Features
Top 30 online tools
20070713 [Computer Shopper]
Top 30 online tools 16 - 20
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1 Blinksale Details: www.blinksale.com Type: Invoicing application Blinksale's web-based invoicing takes away the chore of managing your business income. The free version lets you create and send three invoices per month. That's not a lot, but it may be enough if your small business is secondary to your main job. The program's main window is divided into tabs for categories such as invoices, purchases and people. You enter client details in the People section and create invoices in the Invoices section, selecting your client from a drop-down menu. It lets you email beautifully designed - and configurable - invoices, although traditionalists will be pleased to know that you can also print them out and send them the old-fashioned way. It is also possible to set up automatically recurring invoices. Blinksale isn't just a glorified invoice generator, though. It's ideal for anyone who has ever wondered whether they really did send that invoice, because it manages your invoices so effectively. For example, when you enter and send an invoice in Blinksale, it is automatically flagged as sent, and you can mark invoices as paid when you receive payment. Blinksale also tracks invoices in a Dashboard view, grouping sent invoices as either open or overdue according to the invoice date and payment status. You even get a neat overview of your billing history - dividing sent invoices into open, past due and recently closed categories. By totalling the balances in each invoice, you can instantly see how much is owed to you. You can filter your invoices by client and - because you can attach descriptive tags to invoices - by project and subject matter. You can then export these filtered results to an Excel spreadsheet. If an invoice is flagged as overdue in the Dashboard, you can click on it and generate a reminder email. |
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2 YouSendIt Details: www.yousendit.com Type: File sending Have you ever tried to send a hefty email attachment only to see it fail because of size restrictions? If you have, YouSendIt will be a godsend. As with the best web applications, you don't need to register to use YouSendIt. Simply enter the sender's and recipient's email addresses along with a message, and you can send a file up to 100MB over a secure connection. The recipient gets an email with a link to the web page where they can download the file. Links stay active for a week. Unfortunately, YouSendIt doesn't email the sender a confirmation message when the recipient has downloaded the file. |
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3 Openomy Details: www.openomy.com Type: Online storage Openomy's service is simple. It provides free storage for files up to 1GB, which you can then access from any web-connected computer. Like other web applications, Openomy organises files by tags assigned to files as you upload them, rather than by folder. Abandoning the folder structure can make finding files tricky at first, but after a while its attractions, such as the ability to access files in more than one location, outweigah any drawbacks. Files are private by default, but you can make them public. This assigns them a permanent link, which enables you to share your files with anyone over the web. It's also handy if you want to access your files from another PC. |
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4 Writeboard Details: www.writeboard.com Type: Collaboration application One advantage of 37 Signal's Writeboard is that, unlike similar document collaboration tools, you don't have to log on or become a member to use it. Instead, you simply visit the Writeboard website, enter a name for the shared document, along with a password and your email address, and you can begin writing immediately. If you're wedded to Microsoft Word, you'll find Writeboard's options limited. There isn't even a toolbar. Instead, Writeboard uses simple text-formatting techniques to add styles. For example, items between asterisks are formatted in bold, while to indent a block, you use the '>' character. When you save a Writeboard document, it is formatted and supplied a URL for direct, password-protected web access. This makes it ideal for collaborative work. While there's no Word-style track changes feature, Writeboard's versioning is arguably better. When someone edits the document, Writeboard stores the changes as separate versions. These versions are selected from a pane on the right of a window, and you can compare two versions by selecting the checkboxes next to their version name. There are more powerful online document editors, but none is quite as accessible or easy to use. |
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5 Remember the milk Details: www.rememberthemilk.com Type: Task manager Remember the milk is a to-do list and task manager. You enter tasks to complete on its simple web-based form. The form updates in real time, so when you hit the Return key the task list updates without the need to refresh the entire browser window. You can select each task and assign it a due date or a priority, or even tag it to make organisation easier. Tasks can be shared with others by email or using SMS on your mobile. The tool's most essential feature is perhaps its integration with Google Calendar, or any calendaring application that supports the iCalendar file format. As long as the list you create is public, you can subscribe to its 'iCalendar' URL to track its data visually. You can see your public task lists in Google Calendar, which adds a task icon to the top of each day's display. Click on this to review and edit tasks or add new ones. |
