This weeks selection hits particularly close to home for me and some of my esteemed colleagues. It’s called JibberJobber and it’s pretty slick. They style themselves Career Management 2.0, and I think they bring the goods to back it up.
The software is pretty simple. After you get signed up, you start tracking things like which recruiters you’re working with, any companies you’ve targeted, interview dates and so on. After you plug all that info in, you can do things like search for people on Google, LinkedIn etc directly from the app, you can set follow-ups and reminders and such. It’s like a CRM system for your job search. You’re supposed to be working at this like it’s a full-time job, right? This is the system you need to track your efforts.
It will even show you all of the companies that it knows about in your area:
The base product is free, you can upgrade for 5 or 10 bucks a month and get some nice add-ons. If you’re in the market, check this one out!
Recently I came across Intuit’s Billing Manager. It is a VERY simple way to invoice your clients and keep track of payments. Did I mention it was free? It lets you send unlimited invoices to unlimited clients. Seriously, you can sign up and have an invoice sent out in less time than it will take to you to read this post.
Billing Manager lets you (for a fee) make use of Inuit’s Merchant service to accept credit cards, and you can even seamlessly upgrade to Quickbooks online. Pretty slick of them.
Seriously, if you need basic invoicing and payment tracking ability, you should check this out.
This installment comes to us courtesy of a colleague and a gentleman, Steve Lacey. He sent me over the link and I really thought this was cool. Allow me to set it up a bit.
I have been called an idea hamster. I admit it. I get jazzed up on some concept, think about it and plot a bit, and then move on to the next one. Execution has been a struggle for me in some ways. I just can’t ever seem to foc…hey, look! Ooooh, something shiny!
Anyway, this software is called PersonalBrain. I’m not sure that it will help out with my execution problems, but it WILL let me think of ideas much FASTER. WOOT! Take a look:
It may not look like much to you, but this is one powerful tool for visualizing what’s important to you. A few things I think are just killer:
- You can copy OR link to files on your computer (and network!).
- You can link to web sites and even configure how many links deep you want it to go.
- The search/indexing is amazing.
- “Show Forgotten Thoughts” is like a recycle bin for your thoughts, which I think is pretty nifty.
The pay versions of this package are a little pricey, $150 for Core and $250 for Professional, but it seems to have a lot of functionality in the free product. If you feel like you don’t have enough ideas in your life, I guarantee that this will spark some new ones!
Ok, so that title is a lie this week. Not even a little true. The cool software that you NEED to check out right now is not free. It is a whopping $5/month per computer. Let me tell you why I have violated my own free software principles to recommend this package.
But first, indulge me while I relate a cautionary tale. This week a gentleman that I know came to me with his wife’s iMac and told me that the hard drive was dead. I took a look at it and quickly verified that it was not just dead, but what I like to call dead dead. As in the drive doesn’t spin up at all, no movement no vibration, nothing. I can do nothing for someone in this situation other than recommend some high priced recovery services which will charge you whether they get your data back or not.
He said not to worry, they had an external drive for a backup. I thought little of it until the next time I saw him when he told me that his wife was a basket case because the external drive had failed also. All of their picture, financial data, email, etc was now apparently gone. What a horrible feeling! As a technology guy, that’s one of the worst things to have to tell someone. (Don’t worry, I got their data back from the external drive.)
The moral of this story is that hard drives are evil. There are only two kinds of hard drives in the world. Dying and dead. (If I were a morbid person, I would say the same thing about people.) Don’t trust them. They will hose you. If your pictures don’t exist in more than one place, you will regret it sooner or later.
This brings me back to the software topic that we started with. There’s a great service called BackBlaze and your $5 per computer per month will get you UNLIMITED storage. That’s right UNLIMITED storage.
It works for both Mac and Windows clients (no servers though). It compresses your files, de-duplicates, it slices and dices all for a low low price. Seriously, you NEED to back up your data. Go now. This is your first official directive from me. If you are not backing up, or if you are only backing up to a drive or dvds or something at your house (what happens if there’s a fire?), go get this service.
This week’s entry comes courtesy of my esteemed colleague, Alex Robson. It’s a sweet little app that runs totally in your browser and seems to do just about everything that Microsoft Visio does.
Diagrams, flow-charts, floor plans, you name it and gliffy.com can handle it. It takes about 30 seconds to get started with this tool and it is surprisingly simple. The interface is clean and straightforward:
I was really surprised to see you can do things like copy/paste and grouping shapes. Obviously Visio can do far more, but if you just use the basics like I do, this is a great lightweight replacement. (Fear not, you can save your stuff as an SVG file which Visio can open.)
If you opt for the pay version, it’s just five bucks a month and it gives you some really cool collaboration features and increases your storage. Check it out!
I am a mess. I’ll freely admit it. Those who have worked with me know that I have to juggle many different eggs from vastly different worlds and at times, some of them fall. (It’s not so bad as I make a fantastic omelet.) As a result, I’m always looking for a better way to stay organized.
Evernote has been around for quite a while. The last time I looked at it was a few years ago, and didn’t really see how it would work for me. A friend of mine started using it and mentioned it so I went back to check it out. It seems that the magical elves at Evernote have been busy!
There are clients for the browser, Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android and Blackberry. You can even send notes to your account via Twitter! I’m packing the Droid around these days, so I downloaded that app and the Windows client. I’ve been using it for several weeks now and have been very impressed.
Here are screenshots of the windows client and web client:
The free account comes with 40 GB of space (premium is only $5/month for 500 MB and no ads), which seems to be plenty so far. I love being able to go to my phone when I’m out and about and have all of my notes and lists in one place. The tagging and search functions seem to work very nicely, but I don’t yet have a ton of data in there to give it a real test. The ink note story is not so great (I have used OneNote for a long time and am spoiled) but the ability to access data everywhere overshadows that weakness.
Once Sharepoint 2010 and OneNote 2010 and Windows Mobile 7 phones are out on the market, I intend to see if I can match the functionality of Evernote and still have all the things I like about OneNote. In the meantime, definitely take a look at Evernote.
I have to apologize for my long absence, but I’ve been in year end mode for the entire month. To make up for it, I have a killer list of free tools to geek out on. This list should have something for everyone. I have technology tools, business tools and even an online image editor.
- Google SketchUp – Our Google Overlords continue to keep the masses in check with their constant stream of cool, free apps. This one allows you to create any kind of 3D model you can think of. From a skyscraper to a toilet brush, you can create and manipulate just like professional CAD software. Check out Detroit’s Renaissance Center:
- Recuva – Have you ever deleted a file, emptied the recycle bin and then realized you just got rid of a spreadsheet that you spent 20 hours on? This is the app for you. It scans your hard drive and will recover as many files as it can see. The step by step wizard walks you through the process and make it dead simple to use.
- Fotoflexer – This online image editing application is a lifesaver when you’re at your in-laws house and need to crop, resize, get rid of red-eye or whatever. It has preset effects that you can apply to photos, along with text and even layers. Very slick.
- inSSIder – Troubleshooting Wifi can be a real headache. Channels, spectrums, encryption levels make it a real mess when there’s a high concentration of traffic. This tool breaks it all down and gives a nice graphical view of everything it can see.
- SolarWinds Advanced Subnet Calculator – If you’re a network person, this is a tool you shouldn’t leave home without. You just punch in an IP and it will tell you all of the subnets, ranges, broadcasts and networks that relate to it.
- PrimoPDF Creator – No one wants to pay 500 bucks for Acrobat just to create PDFs from your documents. This free app installs in about 30 seconds and sets up a “printer” that you can select from any application and will create PDFs every bit as well as the big guns do.
As a field tech (not to mention son-in-law, brother, cousin whatever), you have to work on many different people’s computers. You never know what you’re going to have to work with in terms of the applications they have installed. Chances are very high that they won’t have all of the utilities you need to help them out. This is why most geeks carry jump drives with them.
Here are some of the tools that I carry on my keychain jump drive:
What tools do you pack around on your jump drive?
This week’s roundup of free tools is dedicated to a good friend of mine who has jumped into the entrepreneurial deep end with both feet. We were talking a while back about online strategy in general and I realized how often this kind of stuff comes up with small business folks. Obviously I am biased here, but I really believe that a good web strategy can be a huge part of launching a successful venture. So here are some great free tools that help you get more out of your online presence.
Google Analytics – This is a really good place to get started with measuring your web site traffic. You sign up for a free account, and they will give you a little piece of code to embed in your site so it can do it’s Google-riffic magic. Once that’s there it will give you a sweet dashboard that will tell you where your traffic comes from, how much time people spend on your site, and how many pages they hit before they leave. If you don’t know how much traffic you’re getting now, how can you possibly know what is working to increase it?
WordPress – If you want to show your customer that you are committed to their success with whatever it is that you do, you should have a blog. This is my favorite blogging software. You can let them host it (free), or you can load it on your own site (also free). It’s hugely customizable and yet is very capable right out of the box. It is dead simple to get a great looking blog going in no time.
Feedburner – Another great free Google product, Feedburner will give you insight into how well your blog is doing. It will track your subscribers and give you insight into what you can do to optimize it. It will also sort of guide you along with different things you can do with your blog and your feed.
This week I am focused like a laser beam on media tools. I have publicly committed to get my home media system straightened out and I WILL persevere. You can benefit from my arduous trek by checking out these great tools.
My Movies 3 – My search for Home Media Utopia has had me ranging far and wide through the morass of media players, collection managers, codecs and so on that exist out there. It’s an alphabet soup of audio and video formats and very easy to get lost. My Movies is a great package that’s been around the block a bit and really cuts down on the confusion. They recently released version 3 which is even simpler that it was before. It will help you catalog your movies and music, will get cover art for CD’s and DVD’s and will even help you rip content to your hard drive. All that plus it will help you get around some limitations of the XBOX 360 media center makes a pretty mean package. It’s so good, I actually thought that I had struck gold on the first pass because this package fills so many of the requirements that I set out in that post. (You can go read it if you want to…)
My Movies 3 Collection Management Screen
My Movies 3 Inside Windows Media Center
Virtual CloneDrive by SlySoft – I’ve been using this app for a long time. Basically, it creates a “fake” CD/DVD device on your system that lets you read ISO files from your hard drive as if you had actually burned them. It’s small, it’s fast, it’s free. What more do you want?
Boxee – This SWEET app is best described as social media meets all of the glorious video content that the interwebs have to offer. It’s a little different in purpose than My Movies, but there are some overlaps. Boxee leads you through an account creation process, during which it will ask about your other social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook etc. It then checks to see which of those people have Boxee accounts and then it lets you see what they’ve watched, rated and recommended both in their own library of content, but also from the vast quantity of video available out there. It’s a slick, easy interface and runs on Mac, Linux, and Windows. If I didn’t have an XBOX 360, I’d throw Boxee on a Linux home theater PC and go to town!
Boxee’s Online Video UI
