Let’s face it, when you’re freelancing but not enough to make it a regular job you want to save as much money as possible and spend as little on them as you can. At least when it comes to applications that can manage your jobs. The last month or so I’d been looking at a way I could document all my clients details and track changes to make in each project I’m working on, or the progress for any upcoming projects. I’d tried a few applications, searched for web based type management but most of them are free trials with a limitation of 1 or 3 clients. Or it’s a full blown system you have to pay for. I was looking for an all in one solution that followed how I worked but nothing seemed to, every application out there seems to lack the feature of another.

I’ve been trying to find something that can do project management, time tracking and invoicing all in the one go that is either free or gives me more than 3 clients to manage with. I know I’m dreaming, but won’t someone think of the little guys out there?

I’ve found 2 applications in the last week which I am currently running off my USB drive, this is to work in conjunction with the hope that I can run all my web work of a USB HDD and make me a more mobile worker.

The 2 applications I found are TreePad and DevProject Manager. While they don’t match my whole needs, it’s one step futher to consolidating all my working needs into one place.

Treepad gives a basic tree structure with subfolders so that information can be categorised and entered into a text document. The set back I found was no way to Bold, Underline text or give it enhancements to differentiate it from other text. You have to get the paid version to get those perks!

DevProject Manager is more promising. I’ve only just installed it and it gives me project management with To-Do Lists, subfolders for categorisation, changelogs, versions, notes on the project. People can be added to manage projects but I can see this more as a base to put contact details in for your clients. The ‘code snippets’ section looks like a good place to store those bits of code you like to keep for each site. Be it notes for your website or some javascript someone may want. But it could also be used to store more details if need be of clients.

Unfortunately, neither of these come available for linux users. I find this odd because it’s for coders and a lot of them work in a Linux environment, and should there have been a linux version I would have passed it onto a few people who might find it useful.

Both of these apps can be run off a USB drive, but can easily be installed to your hard drive for use on the desktop. I’ve put my projects into folders Archive, Current, Future and Ongoing. Each has a subfolder for the project I’m working on.

I’ll update this post soon hopefully on how it goes managing details for my projects.