SchoolHouse: Keep your Homework Organized

The Mac ‘GTD’ scene has become huge recently with many apps striving to help you ‘Get Things Done’. In fact, we have a whole section on productivity apps. Unlike other GTD apps, SchoolHouse is specifically geared towards the student. With the school term just beginning, now is the time to get organized!

SchoolHouse is simple to set up. You just right click in the left hand pane and add a term; under each term, you can add classes. In each class, you can not only keep track of your assignments but also professor information, grade weighting, time, location, etc. There is a slight problem with this, my school works on a 2-week cycle, meaning that classes are only the same every second week, which is not supported in the app.

SchoolHouse has an excellent interface. You can see all the information you want to know at a glance about your assignments (week, month, and list views are all available).

Adding a new assignment is easy; just click on the assignment button in the top left and you can add information about the assignment on the right side panel.

In this panel, there are 3 tabs: Details, Project and Files. Details is where you enter the details of the assignment, you can set a priority, which is a very useful feature, as well as due date, course, and comments. The Project and Files are the two tabs that hold the unique features of this app. In ‘Project’ you can add tasks for each assignment which you can tick off as you go along. You can also add a Partner, which is very useful, as it gives you a quick link to email them. The final pane, Files is a brilliant time saver. All you have to do is drag any file related to the project into the box pane and you have the option of either linking to the file or creating a duplicate for the app. Unfortunately, you can’t choose where it keeps the duplicate files; it automatically saves them to Application Support folder in your Library.

SchoolHouse not only lets you keep up to date with your assignments, it allows you to store notes. The notepad supports rich text, tables, and links. This makes a very easy way to have organized, and searchable notes!

Another unique feature is ClassCasts which are RSS feeds for your classes. RSS files can be stored in on any (S)FTP server as well as your .Mac, Amazon S3, or WebDav accounts. If you collaborate with other people a lot or are a professor this is a great feature.

SchoolHouse also has other unique features such as the ability to generate a graph showing how well you’ve done over the term. You can also make smart folders to organize your assignments.

Overall SchoolHouse is an excellent app despite a few minor flaws. It’s the best GTD app geared towards students, and is definitely worth a try. Best of all, SchoolHouse is donationware and is available for free from Logan Collins.