Being a college student isn’t easy. Most likely, it’s a lot tougher than you imagined when you were in high school. You have to do so many things, and the academic pressure makes it hard to find your balance, especially when you’re not particularly experienced with time management. If you also have to work part-time to pay at least part of your tuition, you’ll be on a tight schedule.
Fortunately, we’re living in increasingly digital times where laptops have become an integral part of academic life. You have a tool you can always rely on for studying, researching, and doing assignments: you’re shiny new Mac.
In this article, we’ve put together a list of some of the best Mac apps for college students.
Best Mac apps for college students
Manuscripts
Manuscripts is a word processor that simplifies the academic writing process and eliminates one more excuse to procrastinate. It offers the standard features you would expect from a text editor, but the layout is very intuitive.
What Manuscripts truly excels at is handling footnotes, annotations, and references. It makes academic writing and meeting style requirements fairly straightforward and painless.
iStudiez Pro
iStudiez Pro is a student-oriented organizer application. It will help you keep track of their classes, assignments, deadlines, and exam dates, among other things. It has a well-designed, clean, and intuitive interface, so you don’t have to be particularly tech-savvy to learn how to use it.
Everything you save on it will be synchronized on multiple platforms, and it supports macOS, iOS, Windows and Android.
MacFly Pro
College students typically don’t excel in the tidiness department. If you are no exception, then MacFly Pro might be just what you need. It might not clean your dorm room, but it will help you detect and remove any useless files on your laptop.
It won’t be long until your Mac is full of duplicate files from completing assignments. This could mean academic paper copies, textbooks in PDF format, essay drafts, discarded apps or anything else you may have accumulated while doing research or studying.
XMind
XMind is great for when you have to do group projects with your colleagues. It allows you to map out the different tasks and sub-tasks that need to be completed to see the connections between the tasks in a more intuitive way. With a few drags and drops, you can get a clear yet detailed view of even the most intricate projects.
In other words, XMind lets you see the big picture so you can break down a complex assignment into manageable parts.
Prizmo
Prizmo offers optical character recognition (OCR) in 23 languages, translation in 50 languages, text-to-speech, iCloud support, and powerful editing features.
You can use it to turn printed paper, photocopies of textbooks and screenshot into digital text – something you’ll definitely need as a college student. It even has batch OCR support for multipage documents and it corrects any distortions like skewness and warping.
MindNode
If you have trouble organizing your thoughts when working on an assignment, you might want to give MindNode a try. It’s a brainstorming tool that gives you an easy way to approach complex topics.
You can see how you can connect multiple subjects to the main theme so you can get insights and draw informed conclusions. Just what your professors are looking for when giving out these assignments.
Studies
Whether you’re studying law, medicine or mathematics, you’ll want Studies as a companion. Why? Because it will help you achieve your academic goals. How? We’re glad you asked.
You can use Studies to create notes that include links, images, audio and video content and other resources. You can also use it to make a study plan which we assure you that you’ll need.
If you have study buddies, you can share your notes with them and export your notes in different formats to read them on other devices or create flashcards.
Quizlet Go
Speaking of flashcards, Quizlet Go can help you out. The best part is that you can also get access to flashcards other students make. Whatever topic you’re studying, chances are you’ll find a few sets to retain the information more easily.
Be Focused
Do you easily get distracted? Be Focused is an app that used psychology to help you stay on track. It was designed to achieve the ideal work-break balance so you can get good grades without risking burnout. Your job is to set your daily goals, and Be Focused will help you get there at a steady and sustainable pace, so you don’t lose your sanity in the middle of the semester.
How do you use it? Easy. You open the app, which will appear in your menu bar and set the timer. It’s also great for keeping track of how much time you’ve spent on each subject or assignment.
Evernote
You can’t make a must-have college app list without including Evernote. This highly popular cloud-based note-taking app can help you collect and sort information quickly. You can create and save your notes in many different formats, it syncs on all your devices, and you can also use it to keep track of deadlines and collaborate with your peers.
Alfred
Alfred basically helps you find stuff on your Mac. If you have a lot of files on your laptop and you don’t want to spend a lot of time looking through them, this app will fish out whatever you need.
You create a keyboard shortcut to open the app and then type in the name of the file or app you’re looking for. But you can also type in a question or look for definitions of terms. This saves you a lot of time that would be better spent actually studying.
Ulysses
Ulysses is a simple tool with a lot of useful features to help you write essays and papers. It offers a dependable and distraction-free writing environment and saves every word automatically. It also makes it a lot easier to stay organized when working on writing assignments since you can tag everything with keywords.
Other major advantages are that it syncs with iCloud Drive, and you can export your work in multiple formats.