Best Mac Apps For Students 2018

07.05.202022.08.2017admin

Best Mac Apps For Students 2018 Rating: 3,7/5 6083 reviews

2018 Best Mac Applications
Best Mac Apps For Developers 2018
Top Mac Apps 2018
Best Mac Apps 2018 Free

Essential Mac Apps for Students. Mint - Mint is widely heralded as the best free money manager on the Web. It's available for Macs and iPhones and offers secure and easy-to-use tools to budget. Teachers and students can even create accounts for use in the classroom. We found that free typing software including Typing.com did not offer as many lessons and tests as some of the best for-pay applications. Now that we finally have our hands on the MacBook Pro 2018 and macOS Mojave, the best Macs are better than ever before. And, if you’re thinking about going out and picking up the best Mac for. Here are the best Mac apps for students. Plan Your Schedule, Assignments, and Homework One of the most essential parts of a successful student life is planning.

Whether you’re starting a new school year, adjusting to another semester, or just need help getting through the rest of the year, this list of apps for Mac is just for you.

Planning, writing, studying, organizing, and focusing is much easier on your computer with the right tools. Here are the best Mac apps for students.

This is one of the best Mac apps for students to create professional documents with a formal look without much complications. TeX is a typesetting system that processes the document and changes the layout accordingly. For education, to-do apps are relatively simple and work best for remembering assignments and exam dates rather than class meeting times. For many students, however, assignment and date tracking. Please contact me if you have any suggestions for best Mac OS apps! I haven't included any of the default apps that come with Mac OS. I haven't included any of the default apps that come with Mac OS. All of these apps are actually used by me.

Plan Your Schedule, Assignments, and Homework

One of the most essential parts of a successful student life is planning. From your classes to assignments and more, these student planners will keep you organized.

1. myHomework

With myHomework, you’ll never lose track of your classes, schedule, or homework. The app gives you a clear view of your course schedule, a calendar showing what’s due when, and a homework section for all your assignments.

Create reminders and repeating tasks, color-code your classes for easy viewing, and see your student overview in one simple app. And if your professors use Teachers.io, you can connect to that for announcements and assignments.

Download: myHomework (Free, subscription available)

2. iStudiez Lite

Another great student planner is iStudiez Lite. You can view your calendar by day or week and see tasks due at a glance. The assignments section is flexible, so you can view what’s due by date, course, or priority.

The app also offers an area to set up holidays when school isn’t in session, a progress bar for your semester, and a way to connect instructors from your contacts list. You can click on a class to view dates and times plus the room number and professor. It also lets you add notes, assignments, or convert to an exam.

Download: iStudiez Lite (Free)

Create and Study With Flashcards

Flashcards are terrific study tools. These apps let you create your own flashcard decks, share them with others, or browse decks that might fit your topics.

3. PAL Flashcards

PAL is a cool flashcard app that gives you a few samples to start with, but lets you create and import your own decks as well. You can use text or images when creating your cards, which makes it handy for any course.

When it’s time to review your cards, just hit the Study button and test yourself. PAL also lets you share your flashcard decks with fellow students by sending a link. If you want a basic, easy flashcard app for Mac, this is it.

Download: PAL Flashcards (Free)

4. Flashcard Hero Lite

Flashcard Hero Lite is another great flashcard app. Create cards, decks, and topics with just a click. And if you like to be a little creative with your flashcards, the app lets you format text and use lists in your answers.

At study time, you can use the Memorize, Type, or Multiple Choice features. You can adjust the deck for a more productive study session by using your iPhone as a remote, use text-to-speech, and shuffle the cards. Flashcard Hero Lite also gives you a progress section to check out.

Download: Flashcard Hero Lite (Free, premium version available)

Write and Take Notes With Helpful Tools

Every student is familiar with writing. Make writing on your Mac easier—whether it’s papers, essays, or notes—with these tools.

5. Grammarly

You may be familiar with Grammarly due to its popular browser extensions that help you avoid spelling and grammar mistakes. But the company also offers a Mac app that does more than that. You can use it as a full writing tool with built-in spelling and grammar features.

Create a new document or import one to get started. As you work on your document, you’ll see alerts for spelling and grammar issues at the top and can click for details. You can adjust the settings to show word count and increase the font size. You can also view your performance stats and set goals. Grammarly on Mac provides a really solid writing experience that helps you avoid errors.

Download: Grammarly (Free, subscription available)

6. Bear

Another terrific writing tool on Mac is Bear. While you may think it’s just another note-taking app, there’s more to Bear than meets the eye. You can create full documents with headings, font formatting, lists, and even code for programmers.

Bear lets you change to a distraction-free experience, send or share your papers quickly, and view stats like word, character, and paragraph counts. Read time and creation/modification dates are also present. You can adjust the settings in Bear for sorting, shortcuts, fonts, lines, paragraphs, and more. We’ve compared Bear to Apple Notes if you’re interested in more.

Download: Bear (Free, subscription available)

Organize Projects and Thoughts With Mind Maps

A mind map is a handy tool for organizing your thoughts in a visual way. Maybe you have a large team project to collaborate on, an in-depth paper to write, or just need to brainstorm ideas. These mind map apps make it easy.

7. SimpleMind Lite

SimpleMind Lite is one of the easiest ways to create mind maps. The interface is intuitive with a nice toolbar at the top. Add your nodes, use custom colors or palettes, and adjust the style. You can choose from a variety of styles like bright colors, chart, grayscale, and colors on black to get started.

The app gives you zoom and print options, clipboard features, freeform or horizontal layouts, and a distraction-free mind mapping feature.

Download: SimpleMind Lite (Free) SimpleMind ($30)

8. Junkyard

If you like to work with an outline view in addition to the visual map, check out Junkyard. Open up the sidebar and start creating your map with a click. You can pick from various font styles and colors, and adjust the alignment and layout easily.

When you want to see your outline, just click its button in the sidebar. You can even export and print your outline, which is great for a written view of your assignment or project. Junkyard does display an ad at the bottom of the window, but unlike similar apps, you receive all features for free. You can remove the ad via in-app purchase.

Download: Junkyard (Free)

Stay Focused and Take Breaks

Whether you’re studying or writing an essay, staying focused is key to completing your task. But breaks are important to your mental health as well. These focus timers help you try the Pomodoro technique on your Mac.

9. Be Focused

A focus timer should be super simple, and Be Focused is just that. Click to open the app, which pops into your menu bar. Then click once more to start the timer at its default of 25 minutes.

If you want to track specific tasks, you can add those and use the timer for each. This is a great way to see which subjects or assignments you’re spending the most time on. The app includes settings for your work, long and short break intervals, sounds and notifications, and handy shortcuts.

Download: Be Focused (Free)

10. Red Hot Timer

Another excellent focus timer option is Red Hot Timer. When you open the app, just type in the amount of time you want and the timer starts. The display shows a large digital countdown clock, which you can customize to include four different timers.

Other handy features include a menu bar icon, automatic starts and tops, various notification sounds, a Do Not Disturb mode, multiple notification options, and task shortcuts.

Download: Red Hot Timer (Free)

Your Student Life, Simplified by Useful Apps

It’s never too early or too late to get your computer prepared for school. Your life as a student can be a bit easier with the right tools to help you out with planning, organizing, focusing, and more.

We also have you covered with Chrome extensions for students and apps every student needs on their iOS device. Quicken premier 2018 2 year.

Read the full article: 10 Awesome Mac Apps for Students to Help You Succeed

There are a bunch of great apps you can install on your Mac—no question there. Separating amazing apps from must-have apps is the hard part, and we don’t want you to spend hours analyzing the Mac App Store (or scouring the web) to find the very best and most useful apps. We’ve made a list of champions across four categories: productivity; Internet and communications; music, photos, and video; and utilities.

The Lifehacker Pack is an annual snapshot of our favorite, essential applications for each of our favorite platforms. For our always-updating directory of all the best apps, be sure to bookmark our App Directory, where we profile amazing apps for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS each week—browser extensions, too.

App Directory - Tips, Tricks and Hacks for Doing Everything Better Lifehacker

Everything you ever wanted to know about App Directory. News, stories, photos, videos and more.

Productivity

Alfred (free-ish)

You can do a lot with Spotlight in macOS, but Alfred is still our favorite application launcher for yourMac. This easy-to-use tool can do so much more than pull up apps, files, and and keyword-driven automation. Plunk down £19 for the Powerpack, and you’ll get a clipboard history, access to workflows (that you can use to combine different actions, hotkeys, and keywords to do even more), hotkeys, 1Password integration, and even text expansion. In other words, paying for Alfred covers a number of activities that you’d have to download separate apps for—some featured in this very Lifehacker Pack. If you’re a new Alfred buyer and feeling little overwhelmed, be sure to check out our beginner’s guide to the app to get a handle on all the amazing things you can do with it.

If you don’t want to pay anything for an app launcher that has similar (but fewer) features under the hood, check out LaunchBar 6: free, if you don’t mind a little bother here and there. That, or consider tricking out Spotlight.

Bear (free-ish)

This cutely named app is one of the best note-taking apps you can get, with one small caveat—to synchronize notes between your devices or use custom themes, you’ll need to pony up $15/year for the app’s subscription. Otherwise, Bear is completely free to use (and looks great).

Within the app, you organize your notes by hashtags rather than unwieldy folders. You can also link notes to one another, which makes it a lot easier to chain together related thoughts instead of having to dump everything into one giant Super Note or remember that you had a few things to say, split into different notes, about a particular topic. Install Bear’s browser extension for Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, and you’ll be able to create new notes from whatever portion of a webpage you select. Also, Bear makes it easy to import notes from other services, including Apple Notes, so you really have no reason to not give it a spin.

If you need to sync notes and don’t feel like paying for it, consider apps like OneNote, Google Keep, or Simplenote—all good choices, but none that can beat our Bear for usability and looks.

aText ($5)

Who would have thought that text expansion, otherwise known as typing shortcuts, would be so expensive? While it’s true that you can create these kinds of shortcuts yourself directly within macOS, a full-fledged text expansion app is going to save you a lot of time and trouble. We like aText if for nothing else than its price—$5—given that much-loved alternatives like Textexpander ($3.33/mo on an annual plan; $45 for an older standalone) and TypeIt4Me 6 ($20) are anywhere from a bit to a lot more expensive.

As for aText, using it is simple. You set it up so that whenever you enter little words or phrases, the app drops in something else. So, you can finally correct that annoying “ducking” issue forevermore,

Text expansion, also known as typing shortcuts, can save you hours of typing each day. You type a small word or combination of characters and it’ll expand into full, complex sentences that you often use. We love aText because it offers so many great features and only costs $5. If you haven’t yet jumped on the text expansion train, it’s time.

Todoist (free-ish)

For simple note-taking and note-organizing, you can’t go wrong with Todoist. The app is completely free—unless you want to pay $39/yearly for more advanced features like automatic reminders, backups, themes, and an activity overview, to name a few features. Otherwise, the basics are great. It’s easy to create and synchronize tasks (and subtasks) across all of your Todoist-using devices, and browser extensions (including a Gmail addon) will help you make Todoist, and your growing task list, an ever-present part of your daily life. You won’t have that same kind of experience with plain ol’ Notes, especially if you’re trying to access your items on multiple platforms.

If you’re a big Google fan, we also love Google Tasks, which you’ll find directly integrated into the latest version of Gmail (and as a direct app for iOS and Android). You can also add to-do items into our note-taking app, Bear. The app Things 3 is a super-comprehensive task manager, but it costs quite a bit: $50 for Mac, $10 for iPhone, and $20 for your iPad. If the first item on your to-do list is “rob a bank,” however, it’s a gorgeous, fully featured app. And if you want to harass yourself about things you have to get done on your Mac, consider giving the quicky Effortless a try—which drops a countdown timer for your tasks directly into your Mac’s menu bar.

Google Drive and Office Online (free)

We don’t really have to introduce Google Drive, because Google’s offerings should be pretty well-known by everyone at this point. Docs and Sheets are great, free tools for creating and collaborating on documents and spreadsheets (of course), so much so, that a number of businesses solely rely on Google’s offerings instead of anything fancier or pricier.

If you’re a Microsoft convert, or you really love Word and Excel, you can access basic, online versions of both programs directly from Microsoft—no Office 365 subscription needed. If you’d rather work offline, Apple’s Pages and Numbers are the obvious, free choices, and LibreOffice is still the best open-source office app around.

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Airmail ($5)

If you really don’t feel like fussing around with Mail, which is fine enough for most macOS users, consider giving Airmail a try. It’s been our favorite third-party mail app for some time given its low price and ample customization. It also hooks into a ton of other third-party apps and services, including Trello, Evernote, your favorite cloud storage service, and Apple’s mighty Workflow app (on iOS, that is).

If you don’t need power options and want easy, simple email, the free Spark is definitely worth checking out—especially since it can help you automatically sort your inbox to make it feel less like an ever-growing pile of things you’ll never read. Boxy 2 is great if you’re a Gmail user who wants the powers of its Inbox app on your desktop (and don’t mind paying $5 for it), and Mailplane 4 ($30) is a solid app if you prefer an interface that looks like the regular ol’ Gmail. Power users might want to investigate Wavebox ($20/year), which lets you access Gmail, Inbox, Outlook, and all sorts of other amazing web apps directly from one, easy-to-use interface.

Internet and Communications

Google Chrome and Firefox Quantum (free)

The browser you use is likely going to be dictated by the browser you’ve been using. In other words, if you’re a Google Chrome loyalist, it’ll probably take a lot to get you to switch over to Firefox Quantum (if you’re at all intrigued). And if you’ve been with Firefox from day one, you’re probably a lot less likely to want to move all of your bookmarks, extensions, and other settings over to Chrome.

So, which browser is best? It’s not so much that one excels over the other; it’s more important to say that both, finally, are pretty competitive. Depending on the benchmarks you look at—here are a bunch from ZDNet, for example—the browsers appear evenly matched for speed. I haven’t gone through and assessed the most-recent version of each, but I have used both Firefox Quantum and Google Chrome, and they both feel, well, fast. That said, Chrome still feels a bit like a hog when you’re trying to load a ton of tabs at once, but it’s pretty good about using less of your CPU and memory than other browsers.

If you don’t like either, Opera is a viable alternative that’s actually pretty speedy in its own right—and we can’t complain about its built-in VPN, either, nor its awesome integration of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram directly into an easy-to-launch sidebar.

Goofy and Franz (free)

Years ago, it felt like everyone used one chat client to cover a bunch of services (ICQ, AIM, IRC, Jabber, et cetera). Most people nowadays probably have their favorites locked in: Messages for texting, Facebook Messenger for everything else, WhatsApp for sending government secrets or expiring pictures of your booty, Discord for any and all things gaming, Slack for all things not-gaming, et cetera. So, rather than go into detail with all the more obvious apps, we’ll highlight two unique ones.

Facebook Messenger, as you know, requires you to be on Facebook to use it. If I’m correct, you used to be able to essentially connect Facebook’s service to Messages itself, so you could send and receive your Facebook chats without having to have your browser open all the time. And if I’m right (again), you can no longer do that. Instead, you’ll want an app like Goofy, which basically drops the Facebook Messenger interface into a simple application that you can access from your desktop.

We’re also fans of Franz, which offers the same treatment for a variety of other services (as well as Facebook Messenger). If you don’t want to keep 20 programs open to chat with people, Franz lets you access apps like Slack, WeChat, WhatsApp, Skype, Google Hangouts, and Facebook Messenger all from one, single interface.

Skype (free)

Everyone also probably has a video chat app they love to use. And there are plenty to pick from: FaceTime, which comes baked into macOS by default; the aforementioned WhatsApp; Google Hangouts; Houseparty; and even good ol’ Facebook Messenger itself.

If you’re looking for a standalone messaging app that can do it all—for personal and business use, too—we still recommend Skype, which Microsoft recently overhauled. Its interface feels cleaner (and comes with a dark mode), it’s still as easy as ever to send text messages, video messages, and files to contacts, and you can even @ message your friends to get their attention.

That said, we live in an time where most messaging apps have some kind of video or calling component—or so it feels. So if you need that human contact beyond simple texting and emoji, odds are good that you can already do it in the chat app you love.

Music, Photos, and Video

VLC (free)

VLC is the best media player you can put on your Mac, period. It works perfectly with minimal fuss once you install it, and it can play almost any file you throw at it. If you’re a power user, it has a sea of options that would take the entire rest of this article to describe to you.

We enjoy all the improvements VideoLAN tosses VLC’s way, including its new support for 10-bit color depth and HDR, 360 videos, and improved decoding that allows less-powerful systems to play full 4K videos—even if that’s overkill for your Mac’s display resolution. You can drop a number of plug-ins and extensions into VLC to extend its functionality, and you can even use the app to stream videos to your Chromecast, if you’ve allowed Google to get a foothold into your Apple-only household.

HandBrake (free)

HandBrake is a free video conversion tool that, when coupled with an app like MakeMKV, will turn you into a ripping and converting powerhouse. HandBrake is pretty easy to use, but there are still plenty of settings that might give you a little anxiety when you first load the app. We have a guide to help out with that. Once you’ve mastered the basics, queuing up multiple videos and converting them to all kinds of different formats will feel second-nature. Also, don’t forget to grab VLC, mentioned above, so you can actually watch all of your creations.

Adobe Bridge CC, digiKam, and Google Backup and Sync (free)

Apple’s standard Photos app does a pretty decent job organizing your sprawling photo, thanks to collections, tags, and the ability to view photos by when (and where) they were taken. You can even do a little light editing, too.

If you need a little more organizational oomph, consider Adobe Bridge CC—completely free to use, even though you might have assumed it was a paid app. You can’t do a lot of editing in Bridge (well, any retouching, really), but what it lacks in tools, it makes up for in data. You can easily see all sorts of compelling metadata about the images you’ve taken, and organizing them via ratings, keywords, and labels is easy. Well, setting it up is easy. Actually organizing your sprawling photo library might take a little time, but it’ll be worth it in the end, trust me.

The open-source app digiKam has organizing, editing, and a UI that’s fairly similar to what you’d find in Adobe Bridge CC. If you’re not used apps like Adobe’s Lightroom, digiKam might feel a bit advanced—possibly even overkill for your needs—but it’s a powerful app for pro users that would rather spend their cash on camera hardware than more software.

Google Backup and Sync isn’t a photo organizing app itself, but it’s what you’ll want to use to get your photos uploaded into Google Photos—a great online tool and compelling alternative to iCloud as a result of the unlimited storage space you get for photos. It’s easy to create collections and share photos with others (Google will even make suggestions for you based around where and when you’ve taken your shots). And we also like that you can get pretty creative with your searches when sorting and organizing your sprawling photo library.

Spotify ($10) and Amazon Music Unlimited ($8)

Which music streaming service you pick is largely a matter of preference: one might carry your favorite band, one might have an app interface you greatly prefer, one might have all your friends on it. If you aren’t into Apple Music for these, or any other valid reasons, Spotify is the next obvious choice (sorry Tidal). It has a huge library, its social features are great, and we love the thought it puts into its playlists—human-curated and automatically generated.

If you’re already an Amazon Prime subscriber, you should also consider checking out the company’s Amazon Music Unlimited service. You’ll have to pay $8 on top of your Prime subscription, but that still makes it slightly cheaper than an Apple Music ($10) or Spotify Premium ($10).

Pixelmator ($30) and Affinity Photo ($50)

Pixelmator is one of the best image editors on the Mac, but it’s no longer the only game in town. Though its $30 asking price might seem high, it’s a bargain considering all the incredible editing tools you get to play with—rivaling more comprehensive apps like Adobe’s Photoshop CC for a fraction of the price. (And if you want features like Touch Bar support, automatic color adjustments, and advanced compression—as well as HEIF exporting—you’ll want to pick up the pricier Pixelmator Pro for $60)

Affinity Photo is a compelling, albeit costlier alternative to Pixelmator that’ll set you back $50 for a professional-grade suite of tools, including full RAW editing and a UI that looks a lot like the Photoshop you might prefer (but don’t want to pay a subscription to get). That includes support for “Personas,” which mimics Photoshop’s Workspaces feature by allowing you to set your screen’s many options and buttons based on whatever it is you’re working on—if you prefer one set of tools for a simple editing and another set of tools for something more complex, like pre-processing images for print.

If you’re looking for basic image editing and your Mac’s built-in Photos app isn’t enough, you can always give the open-source app GIMP a try. What it lacks in polish, it makes up for in price.

Utilities

Dropbox, Google Drive, and Mega (free-ish)

2018 Best Mac Applications

These cloud storage services should all be household names at this point. We’ve covered their costs, and their peers’ pricing models, pretty extensively. Which one you go with depends on your budget, preferences, and needs. Dropbox is a great, all-encompassing solution for cloud storage, but you’ll need to get creative to get more than 2GB of free space with the service. Google Drive is a no-brainer, since you get 15GB of space and can easily synchronize files to your laptop or desktop to work on them offline.

With Mega, you get 50GB of free cloud storage to play with and a handy app (MEGAsync) that you can use across your Windows and Mac computers. Mega does have an annoying transfer quota of around 1GB or so in a 24-hour time span, but that’s a small price to pay for a free 50 gigs. Take that, thumbdrives

qBittorrent or Deluge (free)

Ever since Transmission had all those malware issues some time ago, and uTorrent filled its installer full of crap and cryptocurrency miners, we’ve been on the hunt for a simple BitTorrent app, and we’ve settled on qBittorrent. It’s an open-source downloading tool that should look pretty familiar for anyone who has used an app like uTorrent or Transmission previously. No big surprises with qBittorrent’s UI or features. We like that the app is ad- and crap-free, is completely open source, and can automatically quit or shut down your PC when your download is done. Deluge is a good BitTorrent app alternative, but the app hasn’t been updated since May of 2017 (when we wrote this), and we prefer something with more active development.

Backblaze ($5/mo)

Best Mac Apps For Developers 2018

If you want to keep your important files on the cloud, rather than a Time Machine backup, that’s fine—you might not have spare storage sitting around, after all. Backblaze is our new top pick for backup services, since it costs half the price of Crashplan (previously great) and does all the same things. Install the app, pick the files and folders you want to back up (encrypted, no less), and hope you never have to use the service’s restoration features.

The Unarchiver (free)

Top Mac Apps 2018

If you have file archives that your Mac can’t open, give The Unarchiver a shot at them. It’s free, it’s quick, and it does a good job of opening that which your Mac cannot open itself. It also works directly out of Finder, so you won’t have to (annoyingly) open up a separate app before you take a crack at your archives.

A good alternative is Keka, which is also free, also opens a bunch of different archive formats, and can even be faster than The Unarchiver depending on the archive format and size. If you have issues with one app, try the other, and you might find that it does a better job extracting your files.

Best Mac Apps 2018 Free

(This story originally ran in July 2016, written by Alan Henry. It was updated in July 2018 by David Murphy.)