- You find tons of free apps for investors, freelancers, businessmen, and other independent or creative people.
- They ease communication, the collection of information, organization, and planning.
- I tried a lot of them, and I use some for years.
- I share with you the best ones that can be useful for almost everyone.
- (We don’t use any affiliate links in this post.)
Why Do Creative People Need Free Apps?
Freelancers, individual investors, passive income hunters, small entrepreneurs, creative workers, experts of a hobby, all have some common needs. They must:
- Communicate with others, like costumers, partners, employees, employers, friends, etc.
- Read news, posts, watch videos, podcasts to gain information about the trends in the world. About their profession, business, or any other areas of interest.
- Organize and store the information they collected. Whether it’s a simple piece of data, an inspiring post, or a long, important new law.
- Organize and store their creative ideas, manage projects, schedule tasks.
In brief:
- Communication
- Collection of information
- Organization and planning
The rise of the internet has provided us with a tremendous amount of information. But today there is too much data circulating online. We are almost drowning in a sea of knowledge. It is not its quantity but its quality that matters. That is why we need to systematize and rank our news, information, and thoughts.
From Buffet’s Reading Habit to Free Tools
“I read and think”–said one of the richest people in the world, Warren Buffett. He credits many of his great money decisions to his voracious reading habit. He says he starts every morning by poring over several newspapers and estimates he spends as much as 80 percent of his day reading. When asked once about the key to success, pointed to a stack of books and said, “Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up like compound interest.” (In CNBC.)
Books are amazing still today. The best ones contain the experiences of a lifetime or make the most valuable thoughts of geniuses available to you. But today we also gain a lot of valuable knowledge from articles on websites, databases, charts, or asset prices. To process all this, we need free or paid applications.
Most applications can be used on both personal computers (PC) and mobile phones. Even better, the same data is accessible from various platforms and devices. Some free apps contain ads, others work in the “freemium” model. That means basic services are gratis, but the paid version has much more to offer. You decide if you want to pay for the premium benefits.
1. Pocket–A Great Free App for Reading
The free app called Pocket is a reading, sharing tool. You can use it to put aside readings for later when you don’t have time to read something important. Articles and pages set aside while traveling or working can be visited later, also from another device. We can share good readings with others, store it, or create a task from it.
On weekends, we can return to what we didn’t have time for during the week. Or we can put something in our “pocket” that we don’t know yet whether we’ll need it later. Pocket is like browser bookmarks, but much more advanced than that. You can also listen to the text on mobile devices. It can be combined with the Trello project management app or Evernote data storage, for example. (See later.)
Other alternatives of Pocket are Evernote, Google Keep, and Microsoft OneNote. Also, a small Chrome browser plugin, Onetab proved very useful for me. It makes possible the mass-storage of links opened in different browser tabs.
2. Feedly–Many Sources in One Reader
The free app Feedly “compiles news feeds from a variety of online sources for the user to customize and share with others”–wrote Wikipedia. RSS-feeds or “news feeds” allow the user to keep track of many websites in a single news aggregator. This way, you don’t have to go through many websites. The reader shows it all in one place.
Very useful, for example, by pages where the content is updated occasionally, only every few days, or weeks. Like blogs, podcasts, but also special sub-pages, specific sections of big news sites. Feedly, and also Pocket, recommend you new readings, similar sites, posts.
The RSS-feed for the Ageless Finance blog you find here.
3. Trello–Free App to Organize Your Tasks, Ideas
The Trello free app is a project management software, but so simple and user-friendly, my grandma could use it. You can create cards for all your tasks, group these cards in lists, and put lists on different boards. (Kanban board system.) This intuitive system can manage my simple grocery lists, my blogging schedule, post topics, investing ideas, but also complex business projects. You can use it to organize your private tasks, but it has serious team-functionality for workgroups.
You can make it all very visual and user-friendly with colors, pictures, attachments, checklists, comments. Use your mouse to move cards, lists. Some competitors are Monday, Asana, but other dozens of similar solutions exist. I tried some of them, but Trello worked best for me.
4. Evernote–Because Elephants Never Forget
The logo of the free app Evernote is an elephant head because it is believed that the elephants will never forget. The program is a memory bank, your personal database, storing texts, files, pictures, links, and whatever you need to keep. With the mobile app or a browser extension, you can send data or links to the application. (Also by Pocket, Trello, and others.) You can edit all notes, upload files, set reminders, collaborate with others, etc.
It’s only the tip of the iceberg. The software has very broad functionality. You can combine it with other apps. For example, read posts in Pocked or Feedly, and store the important ones in your Evernote. An important competitor is Microsoft Onenote, and a much simpler note storage app is Google Keep.
5. Rambox–Review All Your Communications in One Page
Top free apps worldwide for May 2020 by downloads were communications and social media type programs. (Sensortower) TikTok, Zoom, Facebook, Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram, Google Meet, etc. But some people prefer the one, others, the other application. In my case, for example, my family uses Facebook Messenger, my friends, more Whatsapp. Some business partners, Workplace Chat, others, Telegram. So, I must use various messaging apps. For security reasons, I also created several mailboxes. As a blogger, I have to follow many social media platforms.
So many services to use, confusing. The free app Rambox works on PC only, but it concentrates all your communication in one software. This has many advantages. It is simpler to review all events in seconds. Typing is easier on a notebook than on a mobile phone. It takes less time than jumping between your phone and computer if you work.
A similar application is Franz (but with limited services in the free version).
6. Zoom or Other Free Apps?–Video-chats Stay Essential
We see a hype, a mania in last months by the Zoom video-chat application. The free app is limited, the paid version is more professional. In this industry, no software is as dominant as Google in the search-engine space, for example. There are many competitors. We found 29 (see the list here).
I still can’t decide which video-chat application is better. You should try various and use which your business partners, clients, or other contacts prefer. I sometimes use Zoom, sometimes Skype, sometimes Messenger or Jitsy (an open-source, free app).
7. Free Apps for Better Writing–Grammarly, Hemingway, and Punctuation Check
The Grammarly free app corrects grammar errors very well. But the readability, punctuation, and word choice correction options are limited in the free version. Hemingway and Punctuation Check can also refine your skills for free. Many freelancers, entrepreneurs, businessmen, and employees need good writing skills.
“Compose bold, clear, mistake-free writing with Grammarly’s AI-powered writing assistant”– wrote Grammarly. Advanced features go beyond grammar and spelling, like tone checking of your message or word choices.
8. Google Translate or DeepL–Let’s CAT Better
We laughed a lot 12-15 years ago about the errors Google Translate made. We introduced a phrase in any language and the output was often hilarious, full of strange errors and mistranslations. Machine translation was a newborn science at a low level. But it is getting better every year since. Ultimately, I had good experiences with Google Translate and DeepL, at least from a main global language to another. (From English to Spanish, or Spanish to German.) Small languages may be at a disadvantage though, companies spend less effort to them.
CAT is not only a pet but also a new science, Computer-aided Translation. Computers still make translation errors and need human supervision. But they speed up the translation process a lot already. Time to use them, in my opinion. You can make the first steps with these two free apps.
9. Dictate to Free Apps Instead of Writing–Speechnotes
Another science where free apps are getting better and better is speech-to-text. (Speech recognition, dictation.) I’m using the Speechnotes free app for more than a year now and it has already saved me a lot of man-hours. There are still a lot of errors in this process, but it’s much more effective dictating my articles than using a computer keyboard.
Some authors say dictation is three times faster than writing. But, in my experience, only twice. Because it takes a lot of time to correct the mistakes yet. (It depends also on the text, I use a lot of special phrases about sciences and many numbers, names.) But twice means also a lot of time saved, if someone writes a lot. You can also use it, for example, to dictate ideas, drafts, plans everywhere you are. On public transport, in the car, on the street, or while waiting in a line. You can record, transcript also conferences, and meetings with it.
I tried several other programs, but this free app was the best. (On Android and computer, in the Chrome browser.) I’ve noticed that you need a relatively modern device to dictate. My device made in 2016 makes a lot more bugs than a good computer of 2018, with a lot of memory.
10. Podcasts–Another Way to Knowledge
The free apps Podcast Addict, PlayerFM, and TuneIn are my preferred podcast sources. Good podcasts–as also many YouTube videos–can provide you with valuable information. You can hear not only news but also investment ideas, professional opinions, interviews of important or talented people, gurus.
If you choose the right podcasts, you can learn while traveling, making your exercises, training with your spinning bike, etc. I find it more useful than listening to radios (with a lot of ads and garbage programs). Or watching TV, enjoying any entertainment programs.
11. How to Track Stock Prices? With Free Apps Like Investing.com
Many new people are trying to invest in stock markets in the coronavirus crisis. Investment professionals use mostly one of two platforms, Bloomberg Terminal or Refinitiv Eikon (formerly Reuters Terminal, or Thomson Reuters Eikon). But these are too expensive for the average person. Investing.com on the web and the mobile phone is free, although it has many ads everywhere. But you can follow most stocks, ETFs, currencies, and commodities in real-time or near-real-time. You can set up your portfolios and track the prices.
It has many other useful tools and features. Like news, charting, price performance, dividend yields, economic calendar, holiday calendar, etc. A disadvantage of Investing.com is, it is one of the slowest web-pages I know. (Other ones are Bloomberg and Marketwatch.)
There are a lot of competitors in the finance industry, though. You can also track prices with Yahoo Finance, Marketwatch, Google Finance, SeekingAlpha, Bloomberg free pages, CNBC, etc.
12. Charting with Free Apps–Tradingview.com
There are a lot of different sites and free applications on the market to draw price charts for stocks, currencies, commodities. For example, Stockcharts, YCharts, Yahoo Finance, Investing.com, Stooq.com. I tried a lot of them, but I prefer Tradingview for many reasons. Their charts are flexible, have a lot of tools and options, I found most of the investment products I wanted to chart. I can use complex formulas, for example, I can calculate the German DAX index in US dollars. Or calculate the price of one gram of gold instead of one ounce. Tradingview is not only a chart tool. Also, a community where you can follow other people and get trading ideas.
By Stockcharts, I liked the built-in color schemes. You can use formulas here, too, if you know the trick. (Write the formulas in the form for indicators.)
13. Let’s Encrypt Messages–Telegram or Signal
The Telegram free app is my newest discovery for communications. This messaging application is secure, offers encrypted communication, privacy. It is multipurpose (for example, has file sending, groups, secret chat rooms), and simple to use. It is fast, works also on my ancient tablet, and doesn’t store data like products of large internet companies, Facebook, Google. One disadvantage is, it has no video-chat service yet.
Famous news sites like Bloomberg.com or Zerohedge.com also have Telegram channels already. Other channels edited by users provide mixed news. You find Ageless Finance’s new Telegram channel here. A similar alternative is Signal, also offering encrypted messaging, and video-chat.
More Important Readings for You:
- 29 Zoom Alternatives and the Zoom Stock Price Explosion
- How to Buy Gold Coins, Bars, Jewels? 4 Ways, Essential Pros and Cons
- 17 Fake Passive Income Ideas, Explained
- 11 + 1 Grave Investment Errors Robinhood Newbies May Commit
- Are We Facing Epic Inflation, Horrific Real Interest, and Brutal Gold Price Explosion?
- How to Buy Cheap Stocks in the Coronavirus-crash?
Disclaimer
I’m not a certified financial advisor nor a certified financial analyst, accountant nor lawyer. The contents on my site and in my posts are for informational and entertainment purposes and reflecting my collection of data, ideas, opinions. Please, make your proper research or consult your advisors before making any investment or financial or legal decisions.
(Photos: Pixabay.com.)
