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.