Back in May, I wrote a piece about 20 of the best apps for freelancing. Well, here’s an update with five more!
1) OnTrees
OnTrees is an app and website that brings together all of your bank accounts/credit cards and saving accounts in one place, showing you how you spend it and giving you a budget you can customise and receive alerts from. I initially tried it a year or so ago, and was impressed but had some issues adding certain accounts. This seems to have been sorted now, and they’re in the middle of adding lots of other features too. I’ve found it really hard to see how everything is going with personal and business accounts, as well as tracking my credit cards.
One word of warning though – Rosie from OneManBandAccounting mentioned on Twitter that she’s not worried about their security but doesn’t trust the banks to not blame her if she had fraud etc, so it’s worth considering that.
2) Boxer
Last time, I told you about Mailbox. It seemed like a great mail app, but it gradually became slower for me. Boxer is now my mail app of choice, and is blowing both Mailbox and Apple Mail out of the water. Not only can I quickly check various accounts, but I can also quickly swipe through each message to delete it, add it to a To Do list, archive it, Liking it (which sends the other person a message saying you like it), Label it, stick it in Spam and send a quick response from the list of responses which you can customise.
3) Haiku Deck
Haiku Deck is an app Jennifer Begg, my new colleague and old friend, introduced me to. It’s brilliant for creating quick and easy presentations. If you like the Zemanta plugin, which comes up with suggestions based on what you’re typing, you’ll like this app. With Haiku Deck, simplicity is key. Choose an image, text to overlay on top or a graph. Modern presentations don’t need to be really wordy anyway – it usually distracts those watching the presentation.
Below is an example of what you can do with this tool.
Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad
4) Notability
When you’re in a meeting, it can sometimes be tricky to stay on track when things jump around a lot. Which is why I love Notability. This app is brilliant for university students too. Working best on an iPad (although it’s still pretty good on an iPhone), this app records the sound while leaving you free to type out notes, hand draw them or create diagrams.
Sometimes, I’m dead jealous of how many useful apps students have now at their fingertips.
5) Concept
Concept is a sexy little app for making mind maps or diagrams. I’ve been using it for creating sessions in my day job, but it’s great if you prefer to dump your thoughts in mindmap format.
I’m a big fan of mailbox but if Boxer is better I’m definitely up for giving that a try. I know what you mean about students, they are so lucky to have all this stuff now!
OnTrees is a cracking app, it’s just that you need to hand over your bank security details. I would not put it past banks to say you gave over your details willingly, as so refuse to refund, if there was identity theft or fraud, which can happen to anyone regardless of how careful you are.
It’s a bit different with business accounts as they’re business. Interesting thought though, I may ask my bank their policy on accounting software feeds and security.
Lloyds actually has a great feature on its internet banking that
works just like OnTrees called Money Manager – I have *definitely*
started spending less overall since I’ve been using it! It can be used
on the mobile app, too. I think other banks have a similar thing, and for me this gets around the problem of having to put bank details on an external app.