Top 5 Apps of 2009

The web-sphere gets more and more exciting as each year passes.  International phenomenons like Facebook and YouTube often eclipse the equally amazing apps which, while not as appealing to the sofa surfing masses, are making a real difference to the way we, an you work and interact each day.

We thought we'd round up just five of our favourite web apps; on-line tools that have made a real impact on our day to day lives.  There must be a hundred more equally deserving apps out there.  I'd love to know what they are!  I'll write this article again next November so if anyone wants a shot at that please put your favourite apps forward!

1: Freshbooks - On-line Invoicing

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  On-line Invoicing

According to their website since May 2004 Freshbooks has acquired one million new users and I can tell you why.  They've taken the pain out of the arduous task of invoicing your clients and made the whole process a breeze.

I can't believe that once upon a time we used to raise our monthly retainer invoices manually!  Can you imagine what a dull task that was?  Freshbooks has changed all that.  

A simple, slick and solid interface allows you to raise estimates quickly and easily, ping them at your client to one-button-approve and then, when the time comes, convert them to a digital invoice.  Recurring invoices like bills for hosting are raised and sent to the client without any intervention at all.  Just the time it saves for any small company like us is enough to justify the tiny cost ten times over. 

Those of you in the US will get to enjoy slightly better integration with PayPal that allows for repeat billing but nevertheless even here in the UK hooking up Google Checkout, PayPal and so on is super simple and very effective.

Things to improve:

• Ability for clients to enter a purchase order when approving an estimate would be great.
• Improving the 'context' of the page you're on so it's harder to lose your place.  Basing the pages on a URL structure ( "/invoices/client-name/create-new-invoice" ) would make bookmarking a breeze and (imho) fix the problem.

2: ActiveCollab - Collaborative Project Management

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  Project Management

ActiveCollab is a host-it-yourself project management tool that, again, has changed our world quite a bit! If I'm honest we've been using ActiveCollab since its version 0.7 days but a total re-write and commercialisation of what was ( I think ) a bit of a pet-project has seen this app mature into a solid, extensive and fundamentally important tool for us.

Collaborative project management means inviting your clients in to share in the process of planning out your project and keeping it on track. AC provides segmentation of projects from Milestone -> Ticket -> Task, all of which can be both independent and associative, time-tracked, assigned, etc. etc.  

Like all good apps it's also extensible and the guys over at AppsMagnet have developed two great add-ons for reporting and planning, the latter providing interactive Gant charts of multiple projects which is a massive help for managing your working week.

There are a couple of extensions which, largely because we've already other things in place, we haven't even looked at yet.  These are invoicing and Version Control.  I'm doing AC no justice at all with this quick little mention.  If you want to know more about the document sharing, time tracking, iPhone version, inbound email etc., etc., take a quick tour.  

ActiveCollab has become the bedrock of our planning strategy and the time it saves us means that we can afford to hit deadlines and still keep Fridays to ourselves!

Things to improve:

• Wiki-Text for the collaborative pages, and tickets would be brilliant, particularly wikiLinks a la Trac 

3: LitmusApp - Email Client, Spam and Browser Testing

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  Email & Browser Testing

Browser testing is one thing, particularly these days, because on the whole most browsers do most things the same way ( with the obvious magical-mystery exception of Internet Explorer ) but email testing remains a real pain the the Outlook!  

To the rescue - LitmusApp! Fire your email at a magic email address ( or just upload the source ) and the guys at Litmus will render your email in seventeen email and web-mail clients.  For each you'll get opened, unopened, full page, with images, without images etc..  

You can also publish your results so your clients can see...take a look at this example which is a email to the golf members of The Park Resort - a local hotel and golf resort that we look after.

It doesn't stop there either.  The same email will go through all the big spam filters and spam testing of the major clients - twelve at present - advising you if you're missing text/plain or your font sizes are too big etc.

Using a tool like this makes me wonder how we ever managed before.  A combination of blind faith, a lot of RAM and a massive amount of patience and we were no-where close.

With Chrome, Opera, Safari and Firefox all pulling in the same direction HTML & CSS standards are coming on in leaps and bounds.  The sad fact is that html-email rendering standards are going just as fast backwards.  Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have decided that Word is the worlds favourite html renderer and even Gmail is pretty awful in some areas.  The point is that Litmus mitigates so much of the potential hazards of html email by showing you exactly what everyone else sees.

Things to improve:

• Would be nice if they tested web-pages too.  Oh, no, they've done that...
• Would be even better if you could test pages you only see once you've logged in..   dammit! ;-)
• Could do with looking into the buggy Outlook 2007 capture.

4: DropBox - File Sharing & Storage

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  File Sharing & Storage

Celebrating their first day on their rightful domain dropbox.com is, again, a very simple idea, blindingly well executed.  

Download ( if you wish ) a little app to your Mac, PC or Linux box and sign up for a (to start with) free account and hey presto you've a folder on your computer that follows you everywhere.  That's it. Done.  My stuff that I'm working on in the office is now in my study at home, on my lap on my sofa or even on my phone.

What I think gives DropBox some credibility is that we've been doing this ourselves for years...we've servers in various places around Bath and indeed Europe and tools like rsync provide an amazingly quick model for synchronising [the changes in] files between your servers.  So what's new?

First; Execution. DropBox is a desktop tool and it's not intrusive in any way.  You just get used to the fact your files are always there - like synchronised bookmarks ( in Chrome 4 beta - woo hoo! ).

Second; Collaboration.  Invite clients in seconds to share specific files or folders and suddenly you've done away with FTP and "I can't email you these high-res photos, I'll burn a CD" entirely... on a day-to-day basis it's totally changed the way we work with clients like Dickies who have lots of catalogue data and thousands of high-res images to deal with.  We just have a shared drop box folder and the stock of photos lives there.

Third; Access.  Because you don't even need to install the app.  Just visit dropbox.com and there are all your files... wherever you are in the world.

Things to improve:

• Excel.  It's a sad thing really and the guys at dropbox do know about it but Excel touches its files when you open them - triggering an update of the file even if you don't save any changes.  The conflict management does spot it if two of you have the same file open and take evasive manovers so it's hardly a big problem.
• Locking.  Conversely the Excel touching thing could come in handy as much as it would actually be nice if it knew if someone else had the same file open.  Particularly relevant to documents and spreadsheets.

5: Xero - On-line Accounting

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  On-line Accounting

Last, by oh-my-no means least is Xero.  

"But everyone uses Sage and they always have" said my accountant,  "It'll never catch on, it won't know what it's doing, it'll take too much learning" he continued.  (Sorry Simon!) 

Xero is possibly one of the most comprehensively well put together pieces of web-software I've come across ( except for back-end of our Spirit Content & Business Management Framework of course! ;-)  Even if you've no interest in Accounting, if you're just a web designer, you should still take a good, long, hard look at Xero for its UI design.  Even the help-centre is impressively well organised.

Underneath it's beautiful UI is an incredibly capable and ever improving accounts platform that already blows Sage out of the water.  All the standard things from repeat invoicing to account journalling are there as you'd expect.  

But it's the end-to-end integration of everything that makes the difference.  We're lucky enough to bank with HSBC who will feed your bank statement data straight in every day ( no importing ), as will PayPal.  From there the reconciliation process is practically automatic - Xero will recorgnise most of your statement lines and match them to the corresponding invoices.

All the reports you'd expect from your VAT return to full end of year accounts are just a click away. 

Accounts doesn't often get exciting but Xero really does rock.  It's making a massive difference and, like all the apps here the time and hassle it saves more, far more than compensates for the small running cost it represents.

One last thing to say is this:  moving from Sage will seem like a massive struggle.  Believe me; persuading your accountant will be most of the battle.  When it comes down to it it's actually very straight forward and simple and definitely worth it.

Things to improve:

•  We would've saved time knowing that you could complete the setup and retrospectively import outstanding invoices but then, well, we probably didn't RTFM.
• Automatic/bulk mailing of recurring invoices ( although I heard a rumour that was on the way! Yippee ).
• Integration with Freshbooks... oh, yes, I think I can hear that round the corner too. Nice!
• ... and possibly, if I'm being picky, Xero suffers a similar workflow problem as Freshbooks that, if you're looking at a client getting to that clients invoices and, particularly, when you've finished a task being returned to that client's invoices doesn't seem to happen.  It's not a massive problem - Ctrl+clicking things into a new tab or a few extra clicks but...

What have we missed out??

I'm sure I've missed so many great apps from this list and I'd love to know what they might be.  If you've got a favourite app, something that's really changing the way you work I'd love to know about it.  If it's something we might use then I'll test-drive it in 2010 and, if it really is great, I can talk about that next year!