Think of getting yourself a website – how would you go about it? Some might suggest employing a web designer, but a growing range of folks would be confident about creating their own website, thanks to the proliferation of WYSIWYG, do-it-yourself services like Weebly, Moonfruit, or Basekit.
The DIY route doesn’t always provide the best results, though – professional designers, whatever their preferred medium, still tend to produce the best-looking and most creative end products. It is strange, then, that there is a distinct lack of WYSIWYG services aimed specifically at the professionals.
Perhaps Webydo can start to change that. Webydo features Photoshop-style layout creation, drag-and-drop controls, and an enticing freemium pricing model. But can Webydo really be the breakthrough product for designers wishing to unleash their creativity on the web?
Continuing from where we left off with my lists of tiny, free and useful apps for designers and developers, we’ve put together a list of 10 simple yet terribly useful apps for freelancers.
If you are a freelancer, you already know the pains of wearing a bunch of hats all at the same time. Unlike with teams and bigger organizations, there aren’t people assigned to take care of certain tasks while others focus on what they do best. Nope, you’re alone and most probably taking care of everything from your finances and communication to day-to-day project work all by yourself.
What follows is a list of apps that can ease that pressure a bit — they’ll take care of some of those menial tasks while you spend your valuable time and energies on keeping your clients happy.
Looking for a tool to help you get more out of the Flash files you have, letting you convert your existing Flash files to HTML5 so they’ll work on all modern browsers, and giving you the tools to easily download and extract design elements from Flash files? If so, then you’ll want to check out Sothink SWF Decompiler, our sponsor this week, just might be what you need.
Sothink SWF Decompiler gives you everything you need to work with your Flash files. It gives you tools to easily download Flash files from your site, and then lets you convert the Flash files into a fully editable FLA or FLEX file that you can tweak inside the app or in Adobe Flash Pro. You can then easily extract design elements from your Flash files to use in other design work, or replace, say, an image or audio in a Flash file to update your branding. Finally, you can convert Flash videos and animations to HTML5 compatible formats, to make your old Flash site work on any modern browser.
It gives you everything you’ll need to get the most out of your Flash files and not waste any of the time or design elements you’ve put into Flash over the years, even if you’re moving to the future with HTML5.
Go Get it!
If you’ve been needing a tool to help you modernize your Flash powered sites, or want to tweak your Flash files without having to purchase Adobe Flash Pro, then you should be sure to try out Sothink SWF Decompiler. You can download a free trial of SWF Decompiler for Windows if you’re a PC user, or get SWF Decompiler for Mac. You can then purchase your own copy for $79.99 directly from their site.
When it comes to saving things from the web, there are a lot of different ways to do this. For me, when it comes to saving articles, I am a huge fan of Pocket for many reasons that I won’t get into here. But, now that I am going back to school, I find that I am having to save a lot more information from the web than I have in a long time. The main reason why I don’t use a service like Pocket or Instapaper for this is because I want a place where I can dump whatever I find into something temporarily. I don’t like to mix up the articles that I want to read or save for later with my snippets of research for my thesis.
I have used Evernote before for this purpose, but then I came along a web app called Dragdis, which takes a different approach to saving things online. Instead of saving articles or texts to a service, it lets you drag and drop what you want to save so that you can come back to it later. It is actually a pretty neat idea and with some help from HTML 5, this is a slick app to use. Let me show you more about what it can do.
How many photos do you have littered across various devices and services? The ease with which we can now snap photos means that most of us now have thousands of images dotted across numerous online services.
Sick of having to jump from one site to another just to find the image you’re looking for? Trovebox is here to help. Consolidation is the order of the day as this is a service that enables you to pull all of your images into one place for ease of access.
The web is chock-full of cloud storage services these days, and that’s actually a good thing: you can choose from a vast range of apps with different features and pricing and opt for one that suits your needs and budget perfectly. I personally prefer Dropbox because it lives on my desktop, syncs files across all my devices and allows for easy file sharing with clients, colleagues, bandmates and friends.
Suyara is the latest contender to enter the ring, and comes in a-swinging with multiple plans for home and business users, a flexible file management UI, file previews and more. Today we’re going to pair up this new service from Spain to see how it fares against the heavyweights, and whether it can knock out the competition. Let’s glove up!
Between the desktop, web and mobile, there are so many different apps that can help you create and manage tasks. Many of them offer the ability to collaborate with a team as well. So, if a tool is what you are missing in your quest to stay productive, lack of choices is never going to be the problem.
But, every team has its own requirements. Some prefer planning to the boot with every single aspect of the tasks jotted down. Some might prefer to go with a big picture view, focusing mainly on understanding where things stand at any given time. From the looks of it, DropTask appears to be a web app that can help people who prefer to track tasks at a glance. Let’s take a closer look.
Posterous used to be one of the simplest places to start a new blog. You’d just send an email to post@posterous.com, and boom!, you had a new blog. It changed over the years, but continued to be a popular place to blog … that is, until Twitter bought out Posterous last year, then announced that they’re shutting it down on April 30th.
We’ve just reviewed Posthaven, the new alternate to Posterous from some of the original Posterous team, but we were wondering how many of you actually used Posterous regularly.
Did you start out blogging with Posterous, or did you move to it from other, more complex services? What do you plan to use to blog now? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
The world is different now. If you’re reading this article, you’re already connected with people around the world online, and our own writing team hails from a number of different countries. Now you don’t need to leave your country to work and shop beyond your border.
There’s tons of essential apps that help us all work online and be more productive in today’s interconnected world, but there’s one service that, more than any other, makes global work and commerce actually work: PayPal. The payment juggernaut owned by eBay is the handiest way to transfer money overseas without all the bureaucracy of dealing with banks.
If you sell stuff online, you’ll likely get paid via PayPal, so why not use PayPal to pay for all of your online services? There’s one problem: everyone doesn’t accept PayPal payments. Let’s look at the most popular services that don’t work with PayPal, and the alternates you can use with PayPal instead.
Posterous is getting shut down in just a couple weeks, so if your blog is still on Posterous, it’s time to find it a new home. The good thing is, there’s lots of options today. WordPress is one obvious solution, since you can import Posterous sites directly into both WordPress.com blogs or WordPress on your own server. Many other blogging tools have import tools, too, including Tumblr, Squarespace, and my personal favorite, Kirby.
The most Posterous-like option, though, might be Posthaven, a brand new blogging service started by Posterous co-founder Garry Tan. We interviewed Garry about Posthaven last month, and now that the service is open to the public, let’s take it for a spin and see if it’s the perfect new home for your old Posterous blog — or perhaps for a brand-new blog.
