My Freelancer’s Toolbox

28 Sep 2009

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Every freelance designer, developer, writer or artist has his favorite tools that empower him to use his skills in a best way providing the top-notch results. I decided to share with you my daily tools. I don’t want to say “there is no other, better tool” but being a freelancer for almost 5 years, I have tested tons of applications, software and online tools. Here is the list of the application that I find most useful.
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Team / Project management

Open Atrium

Free intranet / project management application based on Drupal – probably the most exciting current Drupal “product”, with fast growing community.

Paymo

Free time tracking utility – up to 3 users for free which makes it perfect fit for freelancers, with invoices, mobile time tracking, reports.

Open Office

Free Office suite work – best offline MS Office replacement so far.

Google Docs & Calendar

Online office, I use it for client and team meeting notes, brainstorming and planning

Freshbooks

Send, track and collect payments quickly. Great for teams, freelancers and service providers.

Development

Firefox

The Firefox Web Browser is the faster, more secure, and fully customizable way to surf the web. Firefox has more than 6,000 add-ons to help you customize it to fit your exact needs. Here is the list of plugins I use most often.

Firebug – Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page…
Drupal for Firebug – drupal integration for Firebug, provides Drupal specific debugging and status messages – requires the drupal module to be enabled
HTML validator – HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing.
Webdevelopment Toolbar – The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
Wappalyzer - Wappalyzer shows you which software is used on the page you’re currently at.
Color Picker – Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies…
Measure It – Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a…
Screengrab – It will capture what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images – either to a file, or to the clipboard.

Microsoft Expression Web 3 SuperPreview for Internet

Expression Web SuperPreview for Internet Explorer is a visual debugging tool that makes it easier to migrate your web sites from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 7 or 8.

Komodo Edit

Free open source editor with autocomplete and calltips, multi-language file support, syntax coloring, syntax checking and more.

Configuring Komodo for Drupal - see http://drupal.org/node/248377

XP-dev.com

Free subversion server / project management tool

Drupal

Award winning OpenSource PHP CMS

Communication

Tweetdeck

Best Twitter client with support for user groups, search, Facebook, iPhone and more.

Pidgin

Free IM client. Connect to AIM, GTalk, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once.

Skype

Make free calls over the internet to other people on Skype for as long as you like.

Design

Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop CS4 is a powerful, professional bitmap graphics editor. An industry standard.

Inkspace

An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Statistics

Google Analytics

Most popular and probably best web statistics analysis

Woopra

Real-time Web tracking and analysis application

BARCAMP SLIDES:

Last Saturday, I was talking about Freelancer’s Toolbox on Slovak BarCamp in Zilina, northern part of Slovakia. You can download slides from my presentation on Slideshare.