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This post is brought to you by Invoicely.

With the exploding number of freelancers and independent business owners, we might need to rework an old phrase to say, “Nothing is certain but death, taxes and invoices.”

Keeping track of which clients need to pay you, and which vendors need paying, is a mind-numbing but necessary part of surviving in today’s economy. Many of us utilize our own DIY systems for invoicing. But Invoicely — a free, cloud-based service designed for freelancers that can scale up to work for businesses of all sizes — delivers handy features that make invoicing the least of your worries.

This post is brought to you by LG Electronics.

Even if you’ve never heard of DevinSuperTramp, it’s a good bet your eyeballs have engaged one of his gorgeous videos of people at play.

Whether it’s parkour in the Shire, boogie boarding off wet rocks, parasailing, base jumping or squirrel suiting, you name the ill-advised activity, and this guy’s probably shot it — with glorious production values.

With 200 videos, 4 million YouTube subscribers and over 765 million views, he’s doing something right. One of the keys to his success is keeping on top of the latest, greatest gear.

This post is brought to you by GraphicStock.

Having worked as a graphic designer years before my official role as a YouTuber, I know the importance of having ready-made graphics and photos at my disposal.

Lately I’ve been using GraphicStock, which is the place to go for all your illustration, vector and stock photo needs (and also a sponsor of Cult of Mac‘s YouTube videos). For a guided tour of GraphicStock, and to take full advantage of a free seven-day trial of the service, check out the video below.

This post is brought to you by EdX.

It’s often said that the internet makes it possible for anyone to get educated on any subject. But just as in offline modes of education, the many models of online teaching and learning are far from perfect, with plenty of room for improvement and innovation.

A joint effort between Harvard and MIT — dubbed EdX — is aiming to provide not only a place for learning new skills, but a platform for innovating new ways of teaching and learning over the web. It’s a nonprofit online education platform partnered with nearly 100 of the world’s leading universities and institutions — Harvard, MIT, Microsoft, Caltech, Columbia, you get the picture — to provide students anywhere in the world access to more than 1,000 certified courses. As an open-source platform, it also offers educators an opportunity to design and implement their own modes of teaching.

This post is brought to you by VMware AirWatch.

Let’s face it: Asking a person to carry around two devices all the time, one for work and one for play, is just inefficient. When organizations implement overbearing management or ignore privacy concerns, they almost force users to carry a device for work and a device for personal use.

While a few employees may enjoy the air-gap separation of church and state, most people buckle under the stress of having two separate devices to potentially forget in a cab or leave on the airport bathroom sink (true story!).

This post is brought to you by VMware AirWatch.

If you know what the word “containerization” means, you probably work in IT (or you’re tech-savvy and adventurous enough to run afoul of your IT department on a regular basis). Containerization is the method of securing a device for corporate use by putting a part of it behind some type of authentication — without managing the actual device.

It’s a common practice in the corporate world, especially for bring your own device (or BYOD) environments, because containerization is often viewed as more lightweight than mobile device management, aka MDM. Users also may assume that MDM is overly intrusive and that containerization is a good compromise.

However, many of these issues are already solved for iOS. By leveraging Apple’s built-in privacy protections, AirWatch allows IT departments to preserve the native device experience while protecting corporate data.

This post is brought to you by Kraftwerk9, maker of 1Sync.

For all the fancy features on our phones, somehow keeping our many streams of contacts organized remains a tedious hassle. When you meet someone on Facebook, get a phone number, connect via Gmail, or get in touch through any of the other myriad forms of communication we use daily, you create a new contact in an isolated contact category.

This post is brought to you by Sony.

Competition among low-profile, high-definition cameras keeps getting tougher. For proof, look no further than the latest Sony Action Cam lineup.

Looking something like a futuristic Super 8 in pill form, these powerhouse cameras are as feature-rich as photo gear five times their size. Sony sets its new cameras apart by throwing in attractive goodies and improving upon the previous Action Cam iteration.

This post is brought to you by SmartDraw Software.

Plenty of jobs nowadays involve creating visual aids for clients, bosses and co-workers, from project flowcharts and building schematics to medical diagrams, you name it. But getting a BA typically doesn’t teach digital draftsmanship, which is why apps that make it easy to create compelling, clear graphics and illustrations have become so popular.

SmartDraw is an intuitive, powerful and fun app that’s become a contender against the big legacy software brands. More than half of the Fortune 500 and over 250,000 public and private enterprises of all sizes use SmartDraw now. But until today, SmartDraw has been available only on Windows machines. That changes with the release of SmartDraw Cloud, which lets Mac users get in on the action.

This post is brought to you by Avi, maker of Smart-Spools.

“Cable organizers” is one of those useful product categories that no one can quite seem to get right. The engineering problem seems simple enough: Give me a way to neatly wrap up and stow my peripherals, like earbuds and power cables, ideally in a form that’s compact and not overly complicated to use.

Many have tried, but too often — whether due to improper sizing or an emphasis on form over function — cable organizers end up being less convenient than simply wrapping your headphones around a few fingers and stuffing them in your pocket.

Smart-Spools finally got it right, though.

This post is brought to you by Tenorshare, maker of ReiBoot and iPhone Care Pro.

Too many of us know the sense of powerlessness that comes with staring at a red Apple logo on an iPhone screen for minutes on end, or seeing the device stuck in an endless restart loop. When the time comes to restore a corrupted or compromised iPhone, the simplicity of an iOS device can turn into an imposing, tangled mess as you use iTunes to wake it up from its digital coma.

This post is brought to you by Wondershare, maker of PDFelement.

If you work with a computer (which, since you’re here, is likely), you have to deal with PDFs. And while PDFs are a great and reliable way to send forms, presentations and contracts — basically anything that can be read or written on — they’re not exactly flexible. In order to edit, add to, remove from, or otherwise alter them, you might think your options are limited to pricey software from Adobe.

This post is brought to you by Tenorshare, maker of iPhone Care Pro.

Oh, iTunes. We gave it a good run, but I finally realized I’ve just been using you to take care of my iPhone. And that I can do better.

After finding my iPhone never quite properly synced, waiting through lengthy backups and updates, and putting up with your strange behavior because “that’s just the way you were designed,” it’s time to move on.

This post is brought to you by You Need A Budget.

Given today’s economy, there’s a good chance you’re a freelancer. The self-employed, as much as and maybe more so than the salaried, can only benefit from being strategic and disciplined in handling money.

Of course many of us don’t have the bandwidth to plan beyond next week, let alone the next six months. But with shifting sources of income and hard deadlines for bills, improvising with your finances is a sure way to lose cash you could be keeping.

This post is brought to you by Code Atlas, maker of Veer.

Sometimes great innovations are really just refinements of something few would have thought of trying to improve. If you think Apple’s already figured out the best way of reaching out to your contacts in iOS 9, Veer will make you reconsider. It’s a novel new iOS app and Notification Center widget that blends seamlessly into your iPhone’s normal operations, simplifying and streamlining how we use the device to reach people.

This post is brought to you by iMyfone Technology Co., maker of iMyfone Umate.

Sure our iPhones look sharp, but the sleek exterior hides an inner life that resembles the floor of a bachelor pad. Broken bits of uncompressed photos, unused files, app caches, cookies, backup logs and whatnot clog up the works (there’s probably a few empty pizza boxes in there, too).

This post is brought to you by LG Electronics.

When it comes to TVs, more is the new black. As the visual fidelity of film and television gets ever more refined, the visual subtleties and dynamics can be lost by TVs that aren’t able to produce a true black tone. It’s a benchmark of a monitor’s quality along with contrast ratio, and no TV can produce a more complete black than LG’s latest generation of OLED monitors.

One thing that apps like Instagram and VSCO have mastered is making photo retouching on a mobile device (e.g. smartphone, ipad, etc.) a breeze. Simple sliders grouped in easily understandable categories and real-time results make the editing process a snap. It’s fun and easy to dial in the overall look of an image on your phone’s screen! However, with that convenience, comes limitations. For instance, if you want anything more precise than a slider you’ll have to open up a professional application like Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture.

This post is brought to you by VMware, maker of AirWatch.

Whatever your organization’s mission, synchronizing all your employees’ mobile devices can power up your operations. However, wrangling together an array of phones, tablets and laptops is very tough. Making sure they’re all caught up and in sync with the same software versions and whatnot — let alone sourcing or (gasp) developing the applications your business will run on them — is a lot for a business of any size to take on.

This post is brought to you by Coolmuster.

There’s no sense pretending some of us iOS and Mac enthusiasts don’t dabble in the world of Android. Whether using phones, tablets or other mobile devices, we’ve come to rely on all our gadgets communicating reliably with one another, but when using both Apple and Android gear that isn’t always guaranteed.

Luckily, there’s a fix: Coolmuster Android Assistant, which will keep your Android devices working in harmony with your PC or Mac.

This post is brought to you by Hulltex, maker of the Hullo Buckwheat Pillow.

If you’re one of the millions of people sitting at a computer for eight hours a day, keeping proper posture is a constant concern. You buy all kinds of stopgaps — yoga ball chair, curved keyboard, ergonomic mouse — but how often do you think about keeping your spine lined up while sleeping?

This post is brought to you by VideoBlocks.

High-definition video is increasingly fundamental to all sorts of online content, and it’s an ever-more-critical part of any design project. Unless you’re a pro videographer in addition to being a digital creator, you’ll have to get your footage from an agency or stock video site, often a pricey proposition for quality visuals.

This post is brought to you by Jutiful, maker of AZZL and other smart games.

Much as candy makers know what taste buds they’re appealing to, game makers have learned what makes people respond. Similarly, the “animation puzzles” in AZZL make it feel like a game that’s also a confection: sweet and a little addicting.

This post is brought to you by Lucid Software, maker of Lucidchart.

Visual diagrams are one of the best ways of conveying complex ideas to audiences and collaborators. Making them is also an invitation to get frustrated by how little diagramming software has apparently advanced in recent years (people still use Visio?).

We live in an age of sleek design and intuitive user interfaces, so why is it still easier to scrawl a simple chart on a napkin than to draft one on a computer or iPad?