Archive for the 'Education' Category

Using flash cards is a great way to study for an exam, but sometimes they can be annoying to make. What if you just want to make a short note? Or one with a picture? With Mental Case you can easily create flash cards or short notes.

Mental Case has a very clean interface; the toolbar on top lets you create cases and notes and start viewing a slideshow, and a bar on the left lets you select your cases so you can edit your notes.

It’s here. Finally. You’ve heard the rumors, seen the video, now purchase the retail bundle. Available online for a limited period of time, the bundle contains 12 apps at a bargain price of just $49.

As usual, the MacHeist guys have done it again, with a bundle that consists of finance software, a word processor, an organizer as well as a handful of games for your Mac. Yea, lovely games.

With thousands of stars viewable to the naked eye, finding the Pleiades, or even figuring out what that bright star near the horizon is, takes a fair bit of research, unless you have a planetarium at your disposal. Until Apple unveils the iPlanetarium, I’m recommending Stellarium.

Open source app Stellarium is a planetarium for your Mac. Stellarium shows you the stars in a beautiful and fun to play with interface. The only thing that looks better is the real night sky.

As businesses and schools move more and more into the digital age, presentations and lectures are more commonly being recorded and stored electronically for future use.

I personally attend many presentations at work where someone is at the back of the room with a video camera running to capture the presenter, his/her presentation on the overhead and the delivery that goes with it.

While this adds immense value for reuse of the presentation, the quality is often poor, and in many cases, the presentation itself is illegible. ProfCast, from Humble Daisy, is a great application for capturing live presentation content and audio in a format that can be easily published and distributed via a number of open channels.
ProfCast is able to record either PowerPoint or Keynote presentations in-time with the presenters audio.

You’ve got a shiny new mac, it cost a lot of your precious money, but it was worth it. You love it. Everything is perfect, until your son/daughter/little brother/little sister wants to use it.

You fear the worst. And for good reason. For kids, the logic is this: You press buttons, things change colors on the screen. Pretty. End of story. Solution: Press lots of buttons.

Trouble is, they’ll mess with your volume, eject your iPod, delete that important file on your desktop - even get overexcited and start banging on the keyboard repeatedly (ouch). That’s where AlphaBaby comes in. Fire up AlphaBaby, and let the 3-year-old in question bang away.

You’ve got a test tomorrow. You put off the studying all week, and it’s all come down to this. You’ve got one night to learn all of the vocabulary. What do you do? Sure, you could make flashcards, but that’s so 20th century. Isn’t there a way to just learn the words?

That’s where Genius comes in. Genius is designed as an alternative to flash cards. Its purpose is to teach you the vocabulary quickly and efficiently by feeding you the words using fancy mind techniques, which may actually make you remember them.

There’s some good news for Mac users who depend on Microsoft Office. Currently, the two ways of running Office on a Mac are using the Power PC binary or virtualizing the Windows version.

I’m sure a lot of Intel Mac users are unsatisfied with the performance of the Power PC version; Mac Office 2004 currently has to be translated (through Rosetta) on both Tiger and Leopard.

However, if you purchase ANY version of Office 2004 (this includes the Student and Teacher, Standard, or Professional Edition), you’ll get a free upgrade to the top of the line Mac Office 2008 Special Media Edition (excludes shipping and handling). Sounds like a really good deal to me. This means you can save up to $500 on a new copy of Office 2008.

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.

One of the many things people strive for during a normal day is productivity. Being productive is something that benefits you greatly. And you who hates being productive, let me know how that is working for you. Not getting any work done each day must really be helping you get places. Applications to keep you focused have been featured here before, but I would like to give you my take on it.

There’s no doubt, Apple loves us students! That’s why Apple offers great deals to individuals enrolled in post-secondary education. These deals include giving students a very generous discounts off of an annual desktop and/or laptop purchase and discounted Apple Developer Connection memberships.

Needless to say, this comes as a very welcome perk for those of us spending all of our money buying texts and all our time studying them. While Apple’s student discounts are offered year-round, we are currently in the season of an even more exciting and limited time discount being offered to University, College and other post-secondary students: Buy a Mac, get a free iPod Nano.

Have you ever tried to use Calculator.app in place of your advanced calculator? If so, you may have noticed it lacks some advanced features and may not provide as precise an answer as needed. Magic Number Machine from Matt Gallagher is a great alternative.

Magic Number Machine provides many of the features missing from Calculator.app such as 25 accurate digits of precision, support for complex numbers, many different number modes, function history, statistics functions, linear regressions, matricies, built in constants, and most importantly, a visual representation of the expression you are entering. If Calculator.app were a TI-83/84 calculator, Magic Number Machine would be more along the lines of a TI-89.

Face it. As students, we’re bound to be working in the middle of the night on that almost-forgotten homework assignment. If you’re doing stuff that could (somehow) change the future, you don’t want to use a standard, dull calculator.

Moreover, I’m guessing you’ve had enough math today and just want to get this over and done with. What could you do? Let me introduce Soulver, the calculator based on the English language.

Notebook is the Circus Ponies’ flagship application. They claim this app can organize your life. I have tested this claim, and in the following review I will discuss how Notebook does just that.

For years I have been wanting to use a computer in class to take notes, but every application I use ends up becoming too cluttered, or I end up with a giant mess of poorly organized text files. Every Mac user has his/her own note-taking app of choice. Some love xPad, others love Scrivener, and even more just stick to the tried and tested Microsoft Office for this task. While I have tested each of these, I was really getting frustrated with the lack of a decent note-taking app in OS X.

If you’re into strategy games, you will most likely enjoy American History Lux. American History Lux is a game from Silly Soft that focuses on 10 American wars, including our current conflict in Iraq. American History Lux takes a strategic perspective on these conflicts and can be a very additive and compelling game.

The first thing you’ll notice when playing American History Lux, is that it has a straightforward presentation which puts the player in the game immediately. Each war represents a different level in the game and each level must be won before the next one is played.

iPhoto is an amazing photo manager and editor; however, Apple has added quite a few features in iPhoto that allow you create books and calendars with your digital photographs. In this tutorial, you will learn how easy it is to make your very own professional calendars!

To begin, select one of your favorite albums. Go down to the bottom of the window and click the + Calendar button. iPhoto will ask you to choose a theme of your liking. Use the scroll bar to go through the available themes. A preview of that theme is shown to the right.