Apps

Some­times you just need a sim­ple project man­age­ment tool for com­mu­ni­cat­ing with clients, get­ting feed­back, and assign­ing a few todos. As big fans of the orig­i­nal Base­camp, Cage is a breath of fresh air. If you’ve been a big Base­camp fol­low­er, but aren’t down with the weird­ness of the lat­est ver­sion, give Cage a try.

Milan­ote is a gor­geous flex­i­ble tool for orga­niz­ing ideas and projects into visu­al boards. Think of it as a nestable vir­tu­al white­board made of pow­er­ful stick­ies that include kan­bans, check­lists, colour swatch­es, rich text, and more. We love tools like this, that adapt and con­form to your ide­al process, rather than forc­ing one on you.

It’s real­ly dif­fi­cult to cat­e­go­rize Notion. It’s flex­i­ble enough to use as a word proces­sor, com­pa­ny wiki, todo man­ag­er, project man­age­ment tool, or as we use at Loud­er Than Ten, all of the above. It has become the nucle­us of our company.

Teux Deux is a sim­ple and fun-to-use per­son­al to do man­ag­er. It takes the place of those gigan­tic desk cal­en­dars we used in the 90s and we love it. Com­plete or move tasks on your dai­ly list, and if you miss them, see how they float to the next day of your week.

We most­ly design in the brows­er, but when we’re pro­to­typ­ing new con­cepts and ideas, some­times a graph­ics edi­tor is the best tool for the job. Our favourite tool hap­pens to be Fig­ma. It’s col­lab­o­ra­tive, cross-plat­form, has great pro­to­typ­ing, shar­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools built right in.

Our favourite tool for mock-up-based pro­to­typ­ing and design feed­back. The new Boards and Kan­ban fea­tures make it even more use­ful for design collaboration.

The most beau­ti­ful sur­vey app in the land. Our top choice.

Cush­ion is sim­ple and addic­tive fore­cast­ing app designed specif­i­cal­ly for free­lancers. We used it when we were a small agency to track our own sales pipeline, project load, over­all finan­cial goals. It was, and still is fantastic.

If you wan­na track time, check out your actu­als vs antic­i­pat­ed bud­gets, or esti­mate poten­tial over­ages, Har­vest does that pret­ty well. One of the more func­tion­al time track­ing plus invoic­ing tools out there.

When we stopped track­ing hours, we also lost our invoic­ing tool. To avoid hav­ing to use Xero’s weak built-in invoic­es, we searched high and low for a sol­id ser­vice that only does this one thing and does it well. When we dis­cov­ered Invoiced, it was a breath of fresh air. Han­dles one-time pay­ments, sub­scrip­tions, and syncs flaw­less­ly with Xero.

One of the best ways to tie your projects to the finan­cial health of your agency.

Ever have to audit the con­tent on your clien­t’s old crusty web­site (yes of course you do)? You need Con­tent Audi­tor. This amaz­ing tool will not only crawl a site and cat­a­logue all the con­tent, it will hunt for bro­ken links, ana­lyze the read­ing lev­el, and cre­ate a pro­file of the num­ber of pages, nav­i­ga­tion lev­els, and more.

A sim­ple mark­down edi­tor with fan­tas­tic edit­ing and col­lab­o­ra­tion tools. We use Draft for our web­site copy and cre­ative writ­ing. Exports into HTML, has pre­view and com­ment­ing modes. Pre­vents clients from repeat­ed­ly ask­ing about those aster­isks where the copy ​‘should just be bold’

Google. Can’t escape your excel­lent file stor­age ubiq­ui­ty. Great for shar­ing files that would nor­mal­ly be stuck in PDF attach­ment form. If you rely heav­i­ly on Google’s ecosys­tem, the desk­top sync­ing does a decent job, but it’s a per­for­mance hog and slight­ly bug­gi­er than Dropbox.

We were skep­ti­cal about this lit­tle app until we bit the bul­let and import­ed all of our illus­tra­tions and logo assets and got the team on board. Now we’re huge fans. It’s nev­er been eas­i­er to build slide decks, riff on illus­tra­tions, and share brand assets. The pric­ing lev­els needs some work, but over­all a great tool.

For­get about the awk­ward back-and-forth email dance of sched­ul­ing meet­ings, and just send your Cal­end­ly link. Your meet­ing part­ner can pick a con­ve­nient slot on your cal­en­dar in open slots that you define.

Fan­tas­ti­cal inte­grates with Apple Cal­en­dar and makes enter­ing events and todos faster and easier.

A handy app if you’re man­ag­ing human and non-human resources and need to track them dai­ly. Does­n’t sup­port mul­ti­ple project view quite yet.

One of the best apps we’ve used for get­ting instant vis­i­bil­i­ty on resources and sched­ul­ing. Unlike many oth­er gantt apps, has the abil­i­ty to add depen­den­cies and view indi­vid­ual workloads.