It has been a crazy
thirty days. I suppose that’s nothing to complain about – as entrepreneurs, we
love to be busy, to be juggling lots of different projects, relationships and
ideas. We thrive on that sort of thing. But it’s always good to have tools to
lend a hand, and it’s even better when those tools are available for free.
Thanks to great advice from the Twitter and startup communities, I’ve come
across a handful of free web tools that I’ve found invaluable recently, and I
figured I’d pay it forward. Here ya go:
AppAnnie
It’s no secret that Apple’s developer tools for tracking
earnings, sales and rankings of iPhone and iPad apps are not exactly, um, user friendly. Over the past couple months,
I’ve come to the conclusion that Apple genuinely does not want you to be able
to do any sort of quantitative analysis on the performance of your application.
Juxtaposed with the effort they put into the UX of their consumer products,
it’s baffling. The Internet’s built a trillion hacked-together solutions for
Apple’s shortcomings here, but none I’ve found is anywhere near as elegant as
AppAnnie.
Currently in open beta, this free tool easily allows you to
track and analyze revenue, unit sales, rankings by country, and reviews. It
builds graphs and marks them with relevant events, like price changes. It also
tracks the top apps in the store by country, category, price and grossing. The
UX is intuitive and easy on the eyes. It’s a must-have for anyone developing an
iPhone/iPad app.
Skitch
I don’t remember how I lived without Skitch. Also still in
beta, this simple tool allows you to take precise screen captures, mark them
up, and save them as jpegs. It’s an easy way to communicate design needs to remote
developers without a Skype screen-sharing session or a tedious encounter with
Photoshop (which is the antithesis of free). It’s also a quick way to measure
pixel dimensions of web real estate, or to draw Hitler mustaches and undersized
reproductive organs on photos of your ex so you can post them to your Facebook
wall.
Get Satisfaction
If you’ve ever seen a static “Feedback” badge clinging to
the side of a website, you’ve encountered Get Satisfaction. The company
provides a user-friendly, in-site interface for your customers to provide
feedback on your product and to interact with each other and company employees.
Customers can “like” one another’s ideas, so it’s easy to see which feature
requests or complaints have the most support behind them.
While they do offer integration with Facebook, I prefer to
keep the customer support segment of my company separate from their Facebook
interactions, and Get Satisfaction achieves this perfectly. I launched redesigns of two websites
last week, and this tool was enormously helpful in keeping customer complaints
and feedback from cluttering the comments sections of the websites (“AMY
WINEHOUSE LOOKS UGGLY HERE BUT NOT AS UGGLY AS THE NEW SIDEBAR!!!!!!1 fixxxxx
it”) and the Facebook pages.
A quick glance at their website makes it look like you have
to pay for the service, but if you peck around a bit you’ll see you can create
a community with basic functionality for free. I also found their customer
support to be friendly and flexible when I needed assistance.
Color Scheme Designer
Seattle is chock-full of brilliant designers. Unfortunately,
many of them have already been snatched up. And, let’s face it, a lot of us who
are really good with ideas and code are maybe not so hot with design. (I, for
one, believe I have a learning disability when it comes to design.)
Startups don’t always have the cash to bring on the design
help they need.
My amazing cousin, who did all the design work for my new
websites and who I am totally going to use this opportunity to plug (check out
her portfolio here and then hire her), introduced me to Color Scheme Designer,
a free and easy application that takes the hex code for the main color you want
to use for your design and then produces a set of colors for mono, complement,
triad and analogic color schemes. Never again do you have to make your
company’s website black, gray and white because all the other color
combinations you try look like a five-year-old ate a box of crayons and then
vomited on the screen.
Cross Browser Testing
You know and I know: The only thing worse than the way your
website looks in IE 8 is the way it looks in IE 6. This tool takes screen shots
of the way your site renders in different versions of Firefox, IE, Opera,
Safari and Netscape (Netscape?)
across various Mac, Windows and Ubuntu OSes. You can scan them all quickly and
on one page to see where problems are showing up. It’s a tad bit slow but it’s useful
for catching these issues before the users do. I wish they would also test
sites across mobile platforms, and hopefully that’s coming in future releases.
Fair warning: This tool isn’t really free. But a lot of you will find you can get most of what
you need out of the free demo period and then cancel, or, if you find value in
it, choose to pay using their SaaS pricing model.
So those are my suggestions for the month. Which free web
tools have saved your life this month?