Xpenser: Text, call or email your expenses into an organizer
I spent the last week on a writing retreat as I finished up the book on free and low-cost tools (coming this fall!). While I was writing away, I ran across this favorite of mine, and I realized I hadn’t shared it yet. Xpenser lets you text, call or email in your expenses while you’re on the road.
When you set up your account, you can set up the ways you want to be able to submit expenses. I can send them in via Jott, Twitter, email and more. You just send something like “Taxi 30 to airport” or something, and your expenses will be entered into your online account. Then you can download them in a number of formats to complete your expense reports. You can also take pictures of your receipts and email them to your Xpenser account for safe keeping.
This service is in beta, which means it’s still free. It won’t be for long.
Xpenser – Mobile Expense Tracking and Management.
PDFescape: The PDF editor I’ve been dreaming of!
Oh, I’m thrilled! I just found a PDF tool that allows you to add text, notes, form fields and more to existing PDFs. I’m often frustrated when my clients send me PDFs to edit because I have to do screenshots with Jing page by page. Don’t get me wrong — I adore Jing, but the process takes forever.
But PDFescape lets you upload a PDF and add all the notes you need without having to have Adobe Acrobat, which costs hundreds of dollars.
This find is definitely my favorite of 2010.
WhatTheFont!: Font recognition from graphics
WhatTheFont is a lot like one of my favorites, Identifont. This little free service allows you to upload a graphic that contains words, and the system does its best to identify your font.
I tried it with a few logos I’ve developed where I knew what the font was. It hit about 50 percent of the time, but the misses were darn close. I could have easily used one of the fonts they came up with as a close match to the look and feel.
WhatTheFont is a tool brought to you by MyFonts, which looks to be a pretty inexpensive way to purchase interesting fonts. Of course, I still prefer dafont, which is free. I’m funny like that.




