Time and Money

As freelancers we are all required to keep track of how much we charge and how long we work.
This is often much easier said than done. I was recently suprise when I used this great little application called Time edition.
As the manafacturers put it "

time management made easy

timeEdition is targeted at all users in a computer workplace who value detailed documentation of their working hours, whether they use it for customer billing or for monitoring the duration of individual projects.

Concept

timeEdition focuses on simple usability and a thoroughly clear overview for day-to-day use. What does this mean in detail?

Firstly, that users initially see only those functions that they need to record their daily working times.
These are: a function to stop and start recording, a display showing the recording period and customer, project and activity selections.

All other functions, such as creating and maintaining master data, export functions etc. can be easily accessed via dialog boxes opened from the menu.

Platform independent

The package includes program versions for Mac OS X and Windows as well as a Mac Widget".

So now we know how to track our time we NEED to know exactly what our time is worth.
This rate calculator will help you to work out what you need to make a profit and also what you need to earn just to break even.
Good luck.

Screen recorder

I have recently been in a position that required me to produce some insrtuctional screencasts.
After much searching online I found this. It is an open source recorder called camstudiothis is what the developers say.
CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)

Here are just a few ways you can use this software:

* You can use it to create demonstration videos for any software program
* Or how about creating a set of videos answering your most frequently asked questions?
* You can create video tutorials for school or college class
* You can use it to record a recurring problem with your computer so you can show technical support people
* You can use it to create video-based information products you can sell
* You can even use it to record new tricks and techniques you discover on your favourite software program, before you forget them
CamStudio can also add high-quality, anti-aliased (no jagged edges) screen captions to your recordings in seconds and with the unique Video Annotation feature you can even personalise your videos by including a webcam movie of yourself "picture-in-picture" over your desktop.

And if all that wasn't enough, CamStudio also comes with its own Lossless Codec that produces crystal clear results with a much smaller filesize compared with other more popular codecs, like Microsoft Video 1.

You have total control over the output of your video: you can choose to use custom cursors, to record the whole screen or just a section of it and can reduce or increase the quality of the recording depending on if you want smaller videos (for emailing to people, for instance) or you can have "best quality" ones for burning onto CD/DVD.

But all of these features would be worthless if CamStudio wasn't easy to use ... fortunately that's not the case. CamStudio can be learned in a matter of minutes and comes with a comprehensive built-in helpfile, so if you do manage to get stuck, you can simply hit "Help" and get the answers you need.
So now you know go and give it a try. feel free to let me know how you got on.

Password manager

Hi here I know I promised to try and post more regulaly but as we all know things have a habit of popping up and making demands upon our time.
Anyway a new year an a new start.
My first orrering of this new year is an increadably useful tool that can be run from a pen drive and thus be carried anywhere. If like me you are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with all the passwords and usernames for various blogs, web mails, amazon, facebook etc then this will be a major help in you day to day life.
I looked at many password managers and this was the best, free and simplest to use.
First pay a visit to keepass and download the most recent version for use on your pen drive.
Now the best thing to do is vist this tutorial which is a short video that tells you how to set up and run this incredably usefull piece of software.
I have been using this for about two weeks now and have managed to rid myself of dozens of scraps of paper with various user names scibbled on them. try it out I am sure you will enjoy it.

Free Html editor

Hi in this post I want to introduce you to an open source web editor called KompoZer.
According to the developers " KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing.

KompoZer is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding."
KompoZer is based on Gecko, the layout engine inside Mozilla so it has an impressive pedigree.
To anyone who has used Dreamweaver this will not present a huge learning curve and will yield predictable results.
To those who wish to get involved in the web industry this may be be a good starting point and as it is free it is within the reach of everybody.
KompoZer allows design view as well as code view so it is very easy to see what is going on during your design progect.

Those who are familiar with the DreamWeaver interface will feel right at home with KompoZer:

• WYSIWYG editing of pages, making web creation as easy as typing a letter with your word processor.
• Integrated file management via FTP. Simply login to your web site and navigate through your files, editing web pages on the fly, directly from your site.
• Reliable HTML code creation that will work with all of today's most popular browsers.
• Jump between WYSIWYG Editing Mode and HTML using tabs.
• Tabbed editing to make working on multiple pages a snap.
• Powerful support for forms, tables, and templates.
• The easiest-to-use, most powerful Web Authoring System available for Desktop Linux, Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh users.
  
  So if you are just wanting to get started in web design or you are a company who wishes to start developing thier own inhouse web web site or intranet KompoZer may be for you.
  
  

Mind Maps for design workflow

I have recently discovered this invaluable piece of software by Edrawsoft called mind map.
This outstanding piece of software allws the user to create mind maps which are in their simplest form a graphical expression of a thought process.
This is particulaly useful when brainstorming with clients and also for explaining how a work process flows and the stages which must be put in place.
One of the main strengths of this bit of software is that data can easily be moved around as ideas change and blocks can be assigned different shapes or colours according to their priority.
I have used mind map a lot since i discovered it and it is very effective for outlining stratergies and decision processes to clients.
Whats more it is absolutly free. Go ahead and try it and feel free to give me your feedback.

Using colour schemes

As designers we all use colour on a daily basis and we often take it for granted that we can choose the perfect colour scheme.
What happens when a creative block occures? or when we cant find that ideal pallette?
Well there is help at hand.
Firstly there is office slayer an online offering that helps us to choose an ideal pallette from a base colour we can define. We choose a hex value for our base colour and office slayer presents a colour pallette based around this selection.
It will create 10 shades of the base colour at varying shades of opacity. The top row emulates opacity over a white background, the bottom over black (or colors of your choosing as of v1.4). The opacity values are 100% opaque, 75%, 50%, 25% and 10% on the top row. The bottom row begins at 85% rather than 100% and continues on as the first.

If you require somethin a little more sophisticated then there is Adobe Kuler pronounced colour this is also a free online application for selecting colour pallettes. However Adobe has a huge range of pre ordered pallettes for us to choose from we can also search for particular pallettes by tag or even upload a picture to act as the basis for our colour pallette.
Adobe Kuler is without doubt a fantastic resource as it also has a forum with many helpful members and an ever growing community of like minded members.

Fantastic file sharing

Sorry for my recent absence I have had many domestic duties to perform. However I am now back and hoping to be posting every week.

I have just been sent a link to a new piece of software called Get Dropbox whilst still in it's beta stage it is available for sign up.

Get dropbox is a free application which allows the user to place files in a particular folder and be able to retrieve theses files from a remote login via a web browser. Not only this but it also allows you to share files either with others subscribed to dropbox and assigned shareing privilages by you or by sending out a link to particular files within get drop box.
I thouroughly recomend this bit of kit so head over to Get dropbox for their tour and sign up today.