Top Ten Must-Have Apps for Students with Mac | MacUpdate Blog

Professors, friends, and parents are important pillars of support when getting trying to get the most out of your university experience. But to do well in your academic studies, consider preparing your digital backpack beforehand. If, for instance, you’re struggling to manage everything you have to do, and you work with many different devices while studying, you should consider using a time planning app.

Indeed, there are dozens of useful Mac apps for students out there. MacUpdate has prepared a list of the best ones.

Note: since money is a key factor for most students, only free apps for students will be examined.  

The best apps for students who have to deal with time planning/project planning

The best apps for students who have to deal with time planning/project planning

• SharedPlan OpenPlanning Lite is a simple, elegant project management application. It's also a web-based, searchable public repository. It makes it easy to communicate and collaborate as well. Plan your work and collaborate on shared projects.

• Project Plan 365 is a nice choice for project planning and project collaboration. It is a smart choice for individual Project Managers and/or small teams working in fast-paced collaborative environments which may span disparate geographic locations. In fact, Project Plan 365 is a Mac analog for MS Project, providing support for all MS Project standard views like Gant Chart, Task Sheet, Network Diagram, Project Calendar, Task Usage, Resource Usage, Team Planner, and others.

The best apps for students: mathematical tasks

GeoGebra Math Apps (formerly GeoGebra) is a great mathematics program for all levels of education. This app combines arithmetic, geometry, algebra, and calculus. It offers multiple representations of objects in its graphics, algebra, and spreadsheet views that are all dynamically linked.

• MathPlot is a smart yet easy to use tool for everyday math problem-solving. It comes with a highly versatile math parser and a basic function plotter.

The best apps to make visually pleasing presentations

• FlowVella (formerly Flowboard) is a nice little app that lets you create beautiful interactive presentations, bringing all of your ideas to life on your Mac, iPad, and on the Web. It is simple, elegant, and fast. FlowVella uses cloud-based storage and comes with a free 500mb/month upload quota. You can get Premium features to benefit from extra functionality, not to mention expanded analytics, increased cloud upload quota, and password-protected FlowVellas. It could be said without exaggeration that it’s a re-imagining of presentation software.

• Presentation Manager is the Mac component of Wooji Presentation Remote, the first - and still the best - iPhone/iPod touch remote control for Keynote. As well as flicking through your slides, you can see your presenter's notes, highlight portions of the screen, jump directly to any slide using a slide index (with thumbnails) and even mute or change the volume of your Mac.

The best apps that help visualize data

• Mercury is a free powerful graphics app that comes with a comprehensive range of tools for structure visualization and the exploration of crystal packing.

• Volcano Kit iTunes Visualizer is a neat application that helps you analyze the frequency/amplitude data in your music to create a rich, information-based visual environment. Control the number and responsiveness of the bands shown and display data on the track currently being played, it’s easy with Volcano Kit iTunes Visualizer. 

 The best apps to store data

• Google Drive is without a doubt the number one app when it comes to secure online data storage and sharing. The app is easy to use and comes with a number of great functions. You have 15GB of free storage, but if you need more, you will need to buy it.

• OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) is the easiest way to access your OneDrive from your Mac. When you install OneDrive, a OneDrive folder is created on your computer. Everything you put in this folder is automatically kept in sync between your computers and OneDrive.com, so you can get your newest files from virtually anywhere. Whenever you add, change, or delete files in one location, all the other locations will be updated.

Key Considerations

Overall, student years promise lots of fun. But to neatly combine learning with enjoying yourself, consider collecting your digital backpack beforehand. MacUpdate has prepared a list of ten must-have applications for your student years. Use these apps and be certain that you’ll stay on top of your studies.