Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Sasha Pasulka
It has been a crazythirty days. I suppose that’s nothing to complain about – as entrepreneurs, welove to be busy, to be juggling lots of different projects, relationships andideas. We thrive on that sort of thing. But it’s always good to have tools tolend 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 comeacross a handful of free web tools that I’ve found invaluable recently, and Ifigured I’d pay it forward. Here ya go:
It’s no secret that Apple’s developer tools for trackingearnings, 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 ableto 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 forApple’s shortcomings here, but none I’ve found is anywhere near as elegant asAppAnnie.
Currently in open beta, this free tool easily allows you totrack and analyze revenue, unit sales, rankings by country, and reviews. Itbuilds graphs and marks them with relevant events, like price changes. It alsotracks the top apps in the store by country, category, price and grossing. TheUX is intuitive and easy on the eyes. It’s a must-have for anyone developing aniPhone/iPad app.
I don’t remember how I lived without Skitch. Also still inbeta, this simple tool allows you to take precise screen captures, mark themup, and save them as jpegs. It’s an easy way to communicate design needs to remotedevelopers without a Skype screen-sharing session or a tedious encounter withPhotoshop (which is the antithesis of free). It’s also a quick way to measurepixel dimensions of web real estate, or to draw Hitler mustaches and undersizedreproductive organs on photos of your ex so you can post them to your Facebookwall.
If you’ve ever seen a static “Feedback” badge clinging tothe side of a website, you’ve encountered Get Satisfaction. The companyprovides a user-friendly, in-site interface for your customers to providefeedback 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 featurerequests or complaints have the most support behind them.
While they do offer integration with Facebook, I prefer tokeep the customer support segment of my company separate from their Facebookinteractions, and Get Satisfaction achieves this perfectly. I launched redesigns of two websiteslast week, and this tool was enormously helpful in keeping customer complaintsand feedback from cluttering the comments sections of the websites (“AMYWINEHOUSE LOOKS UGGLY HERE BUT NOT AS UGGLY AS THE NEW SIDEBAR!!!!!!1 fixxxxxit”) and the Facebook pages.
A quick glance at their website makes it look like you haveto pay for the service, but if you peck around a bit you’ll see you can createa community with basic functionality for free. I also found their customersupport to be friendly and flexible when I needed assistance.
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 whoare really good with ideas and code are maybe not so hot with design. (I, forone, believe I have a learning disability when it comes to design.)
Startups don’t always have the cash to bring on the designhelp they need.
My amazing cousin, who did all the design work for my newwebsites and who I am totally going to use this opportunity to plug (check outher 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 wantto 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 yourcompany’s website black, gray and white because all the other colorcombinations you try look like a five-year-old ate a box of crayons and thenvomited on the screen.
Fair warning: This tool isn’t really free. But a lot of you will find you can get most of whatyou need out of the free demo period and then cancel, or, if you find value init, choose to pay using their SaaS pricing model.
So those are my suggestions for the month. Which free webtools have saved your life this month?
