Will Chatham

These are some appli­ca­tions (free and not free) that I have been using a lot, and that I would now con­sider myself unable to live with­out. All of them are web-based in that they are acces­si­ble from the inter­net and can be logged into from any­where. This makes work­ing from home, from the office, and from the cof­fee shop a breeze.

Back­pack — http://backpackit.com/
This appli­ca­tion is excel­lent for any­one doing any sort of project man­age­ment, free­lanc­ing, or col­lab­o­ra­tion. I was skep­ti­cal at first when I signed up for the free trial, but then I real­ized the power after using it for a few weeks. I was hooked when they low­ered the price of the mid-level package.

Back­pack allows you to set up projects (Pages, as they call them) for each of your projects. Each of these Pages has to-do lists, Notes, file uploads, the abil­ity to share this con­tent with some­one, Write­boards, and more.

One of my favorite fea­tures is the Reminder fea­ture, which will send you an email and/or a text mes­sage on your phone when an event is about to occure. Also, there is the abil­ity to send an email to Back­pack and have it be added to a Page auto­mat­i­cally. Pretty darn cool.

Time­Tracker v2.0 — http://www.formassembly.com/time-tracker/
After try­ing numer­ous time-tracking apps that run off my PC, I landed at the Time­Tracker web site. I can now set up projects and keep track of how much time I have spent on each. Slices of time can have notes appended to them so I can keep track of what I did dur­ing any given time. This makes billing clients for work I have done a breeze. Oh, and it’s free!

For­Per­fect CIn­voicer — http://www.forperfect.com/seo/cinvoice.php
This is an online billing/invoice sys­tem that you have to down­load and install on a web site your­self, but it does every­thing I need it to do, albeit a lit­tle con­fus­ing. I wanted a tool to keep track of client invoices, send out reminders, send out recur­ring bills auto­mat­i­cally, inte­grate with Pay­pal and 2checkout, and be rea­son­ably easy to use for clients. This does it all. Con­fig­ur­ing it to look and act like I wanted took a lit­tle time, but once it was done every­thing is run­ning smoothly.

It costs $39.95 and requires a lit­tle MySQL knowl­edge to install it. There is a live demo on their web site (linked above).

Hip­Cal — http://www.hipcal.com/
I have talked about Hip­Cal before, and I still love it. It is more feature-rich than any of the other online cal­en­dars I have toyed with. For a while I thought 30Boxes was going to trump Hip­Cal, but when their devel­op­ers showed a lack of inter­est (if not a defi­ant stance) in enhanc­ing the repeata­bil­ity of events, I gave up on them. They are shoot­ing them­selves in the foot if you ask me, but I digress…

Hip­Cal rocks, and after their first cou­ple of rocky months (bugs, server issues), things seem to have sta­bi­lized and I am enjoy­ing the free cal­en­dar a lot. It will send me reminders of events, and has a sim­ple to-do list on the side.

Netvibes — http://www.netvibes.com/
Netvibes keeps get­ting cooler and cooler. It’s a ‘start page’ of sorts that allows you to cus­tomize the lay­out and con­tent to your lik­ing. You can add your favorite RSS feeds, wid­gets, email inter­faces, and more. They just launched a major upgrade that has a ton of great fea­tures. I have tried other sim­i­lar start pages, but they all suck and are clunky com­pared to Netvibes.

Sum­mary
That about wraps it up.