Schoolhouse Review: The App Every Student Should Have

If you’re a student: you need Schoolhouse. You’ll never miss another assignment again. Schoolhouse is the assignment planner you’ve always dreamed of. Separate your subjects, organize your studies, track your grades, and keep digital notes all from one easy-to-use app. You can find our review of a previous version of Schoolhouse here.

The Schoolhouse interface bears a striking resemblance to iCal

When the app is first launched iCal users will immediately notice a familiar layout. Separated into 3 columns, Schoolhouse works and interacts similarly to iCal, but is designed with your studies in mind. Users can add as many classes as they choose, and fill out useful information about classes. Assignments, tasks, and notes can then be added to each class with options to customize due dates, attach files, add partners, assign priority, and deadlines for tasks. Notebooks to store a group of notes can be created by course, or separately for sub-topics.

Course schedules, instructors, and assignment types can all be customized

Schoolhouse allows you to add as much or as little detail about your schedule and assignments as you choose, depending on how organized you are. Assignments can be added and viewed quickly, or entered with significant details. Students can check off assignments when completed, enter grades for tests, and keep track of their term grades with the built-in Grades feature. The app also allows students to contact their teachers about specific assignments with just one-click.

Rich text notes can be stored in Notebooks and courses

While the app has robust customization features, I still wasn’t able to adapt it to my course schedule. I also felt confined to the app, with no way to export my assignments except for the proprietary Schoolhouse database. I would love to see options to export to iCal, iPods, and the web in the future. Also, I found the lack of keyboard shortcuts annoying as I tried to enter and manipulate my courses and assignments. Plus there’s no integration for students that have online textbooks or web services tied to their courses. I would also like to see the app fit more naturally into OS X by Schoolhouse 3. The app currently has portions that are non-standard for OS X applications, which Mac users wont find as intuitive as most native applications.

Schoolhouse was updated at the beginning of February after being crippled for well over a year. Leopard users on Intel Macs had to force Schoolhouse to run through Rosetta, causing the app to crawl. On February 6th the developer published Schoolhouse 2.2, fixing a number of the Leopard compatibility issues. The app remains overall the same. Classcasting, a feature that published assignments in RSS via .Mac, was removed due to the .Mac / MobileMe switch over and changes to the service. Current users can feel more comfortable upgrading to the new version because their library will be automatically backed-up before upgrading, but they will be frustrated when they can no longer manually backup and restore the database.

Despite some of the short-comings Schoolhouse is an amazing application. Now that the Leopard compatibility issues seem to have been sorted out, I feel comfortable using it to keep track of my assignments again. While there are plenty of features that can be added in the future, there are tons current features to help students keep track of their studies and spend less time doing it.

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