Save on a new Mac or iPad for your studies. Apple Education Pricing Available to current and newly accepted college students and their parents, as well as faculty, staff.
Be warned, though, you might not like what he suggests So you’re about to go off to college in the fall or maybe you’re going back. You’ve probably got the essentials to live your life, toiletries, appropriate clothes, etc.
But do you have the essentials for your computer? Throughout your years in college you’re going to be typing a lot of papers. This isn’t new information to you I’m sure, but you want to be best prepared and on a Mac that means not going with the norm of Microsoft Word. Pages ( – $79) is the way to go on a Mac – a word processor built for Macs from the ground up. What does that mean for you?
It means that your word processor was designed around Mac’s software architecture and not as an after thought for a companies’ main market. It will also run you about half as much as you would pay for Microsoft Office. Pages runs extremely efficiently, loads quickly and will give you everything that you get from Microsoft Word without the bugs and lengthy loading times. As an added bonus since you won’t be touting Microsoft’s Office suite on your computer it will give you an easy out from those pesky group Powerpoint presentations. Next you’ll need a good Instant Messaging client to keep in touch with your friends who don’t use Facebook Chat, Twitter or Text messaging. Adium (/ – Free) is the best IM client for Macs. Not only is it open-source, it’s incredibly customizable with a large group of developers and designers eager to create new themes, dock icons and more.
Adium did tabs way before iChat and did them right. One thing that’s missing though is a video chat feature which comes built into iChat. Adium developers say that the feature is coming in Adium 2.0 (which has no release date) but wait, there’s Skype! Skype ( – Free) is an Internet telephony application that’s available across all operating systems so no matter what kind of system you or your friends have, Skype will work for you. In my first year of college I used Skype often to video chat and keep in touch with friends and family all across the country. It’s a breeze to install and you’ll be video chatting with your loved ones in no time.
Skype is a must have for any computer, really. Maintenance: MacUpdate ( – Free) is a great application to have around for keeping your computer in good, working order. You know every once in a while when your computer gets buggy and noticeably slower? That’s when Maintenance comes in handy. Just click a few boxes, enter your password, step back from your computer and let Maintenance do the rest. It will repair your disk permissions, clear out half-downloaded files and rid your computer of all of those things that were just left lying around, buried somewhere with no grunt-work on your part. A good browser is a must and Macs, like Windows, have a large variety of browsers to choose from.
Safari, which comes with your Mac, is a fantastic and speedy browser that will take care of all of your needs. I use Firefox ( – Free) too, right alongside Safari. Though it may hog a few more of your system resources Firefox in some instances out-performs Safari making it the obvious second choice. I keep them side-by-side in my Dock just in case I feel like using one or the other.
Browsers like Opera and Camilla will vie for your attention but pay no attention to them. Go with the two big guns on the Mac, Safari and Firefox. You also need a good Bittorrent client. College kids are strapped for money right? That means you’ll just have to get all of your music and movies for free off of the Internet.
I recommend Transmission (/ – Free). Transmission is extremely lightweight “with few dependencies and written in C, Transmission has the lowest memory footprint of any BitTorrent client we’ve seen,” according to Transmissions developers. Note from Dave Taylor: I do not endorse using bittorrent applications to download illegally copied commercial material, but there’s also other data accessible through the torrent networks, including entire operating system distributions. As with any tool, please use it thoughtfully and for good. 7. Last but not least is Adobe Photoshop ( – $195), something that everyone should have on their computer and have a modicum of skill using. Whether it’s blurring out the Bud Lights in your hand at parties so you can show your friends on Facebook that you go out or actually using Photoshop for academic purposes, the fact that you need Photoshop is really an understatement.
You’re going to need to design things in college, whatever it may be, and Photoshop is the only way to go. This is the student version too so you’re getting major discounts from the full Creative Suite package. I hope this list will come in handy and these applications will treat you well. I just got done my first year of college and I used each one of these apps extensively.
Whether it’s design, keeping in touch, or acquiring your favorite music and movies, these Mac apps will help you out along the journey that is the college experience. Zack Shapiro is the Social Media Outreach Editor and staff writer for the CU Independent. He is also an active blogger. You can find him on his website and on Twitter as. Dave, why not make a 2011 version of this article?
Microsoft Office 2011 is far far more capable then pages, its just a dream to work on. Also note that Pixelmator should ideally replace Photoshop with just a $39.99 price tag at Amazon, its damn cheap. CleanMyMac is the perfect Mac maintainence software. Also iChat is sufficient these days days with Adium slowly losing its popularity as Google goes on becoming the main social platform together with Facebook. Do update the article lest confusing users. I guess it depends what your major is and what you want out of college.
A Mac is a great tool for some, and PC for others. Be aware of your campus’ network – mine provides several free apps, and some very cheap apps (MS office for $65 for the full suite). I wouldn’t use Photoshop or a “nonstandard” im suite at all (Photoshop being expensive and useless for me). I’ve found that, unfortunately, not all sites are accessible from Firefox, and I dislike safari (iphone only) with IE being the only browser able to access the secure sites I need. Whatever computer you decide on, make sure your printer is cheap to run and you have enough cash for a good internet service.
Nowadays, Mac has become one of the most useful tools for students to study. And students will soon be heading back to school with their Mac and mobile devices in hand. While the number of apps available through the Mac operating system may have increased considerably in recent times and most of them are paid, so we've compiled a list of our best free back-to-school apps for Mac that can help you boost your studying process and make your school life wonderful. Again, these best back to school Mac apps are totally free, just check them below.
Sophos Antivirus As Apple products grow in popularity, they have become one of the most attractive targets for cybercriminals. Macs can also be infected by a growing number of viruses and other malware.
Sophos' free Antivirus software for Mac keeps your Mac safe from all the latest Mac threats. It protects every Mac in your home or campus from malware, viruses, ransom ware, and inappropriate websites. With it, you can feel free to use your Mac for studies. The Unarchiver The Unarchiver is a free and easy to use program which is designed to handle many more formats than the built-in archive extraction program on Mac. It can unarchive many different kinds of archive files such as Zip, RAR (including v5), 7-zip, Tar, Gzip and Bzip2. It will also open many older formats, such as StuffIt, DiskDoubler, LZH, ARJ and ARC and open other kinds of files, like ISO and BIN disc images, some Windows.EXE installers.
NetSpot NetSpot is an award-winning WiFi signal mapper and wireless manager which helps you visualize WiFi, run wireless site surveys & analyze Wi-Fi on Mac. It allows you to view all Wi-Fi networks in the local vicinity and conducts a professional WiFi survey of a house, office, cafe, airport, building, or any other area. It is very helpful if you’ve got your Mac with you on campus or in the library. It will save you hunting around and make WiFi connectivity that little bit easier. But it is not very safe to use a public wireless network and you’d better. MacClean 3 It’s back to school time, so don't let your Mac still be cluttered up with junk files. Your Mac needs to be cleaned up and have more storage for learning materials.
If you used to dig around on your Mac, search for what are taking up space and decide what is safe to delete, MacClean 3 will save that inconvenience for you. MacClean 3 is designed mainly for Mac users who want to clean up and, and with no effort. Libre Office Libre Office is a competent, free alternative to Microsoft Office. Like Office, it's kind of bloated and slow to load.
It can open text documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings created by a large number of applications like OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visio, WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Lotus 1-2-3, and AutoCAD. Even documents created by old and historical applications such as MacWrite and ClarisWorks are also supported.
But XPS, OXPS files are not supported by Libre Office; if you need to open them on your Mac, can help you do that. PDFSigner for Mac is a 100% free and safe solution allowing you to sign PDF on Mac. With it you can easily fill out PDF form, and add scanned signature or images with full control of size and orientation. If you want to add texts, comments, notes, or shapes (Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Circle,) to your PDF on Mac, try. Just like, PDFManagerUltimate also allows you convert PDF into Microsoft Word, Excel, Text and other formats. Evernote Evernote is a cross-platform, freemium app designed for note taking, organizing, syncing, and much more. As a student, you can use it to save information such as school phone numbers, team practice schedules, etc and add reminders to important notes, such as class notes and scanned study guides, so everything you need to prepare for the next test or exam is in one place.
The application is also available for Windows, Android, iOS, etc. Though Evernote is free, but the application is ad-supported and you can only upload 60 MB of data per month (this equates to about 30,000 notes and 400 web pages), which is usually enough for most of the users. Wunderlist Wunderlist is a versatile and convenient to-do listing application which helps you keep track of all of your projects and tasks. Whether you’re planning some reading, a holiday, sharing a shopping list with a partner or managing multiple work projects, Wunderlist is here to help you tick off all your personal and professional to-dos. Anxiety Anxiety is a super-lightweight to-do list application for Mac that synchronizes with iCal and Mail.
Its aim is to provide a streamlined, easily accessible interface to add and check off your tasks, while remaining poised to melt into the background at a moment’s notice. It is a good reminder when you have lots of studies to do. Isolator Want to concentrate on your task in hand and don’t want to be distracted by other windows?
You need Isolator. Isolator is a great application that helps you concentrate. When you're working on a document, and don't want to be distracted, turn on Isolator. It will cover up your desktop and all the icons on it, as well as the windows of all your other applications, so you can concentrate on the task in hand.
It is indispensable for students who want to improve learning efficiency. MindNode MindNode is a simple-to-use mindmapping application for the Macintosh that help to visually collect, classify and structure ideas as well as organize study and solve problems.
![Best Best](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125429839/309569529.jpg)
It is mostly used in brainstorming sessions for Mac users. It has helped students, artists and project managers to be more creative and productive with less effort. F.lux According to some studies, exposure to bright blue light in the evening can affect your circadian rhythms and makes it harder for you to fall asleep.
Even with automatic brightness turned on, the hours you spend staring at Mac can cause serious strain on our retinas. F.lux is dedicated to automatically adjust not just the brightness, but also the color temperature of your display based on the time of day. It's especially useful at night, when the screen takes on a warm hue to help your eyes relax, letting you study and sleep well. By using this app, you may become energetic and productive. Skype Skype is a powerful communication software that provides video chat and voice call services.
The users can exchange and transmit text or video messages and digital documents such as images, text, video and any others. It is available for Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, iOS as well as Android, Blackberry, etc. You can download Skype for Mac below and Stay in touch with family, friends and schoolmates for free video calls, voice calls and messaging on Skype. Go for Gmail Do you often have troubles with your Gmail? Is it frustrating to control your inbox because it lacks features?
Then it’s high time to download Go for Gmail to your Mac and forget about all these problems at once. Go for Gmail is the best and most powerful Mac app for Gmail, and is gorgeously designed to allow you to quickly access your Gmail account. With it, you can easily check your inbox, compose emails and customize your notifications. Pocket Read-it-later pioneer Instapaper may have transformed the way we absorb information, but Pocket’s Mac app is like your own personal DVR for the web. It is one of the most efficient ways for you to save any articles, photos, videos that you find and store them inside its infinite queue for reading them later. This is super helpful when you are working on a paper or specific topic.
You can also tag your articles keywords to quickly find the one you want. Text2Speech Are you fed up with reading text using your eyes? Then use your ears. Text2Speech is a free text to speech utility which can help you read text with over 10 voices and supports 26 non-English languages. The voices are very smooth and easy to listen to. You can change the speaking rate, or to start, stop, pause, continue and select different voice anytime you want.
Cisdem VideoPlayer Many students are indeed more likely to watch videos than read texts. And more and more students are watching videos for fun or study. If you find a very interesting video and download it, But if the video has not been encoded in 64-bit or MPEG, the newest version of QuickTime might not be able to play them. You just need a powerful media player that supports the format of your file. Will be a great choice for you. It is a free video and audio player that plays just about any media file (including 5K and Full HD 1080P video) and supports more than 50 video file formats including MKV, AVI, FLV, AVCHD, WMV, etc.
Keep it in your hands and you will have a perfect video playing and viewing experience. If you always transfer the downloaded videos to your mobile phone in order to watch them anytime and anywhere, you should try to convert these videos to your phone supported formats first. GIMP GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image retouching and editing, free-form drawing, resizing, cropping, photo-montages, converting between different image formats, and more specialized tasks. You probably won’t need Photoshop if you have GIMP. You can find more back to school Mac apps in this article “”.
![Students Students](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125429839/572286669.jpg)
If you have any other free Mac back to school apps for students, just let us know in the comments below! More Related Articles You May Like. Macs are becoming much more popular with students. And it's back to school time. If you are a Mac lover who will go back to school, then you can’t miss these must-have back to school Mac apps that will help you study smarter and give you a smoother school experience.
And some of these must-have back to school apps are also available on iOS. Summer holiday is getting closer to the end, do you have new plans for the coming back-to-school days? Here essential tips are revealed to help college students to make another new and great school year. As Apple released the new iPhone 8 and iPhone X, Cisdem provides a special offer - $10 OFF with Cisdem iPhone Recovery for new iPhone upgrade from September 12th to 30th. Recover your lost or accidentally deleted files from your iPhone or iPad at home with only $49.99!