Hellman658
So here’s another story that I wanted to share with fellow freelancers and my clients on how expensive so called “free” open source software can get.
This incident occurred a couple of times but only today that I realize how much expensive the open source bang wagon could be. You can call me a tube light for realizing this so late.
I worked on a Joomla 1.0.x (open source and quite an established php cms software) based project a year back for a niche community of houseboaters. We spent weeks configuring the site to make it work the way my client wanted. Adding new components, creating new components, complex customizations, design, SEO, templating, etc. etc. and it all looked good at the end. The client was very pleased and so was I for what I have created out of Joomla.
It all went fine until yesterday when the site got hacked and Google kicked it out of its search results. The traffic went down drastically leaving nothing but few thousand users. Turns out that my client wasn’t really paying attention to the growing security concerns of Joomla nor was he really interested in upgrading the scripts to the latest version. Anyways, I had to act quickly and figure out the best possible way of getting the site back on Google and make the site secure once again.
I spent one whole night researching and trying to figure out the problem.. finally I found the malicious code and removed it. You can read it here.
After getting it back on Google, our challenge was to make it secure. And the only way to do that was to upgrade to the latest version of Joomla and all the components, customizations etc.
The site has grown exponentially over the year and with so much customization, it has become quite difficult to bulk upgrade the site. Now the whole upgrade project costs almost same as getting a new site.
The point here is, although free open source software comes for free, you still need to shell out quite good amount of money to make it work the way you want. Plus, maintenance and regular monitoring is essential. This hidden cost of maintenance and upgrades could hurt your business model. So, make sure to include it.
Freelancers, a tip for you would be to explain the hidden costs to your clients and sign them for a maintenance contract!
About myView: myViews are totally my point of view of things I see in the industry. Could be a good analysis or just stupidity.
Like most of the people living in USA, I recently joined 'the two jobs on shoulder' club. Working my ass off throughout the day as a software consultant and at night as a freelance web developer, this is my attempt at earning $1.1 million in 3 years. While this blog is mainly focused at freelancing, I take pleasure in writing about other things that interests me. If you like any of my posts, please do subscribe! And also keep an eye on my goals list ;) More
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