7 Useful Mac Apps For College Students

7 Useful Mac Apps For College Students
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Summary: If you're a college student and you're using a Mac, these 7 applications will make your life a lot easier.

Essential Mac Apps For College Students

Laptops became an integrate part of schooling as much as copybooks and pens before them. They are the most versatile tools, but they have their issues. Too often students finding themselves in possession of a new shiny Mac tend to fill it with all sorts of trendy apps, but forget about the essentials necessary for learning. The following list has a purpose of tackling this particular problem.

1. Manuscripts

This app is a word processor designed specifically for academic papers creation. This means that developers made editing footnotes, annotations, and references unbelievably easy. The features are more or less the same as in standard text editors (that is, more than enough for an average student). The layout, however, is very intuitive. All the key features required to meet style guide requirements are only a click away, so editing and restructuring are fairly painless.

Manuscripts facilitates the process of academic writing and leaves students one less reason to procrastinate.

2. iStudiez Pro

This is an organizer app that was designed specifically for students. Assignments, essay deadlines, exams dates, homework, class schedules, and grades – everything is tracked easily. What is more important for teenagers today, everything is synced across all the devices (iPhone, iPad, or both).

The interface is clean and intuitive, so nothing will distract you from the actual content of the app. Still, it is elegant enough, so working with it is pleasant.

3. MacFly Pro

MacFly Pro is a maintenance app that clears the useless files from the disk. Students are notorious for their untidiness. Their laptops are no exception. They tend to have all kinds of duplicate files littering the disk – essay drafts, academic paper copies, discarded apps, innumerable photos.

This cleaner is a great tool to detect and delete duplicate files on Mac, system junk, large files – everything that can be safely removed to free up some additional space. The last point is particularly useful, as students usually have base Mac models with modest disk capacity, so they run out of space far too quickly.

4. Paste

Paste is clipboard manager. It is useful for students, as they have to deal with various subjects and multiple sources of information on a daily basis. This can be quite overwhelming, so a simple and intuitive organizing tool can help a lot. With Paste, everything they copy is never lost, so it is easy to return to the copied information later. Moreover, the clippings are stored on an array of pinboards that user can organize by theme, file type, time, or any other attribute.

This tool is particularly helpful during revision week and while writing research papers – in fact, whenever students have to process big volumes of material.

5. Giphy Capture

Giphy Capture is an app for creating gifs from videos, pictures, or anything that is happening on the screen. This easy-to-use tool looks like fun, but what’s its value for the education?

The illustrative power of gifs is undisputable. How-tos, guides, tutorials – everything that is easier to show in one moving picture than to describe in thousand words. While you can have both in video format, making a video is a complex and time-consuming process. With gifs, you can bring across the same clear message with minimum effort, plus incorporate instructions as text, which is even more beneficial for visual learners.

This app is great for both teachers and students to show off their projects and share knowledge with the class in an engaging and entertaining way.

6. Evernote

No list like this one can ignore the elephant in the room. This cloud-based note-taking app enjoys wide popularity, so I will discover nothing new by reciting Evernote’s features. However, students tend to ignore it. They prefer playing around with desktop stickers, messages to themselves, and a mess of text files instead of the civilized way of keeping records.

Therefore, I decided to put it on the list anyway. You can save text note, doodles, iSight notes, voice messages, and entire webpages – practically anything in any format. This is your digital “random stuff” box that you can always have on you and that does not rattle as you go.

7. Alfred

Alfred is something in between the succinct Spotlight and the chatty Siri. It can find anything and it understands what you seek so well it’s almost eerie. Simply hit the keyboard shortcut and in the window that appears, start typing in the name of the app you want to run.

Alfred is the fastest way to fish out any file and app from your vast collection without having them on the desktop. This saves a lot of time and effort that students can instead invest in actual learning.