Matthew Gates http://notetoservices.com 11m 2,835 #software
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
Using Software Without Using Software
When it comes to software, there is a lot of time and work that goes into the tools that give you the efficiency to work. This software is very useful and can often mean the difference between a stunning project and a mediocre project that looks like it was typed up in Microsoft Notepad or drawn up in Microsoft Paint. While there is plenty of software that is free and very well made, there is also plenty of software that is paid and offers an abundance of tools. It is ideal that everyone, specifically the programmers that worked on the software get paid for their hours of service, it is not always the case that people are willing to pay or can afford the software.
For a long time, the only answer was “warez” or piracy, in which the Internet would figure out serial keys and create generators in order to offer this expensive software for free. There are still many people who legitimately pay for the software they use and are happy to do so. However, since the dawn of the Internet, there has always been a [large] group of people who has always opted and believed in freeware. This is not fair to the companies and programmers who spent so many hours of their time working on the software, and there have been many legal consequences that have been brought up. Unfortunately, despite the laws that were put into effect to combat this issue, software is still being stolen at a rapid rate.
In order to combat this effort in a legal way, many developers began to volunteer their time to the freeware and open source software movement. In a way, this began a solution to those who could not afford or would not pay for software. This meant that both groups of programmers and individual programmers were willing to spend time creating free programs and applications for people to use. Their time is sometimes compensated through donations and ads in the program, though not always.
With the creation of Github and Sourceforge, many programmers were able to create free software and have other programmers to volunteer and help them with their projects. Github is a large community of at least 12 million programmers contributing to over 30 million projects. Sourceforge is another community of at least 4 million contributors and over 400,000 projects. Whether programmers do it in the goodness of their heart, or to practice code, or to create a name for themselves, open source and freeware has become the mainstream form of application use. There is still plenty of paid software that might offer better solutions and is the preferred software, but there are also plenty of alternatives.
This is the Art of Not Using Software.
Drawing
scri.ch is the most basic drawing tool you will ever use. Simply point, click, hold your mouse down, drag, and draw. That is all there is to it. Afterwards, you can save your drawing, which will give you a random URL that you can return to in order to add to it later on. You can right click and either copy or save the image as a png file. Unfortunately, with basic comes a minimalist interface, which means that once you draw something, you cannot actually erase or undo it. You can, however, save in increments. If you happen to mess up, just refresh the page and none of your changes will have saved, if you messed up.
sketch.io is an advanced drawing tool that allows you to use a series of line tools, along with changing the opacity and width of the lines. It comes a series of additional designs and tools that you can use to enhance your drawings, including pencil, pen, calligraphy, crayon, streamer, paintbrush, arrow, line, path, spraypaint, stamp, chrome, fur, sketchy, web, or spirograph. Numerous shapes are also available which includes square, rectangle, regular polygon, triangle, star, burst, circle, ellipse, pie, ring, radial burst, gear, and spiral. You can also save your drawings and upload them for later use. You can also print your drawing or share it on any of the major social media websites including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit.
drawisland.com is an advanced drawing tool that allows you use a series of line tools and shapes, rotate your drawings, change the size of lines and shapes, and save the image. Once the image is saved, you can turn it into a gif and animate your image. You may also upload images, currently in beta, and no more than 500 KB at this current time.
A complete drawing tool with many features. When you first land on the page, you will have to choose where you want to save your picture, on Google Drive, Dropbox, and several other areas. Once you have selected this, you will be given an option to open an existing diagram or begin a new one. Upon starting a new picture, you can choose from several templates including Basic, Business, Charts, Engineering, Flowcharts, Mindmaps, Mockups, Network Diagrams, Software Designs, and more. Pre-existing charts get you going and all you really have to do is fill in the dummy data with your own. You can also add to the diagrams and choose from many shapes. Saved files are in XML format. You can also print the diagram along with many other options. JavaScript must be enabled to use this tool.
Gliffy.com is a chart and diagram website that allows you to create flow charts, network diagrams, floor plans, organization charts, mindmaps, venn diagrams,SWOT analysis, wireframes, sitemaps, UML, business process models, and technical drawings. Click on Start Drawing to get started. It comes with many tools including basic shapes, containers, forms, images, etc. It also has options for undoing, duplicating, grouping or ungrouping, and much more. Export your diagram in PNG, JPG, SVG, or Gliffy format. Features may be limited in the free version. Gliffy is free to use for up to 5 public diagrams that cannot be made private, however, membership is offered at an extremely affordable rate to unlock all features.
Fonts
Google Fonts can be used on any website and offers hundreds of different fonts, from skinny to wide to small and tall. Google fonts can be used on any website and is recognized by all web browsers. Google Fonts are very quick loading and best of all, they are completely free to use, display, and download.
Graphing
If you have some math homework, graphsketch.com may be for you. Functions of the graphic chart include: sin, cos, tan, asin, acos, atan, log, squared, squareroot, exponents, etc. You have the option to download the graph after it is finalized or link to it.
From problems, to graphs, to worksheets, and a glossary. mathway.com includes Basic Math, Pre-Algebra, Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Precalculus, Calculus, Stastistics, Finite Math, Linear Algebra, and Chemistry for all of your math and math homework needs. If you need any help using the system, there is an entire documentation of examples located in the footer.
desmos.com/calculator is a very useful graphing tool with many math graphing features including Lines, Parabolas, Trigonometry, Conic Sections, Polar, Statistics, Lists, Calculus, and types of charts including slope intercept, point slope form, two point form, standard form, etc. Sign in is necessary to save the charts.
MindMaps
Upon landing on the mindmup.com, you will be given several options of choosing to have your MindMap as a public web page, or you can choose to make it private, public, or saved to Google Drive. If you don’t already know what a MindMap is, a mindmap allows you to express your ideas on an unlimited spaced whiteboard. Continue writing and drawing out your ideas whether you go up, down, left, or right. Very useful when learning new languages, brainstorming ideas for business, or just organizing your own thoughts. A random URL is assigned once you have selected your options. Upon returning to the random URL, your work will be saved. While there is a limited free option, there is also a Gold option which requires you to sign in to officially save your work. Published free mindmaps are stored for 6 months before they are deleted. A Gold subscription can be purchased for $3 a month which will allow you much more functionality and the ability to save Mindmaps indefinitely or until you let your subscription run out.
Newsletters
mailchimp.com is the ultimate software that will change the way you market your product on the internet. MailChimp is a simple email marketing software (EMS) which gives you a number of easy options for designing, sending and saving templates of your emails. The number of feasible options and the easy to use interface set MailChimp apart from other software, and this can be seen with the number of users that use this software, going well over a million users! MailChimp allows you to easily create newsletters of varying types and then provides simple options for sharing them on social networks such as Twitter or Facebook, making it your own personal platform for publishing your newsletter. Build a list of the people whom you want to market your products to, and save the list for use later on, and create custom templates for your products so that you do not have to rewrite mails again and again.
Online Web & Text Editors
mypost.io
MyPost.io is a quick, user-friendly single webpage creation platform without having to deal with hosting or registration.
mypost.io offers the ability to create single web pages or posts within minutes and maintain complete control over all of the elements. Whether you are a beginner who knows nothing about HTML or a guru who knows how to manipulate CSS to do your bidding, mypost.io is for you. Design a post with a specific theme in mind, change the fonts, colors, and sizes of the text. Add your own CSS customization to make everything just the way you want. There is no registration, no signups, no user accounts. You choose your password, save the URL, and return to it later on to make changes.
Creation of a post can only be done from the home page or by bookmarking the create post page.
This is a sample post modeled to look like Confessions of the Professions.
More advanced options include:
- headline font, size, color
- content font, size, color
- background color
- ability to have comments and change the color
- display the character and word count
- display how many times the post has been seen
- display how long the post takes to read
- display it on mypost.io
- display social media sharing buttons
- add custom css
- add custom javascript
- hide from search engines
- remove default mypost.io css styling
- leave notes for yourself and others, not visible to the public
What can you do with mypost.io? This is a list of just several things you can do:
- articles
- web pages
- web sites
- infographics
- e-books
- lists
- school lessons
- business proposals
- business listings
- landing pages
- white papers
- resumes
- press releases
- research findings
- research documents
- photo gallery display
- essays
- writing assignments
- philosophy
- presentations
- advertisements
- recipes
- landing pages
- autobiography
- wedding invitations
- memorial page
- use the comments system as a chatroom!
- and much more!
You have complete control over what you want to do with your post. You must choose your own custom URL, as one is not randomly generated for you, which will look like: http://mypost.io/post/your-url
In addition, mypost.io offers image and file hosting to make everything very convenient to write your post.
You can even save the posts you like by setting up an account, which is not optional, but if you wish to save posts, you will need an account. However, deleting your account is just as easy as deleting all your saved posts.
A tutorial is available to help you write your post as well as tons of resources and samples to help you get comfortable with using mypost.io. A support page is also available for additional help.
mypost.io is a side project I had been working on, designed in September of 2015, while writing this and many other articles. This article was the inspiration for creating MyPost. It is my own creation to help accommodate those who are looking for a simple free website platform that allows them to create web pages or posts in minutes without having to sign up or register for an account.
shutterb.org is a basic text and HTML editor with a lot of text format options from highlighting text, changing the font style, font size, or font color, and the ability of adding links and photos. Give your document a name and after you are finished with it, save the document as a PDF, HTML, or DOC. You also have the option of viewing your document in design mode or code mode. There is no unique URL assigned and you can only save your document as is. You cannot return to it at a later time.
piratepad.net
piratepad.net has no registration, comes with a basic editor with line numbers, a random assigned URL, and formatting options. You may invite other users to collaborate and write with you by sharing a link or providing the embed code for a website. You can save revisions and view them later in a time slider. When an author types, their text will be highlighted with a specific color that is associated to them, and this can be changed to a different color. You may turn the pad into a read-only pad which will prevent further editing and this feature cannot be undone. You can import and export files, in the format of HTML, Plain text, Bookmark file, however Microsoft Word, PDF, and OpenDocument. Pad options include removing line numbers, authorship colors, and choosing normal or monospace font. The pad comes with an undo and redo feature. You can also make the editor full screen so it fills up your browser.
Photoshop
Considering I mostly work on a Chromebook when at home, I needed an easy way to use Photoshop without buying Photoshop. Although GIMP comes close as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop Cloud, pixlr.com comes as a second best to being an online photo editor “in the cloud”. Pixlr allows for layers, lines, colors, shapes, text, and much more, including special effects, cropping, and image re-sizing. Open an image from your computer, from a URL, or a library from Pixlr, Facebook, or other library. Pixlr has proved many times over its usefulness for having a free online photoshop editing program available for your photo editing needs.
Spreadsheets
ethercalc.net is an online spreadsheet service starts you off by generating a random URL and a spreadsheet that looks similar to an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Doc spreadsheet. The formatting options are all similar to what you would find in the Microsoft software program. In addition, many of the functions that you would normally use, such as calculating numbers, specifically SUM, COUNT, COUNTA, LEN, TRIM, ROUND, and even the IF statements are available.
This spreadsheet program keeps track of the history of changes you made, and you can even turn your spreadsheet into a graph. You can search the sheet and hitting CTRL+P will allow you to print your full spreadsheet document. Saving the URL and returning to it later will allow you to return to your saved work.
Surveys
surveymonkey.com is an online service that allows users to create web browser based surveys. This service offers both a free account and a paid account that includes enhanced features. The free version offers up to 10 questions and 100 responses. This article will teach you how to create an online survey with SurveyMonkey.
Google forms offers a variety of templates and allows you to create surveys and questionnaires, gather data, and export it into an Google Docs or Excel spreadsheet, where it can be further charted into a graph or other data display.
Videos
wevideo.com is an online video editor, which does require sign up, but offers free video editing software of video up to 5 minutes, downloadable, and shareable to social media networks.
The YouTube Video Editor offers several tools to enhance the YouTube video experience and is completely free with a YouTube account.
This list is very far from complete, but there is plenty of other freeware online software out on the Internet that was not included on this list and a search for it could lead you to what you are looking for, including invoicing software, appointment and scheduling software, billing software, time sheet software, and much more.
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