Man, has it been a long time between drinks. The last post I made to this site was in November 2009. That’s right: two thousand and nine. At the rate I’m going, I almost need one of these for my next post.

So, I sat down with my accountant last week and we went through the numbers for 2009  - 2010. This means that I quit full-time employment in favour of freelancing almost 18 months ago. Being a gun for hire in the sometimes-dangerous-but-never-boring world of freelancing can be daunting. How much work will I get this month? Will this proposal be worth the time I’m putting into it? Bottom line is, there are no guarantees. You win some, you lose some. And for the most part, you learn by trial and error.

On the battlefield that is the day-to-day landscape of a flash/flex gun-for-hire, I’ve come to rely on a few applications that have saved me a lot of time. And at the risk of sounding cliche: time == money. Some of them are specific to the type of work/development I do, and some are more general. But they all help.

Five time saving apps I wouldn’t go to war without… in no particular order.

• Harvest – www.getharvest.com. I only started using this in the last 3 months but it has improved my general time management dramatically. I’m only using it’s time tracking and invoicing features, but those alone are worth the US$90 per year. When you’re up to your neck in code trying to meet endless deadlines (oxymoron?) the last thing you want to be doing is trying to remember how much time was spent on each section of each project, when the next invoice can be sent out, if the last one was even paid etc etc. With Harvest, one quick look at the dashboard will tell you the status of a project, the remaining budget, any outstanding invoices etc. And the best bit – it looks pretty. It’s also a great tool for analyzing which project areas are more profitable, which ones are slowing you down, and so on and so forth. There are a host of other features that I haven’t really had the time to check out, but even if you use it for time tacking and invoices alone, it’s worth it. There’s an iPhone app and some desktop widgets to boot!
• Quicksilver – www.blacktree.com. I’m lazy. I hate having to browse with a mouse/trackpad trying to find files. As the slogan suggests, with Quicksilver you can “act without doing”. Any application, folder, document, whatever, is only a couple of keystrokes away. And it’s not just for browsing to files – you can move, upload, or search within a file just as easily. And it’s super responsive – sometimes I can swear it’s thinking for me.
• Google Apps - www.google.com/apps. It’s cheap, it looks nice, and it shits all over my old exchange server. There really isn’t much more to it.
• FDT – fdt.powerflasher.com. If I had to make an estimate on how much time this saves me compared to using other code editors, I’d have to say somewhere in the realm of 50%. I’m talking purely about physically typing out code here, but still, that’s a A LOT of time that can be used instead on planning, or debugging, or where ever else it might be needed. I really have to hand it to the Powerflasher team on this one – it’s refactoring is awesome; it’s Quickfixes are the shit; it’s like the Quicksilver of code editors. Sometimes I even wonder why my trackpad is there. I have to admit, I’m still using FlashBuilder for Flex applications (though I hear the MXML support is pretty fantastic in version 4, I just haven’t had time to check it out myself), but for pure AS3 projects you just can’t go past FDT. Sure, it’s fairly pricey, but you’ll make up for that pretty quickly in the time you’ll save yourself by using it.
• Robotlegs – www.robotlegs.org. I heart Robotlegs. I’ve used it on a number of projects now and as far as a lightweight MVCS framework goes, this is as good as it gets. It’s saved me a lot of time during planning and testing, it’s helped keep my code nice and clean/manageable, and I haven’t even used a lot of it’s features. It’s a winner.

So there you have it. They are the tools that make my work a lot easier. If you agree, disagree, or have better/more tools or methods to share – leave a comment.