Best App For Students Mac
- Best Apps On Macbook Pro
- Best Mac For A Student
- Best App For Students Mac Or Microsoft
- Best Apps For Students Macbook
Whether you’ve received your first college homework or just opened that letter of acceptance to the university of your dreams — it means the best time to buy a MacBook has arrived. Studying at a university or college today has become more challenging than ever before, but there are ways to make your efforts less strenuous, by surrounding yourself with good and reliable technology.
Many students around the globe consider Apple to be providing some of the best laptops for college students, and rightfully so. Apple’s operating system has established itself as the most intuitive, trusted, and fastest platform around — it’s highly appreciated by anyone who doesn’t want to take the risk of their work going missing due to a hardware malfunction. Not the least important feature of Mac computers is their immunity to viruses, which comes with a benefit of saving on antivirus software. Pretty good news so far.
How To Find The Best Mac For Education
The process of choosing the best MacBook for college depends on the kind of student you are, the type of assignments you get, and what you’ve generally come to expect from your computers. Apple is known for making their products to last, so even if you decide to buy a cheap Mac laptop for university, it should still be in good shape long after your graduation.
Since your studies will include both theory and practice, it’s crucial for your laptop to be able to support all the apps necessary during your time in college. If you’re not anticipating to be working on any complex projects over the course of your studies, then a cheap Mac laptop will be a reasonable purchase for you.
- Aug 13, 2018 The Best Apps for Writers on Mac As I said earlier, these writing apps can not improve your writing, however, what they can do is to assist you in improving your efficiency while writing. They create an environment where you can forget about technical stuff like formatting and focus more on the art of writing itself.
- Aug 13, 2018 The Best Apps for Writers on Mac As I said earlier, these writing apps can not improve your writing, however, what they can do is to assist you in improving your efficiency while writing. They create an environment where you can forget about technical stuff like formatting and focus more on the art of writing itself.
- Essential Mac Apps for Students. Students: Have a Mac, iPhone or iPad? Don't miss these essential apps for homework, organization, note taking, communication, budgeting and even avoiding.
To ease the process of finding the best Mac education pricing and quickly resolve the age-old question of whether to get MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro for college, take a look at the following aspects.
May 15, 2018 Best-picks; Best Apps for Students. By Amy Oztan 15 May 2018. Office Lens is an amazing app from Microsoft that takes pictures of documents, whiteboards, blackboards, magazines. Mar 12, 2020 This app is perfect for students who want to save time on scribbling notes and keep them organized — easily search through the MarginNote’s smart system, and access any material on the go. MarginNote saves all your entries in one place and allows access from any Apple device, whether it’s a Mac for students or an iPhone. Jul 19, 2019 Here is our list of the 12 best mind mapping apps for Mac (free and paid) you should check out. Looking for the best mind map tools and software for macOS? Here is our list of the 12 best mind mapping apps for Mac (free and paid) you should check out. The best feature of this app is its nesting ability. It is far superior to any other apps.
What you need to know about Mac laptop prices
When you first start comparing Mac laptop prices, it might seem as though MacBook deals for college students are not that cheap. However, once you dive deeper into your search for the top computer on the market, you’ll not only find many cheap Mac laptops, but realize that even the most expensive models are completely worth their price, due to their exceptional longevity and overall efficiency.
Besides, if you’re a registered student, you’re eligible for the Apple college discount to use towards your new Mac from Apple’s Education Store. Occasionally, there are some back-to-school deals too, usually during the summer months — the right time to buy a MacBook.
Want to find additional ways to save money but still get the best MacBook for college? Consider shopping at Apple’s refurbished store or buying a cheap Mac laptop secondhand.
Now that you know everything about Mac education pricing, let’s explore some of the best laptops for college students on the market right now.
Performance: 16-inch MacBook Pro (2019)
If you’re looking to get the most power in a portable package, this is the best laptop for college, period. MacBook Pro runs on the latest Intel processors and could be configured with up to 8 TB of storage. Depending on your needs, this can be seen as an advantage or drawback, since as an average student you might not need all that power and hard drive space. A larger display is another great feature of this Mac for students, but it also makes the laptop heavier than the competitor models. It even looks more expensive than other Mac laptops, but arguably the price is fully justified by the myriad of expansion options.
Balance: MacBook Air (2019)
One of the best features of the new 2019 MacBook Air model is its 12-hour battery life — enough to finish your homework after a day of classes without the need to carry a charger. MacBook Air is often named the best laptop for college by students because it’s light and portable, allowing for an effortless transfer between classes. Given the substantial power of its processor, this Mac laptop is almost unbeatable in terms of the price-to-quality ratio. A minor flaw to mention, however, is lack of extensive customization.
Price: MacBook Air (2017)
If the two previous MacBook models are not something you’re really into, you can try to turn to an older laptop and get a good MacBook deal for college students that way.
A MacBook Air model from 2017 is still a pretty good Mac for students, even though it doesn’t have a Retina display or Touch ID. And, of course, it being a few years old, you could argue that its processor is old or that storage space is limited. But if those things don’t concern you, this Mac is a solid performer overall, despite its age.
Buy MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro for college?
As one of the most frequently asked questions from students, getting MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro for college has no definitive answer — it all depends on your specific requirements and needs. MacBook Air, for example, is generally considered the best Mac for college students at large, due to its light configuration and long battery life. It’s also one of the cheap Mac laptops that nevertheless covers all the basics.
Those who anticipate spending lots of time working on complex projects need to look for an advanced processor, large storage capacity, high-resolution display, or all at once. MaBook Pro is a great option here, since it offers much more power without sacrificing portability and lightness. On the other hand, it’s safe to say that if you need a laptop simply for research and written assignments, then a MacBook Pro might be a waste of money. But don’t let that stop you just yet, since you could be eligible for the Apple MacBook Pro student discount.
How to speed up your learning
Now that you’ve settled on the best laptop for college to satisfy all your needs, you can look at some of the best apps out there that can make your learning process more interesting and productive, supporting you through your university years.
Studies is an indispensable tool used by students who are adamant about customizing their education to get the best results. Fully synchronized with iCloud, this flashcard creator allows students to easily maximize their learning experience. In addition, Studies has a convenient calendar for effortless class management.
To create your own stack of flashcards via Studies:
Click New Stack in the top left corner
Add a title to your stack
Click Save
How to organize your study notes
Regardless of the program you’re in, all college majors require you to work with an abundance of information. Paper notes are mostly inconvenient and irritating, so having the best MacBook for college is a really sound idea. But you need a proper all-in-one solution.
MarginNote takes a new approach to note-taking, by creating flashcards to optimize your learning and organize your textbook storage system at the same time. This app is perfect for students who want to save time on scribbling notes and keep them organized — easily search through the MarginNote’s smart system, and access any material on the go. MarginNote saves all your entries in one place and allows access from any Apple device, whether it’s a Mac for students or an iPhone.
To start using MarginNote:
Open the Document menu
Click Import in the top-left corner
Import a book
Now you can start reading and annotating as you go
How to optimize document and textbook search
Learning is always associated with the need to efficiently save useful clips, drawings, photos, or graphics — that’s why every student needs a good scanner app.
Prizmo is the perfect way to quickly convert all those physical documents (or PDFs) sitting on your desk to searchable digital material with very little effort. This smart app not only corrects the curvature of your photos and scans, but also has an incredible feature of translating any document to 59 different languages.
Here's how to turn any picture into a document file with Prizmo:
Click New Document
Drag and drop a picture of a page into the new window
Use Curvature Correction to crop the area that you need
Edit the text if needed
Click Export in the top-right corner to save the new PDF document
How to excel at math and science easily
Students majoring in sciences have to solve complex math problems on a regular basis and are often able to find the answer faster if they scribble the formulas on a piece of paper first. But since we live in the 21st century, it’s a good idea to hand in assignments digitally and keep a copy on your Mac just in case.
MathKey makes a students’ life easier by providing a way to write any formula on your MacBook using a trackpad, mouse, or an Apple Pencil. The app will then import your writing into any digital format like LaTeX, MathML, or images.
While math is not always easy, working with MathKey is refreshingly simple:
Launch the app and start drawing formulas using any input device
Click Convert
Save your work into your preferred format
In the end, a carefully selected Mac for students, with the right apps to enhance it, will not only provide immense support during your college years but will also be a useful tool when you go off to work in the professional field of your choice.
And it’s a positive bonus that Studies, MarginNote, Prizmo, and MathKey mentioned above are all available to you right now for a free seven-day trial through Setapp, a platform of over 170 of the best Mac apps, including some of the most essential ones for students. Now that you know how to pick the best MacBook for college and how to get the best apps, nothing can stop you from learning.
PDFs offer a lot of advantages over other file types, but being easy to work with generally isn’t one of them. What makes working with PDFs difficult is that they look familiar, but because PDFs are essentially images, they are much more restrictive. This can make editing them extremely aggravating when you know exactly what change you want to make, but your software won’t cooperate.
Fortunately, there are a couple of great tools available for the Mac that make working PDFs a much more pleasant experience. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the best options available and crown our favorite: PDFpen.
Evaluation Criteria
In selecting the best PDF editor for Mac, we used the following criteria in selecting the winner:
- Overall Design — Working with PDF files is hard enough as it is. The PDF editor you choose should provide a clean user interface with features that are easy to understand and use so you can complete your work quickly.
- Viewing Speed — While much emphasis is placed on the ability to edit PDF files, equally as important is the ability to quickly find the areas you want to change. This can be slow and cumbersome if your PDF editor doesn’t provide a pleasant reading experience.
- Annotations — Most PDF editing tasks require annotating documents and sending them back to your clients or coworkers, so the PDF editor you use should allow you to mark up your PDF files quickly and easily.
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR) — The ability to apply Optical Character Recognition (or OCR) is extremely important as it takes an image that looks like text and converts it to actual, computer-readable text. This allows you to search for (and depending on the app, even edit) text in your PDF files much like you would in a word processor.
- Additional Editing Features — Depending on your use case, you might need additional features that are only available in some higher-end (read: expensive) PDF editors. These features can either be completely unnecessary or essential to your workflow depending on your work.
- Sharing & Exporting Options — Once you have your PDF file ready to go, you need to be able to share it easily. In addition to sharing the PDF file itself, you might need to open the file in an external application. The PDF editor you choose should be able to send your file to other applications easily.
- Price — The price range for PDF editors is very broad, ranging from free to hundreds of dollars. You need to consider price when balancing what a specific PDF editor offers against your individual PDF editing needs. Power user features may be nice to have, but if you aren’t going to use them very often, the extra cost may not be worth it for you.
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Our Favorite PDF Editor: PDFpen
Smile’s PDFpen application is a functional, powerful PDF editor. While the user interface isn’t the best of the apps we tested, it’s generally easy to use and makes up for a lack of polish with powerful features to meet even the most rigorous demands of PDF power users.
There are lots of workflows that are possible in PDFpen, but we’ve looked at some common ones to show the power and flexibility packed into this program.
Annotations
Annotations in PDFpen are fairly straightforward. To highlight text in your PDF, just select Highlight from the tool bar, pick your color, then select the text you want to highlight.
To add a note or comment to your PDF, select the appropriate options from the Tools menu. Notes can be minimized and display a text bubble icon in the document that you can click to expand, and comments are displayed as text on top of the page.
You can also add shapes to your PDF document if you want. To do this, select the Shapes icon from the toolbar, select the type of shape you want, and then drag it into your document. Once you have your shape, you can easily select a new color, line format, or line thickness from the toolbar.
PDFpen also has a library of proofreading marks you can use to mark up your document. To access these, go to Window → Library and click the Proofreading Marks icon.
When you’re done annotating your document and you want to print it, you can click Show Details from the Print menu to select whether you want to include comments, notes, or both.
Signing Documents
Signing PDF documents is another common editing task. This takes a little bit of prep work in PDFpen, but once you have it set up you can easily reuse your signature by saving it to your library. To do this, you first need to sign your name and scan it to your Mac. Once you have the file, you can drag it into PDFpen, but you’ll see that the image file will have a background that obstructs whatever the signature is sitting on top of (usually it’s white). You can make the background transparent by going to Edit → Make Transparent Image. This will open a popup with an eyedropper tool where you can select the background color that you want to make transparent.
Once you select the background color and click Make Transparent, you’ll have a signature that you can drag to the appropriate place in the document and resize by dragging one of the corners.
Once you have your signature ready, you can save it for re-use. You can do this by going to Window → Library to make sure the Library window is open, then go to the Library window and select the + icon, and click Add Selected Imprint to save the transparent signature image to your Library.
Applying OCR
Optical Character Recognition is extremely important when dealing with PDF files as it allows the computer to identify the text contents of your document. Without it, all it sees is a bunch of pixels, which means you can’t do anything that involves text selection (i.e. copy & paste) and you won’t be able to search your document and find a selected word or phrase.
This is one area PDFpen really shines as it is incredibly easy to apply OCR to a document. In fact, when you open a PDF file in PDFpen that it thinks is scanned, a dialog box will appear and ask you if you’d like to apply OCR to a particular page or to the entire document. You can even select from multiple languages.
Redacting Text
Occasionally you’ll need to share PDF documents that contain text you don’t want others to be able to see (like address, telephone number, etc.). PDFpen has you covered there too, as it allows you to find and redact text to hide personal or sensitive information.
Mac os x download iso. To redact text in PDFpen, first click the Find button in the toolbar and type in the text you want to redact. You’ll see all the instances of that text appearing in the document in the box below your search term. Next, click Find in the dropdown menu and select Redact.
Finally, select the instance you want to redact from the list and click Redact. If you want to redact all instances of the text, you can also click Redact All to redact them all at once.
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Exporting to Microsoft Word (or other word processors)
Let’s say you get a contract from someone that you want to edit. Frequently these documents are sent as PDF files specifically because it makes it harder to make changes, but PDFpen’s export to Microsoft Word feature makes this easy as well. All you have to do is click File → Export and select the desired file format.
This will allow you to easily edit the text in the document and you can then export back to PDF by clicking File → Print and selecting Save as PDF.
Best Apps On Macbook Pro
Additional Features
If your PDF needs extend beyond the scope of the standard PDFpen application, you can also check out PDFpen Pro, which includes the following additional features:
- Turn websites into PDFs
- Create and edit forms
- Export to Excel, Powerpoint, and PDF/A
- Add and edit permissions
- Create and edit Table of Contents
- Create links from URLs
PDFpen is availabe for $75 on the Smile software website, and PDFpen Pro is $125 if you need the additional features.
Runner Up: PDF Expert
PDF Expert by Readdle Software is an excellent application with one major flaw: It doesn’t have the ability to add OCR to your PDF files. This is absolutely critical when editing PDF files, so the lack of this single feature is unfortunately a dealbreaker for a lot of people.
Best Mac For A Student
For a lot of PDF-based tasks, PDF Expert is fine. It offers a blazing fast PDF reading experience, and has very good annotation tools. It also offers the tools to edit, merge, and sign documents as well as fill forms. Once you’re done editing your PDF file, PDF Expert integrates fully with the Mac share sheet so you can send it to any application that accepts PDFs. It does all of this with a beautiful user interface and a price tag ($59.99) that is on par with the other PDF editors we looked at. If you’re a student, you can even snag a small education discount when purchasing directly from Readdle.
Other Options
Adobe Acrobat Pro — Adobe actually created the PDF file format back in 1991, so you might think that Adobe Acrobat Pro would be the hands-down favorite for the best PDF editor for Mac. While it’s true that Adobe Acrobat Pro is an extremely powerful PDF editor, it’s also incredibly expensive. It’s available via subscription for $15/month or as part of the Creative Cloud suite ($49/month), and is also available as a stand-alone product for $449. In our opinion, Adobe Acrobat Pro is not as easy to use as PDFpen Pro, and the incredibly high price is not justified unless you really need some Adobe-only features or already have a Creative Cloud subscription.
Preview — Preview is the default PDF editor that comes bundled with Mac OS X, and is actually a pretty decent tool for basic PDF editing tasks. Depending on your needs, Preview might be enough for you. For example, you can make basic annotations, reorder pages, and even sign documents in Preview. But in our testing, annotations made in Preview sometimes didn’t display correctly in other PDF editors, and if you work with PDFs frequently, you’ll soon hit the limit of what Preview is capable of. Preview is “fine” for occasional PDF editing, but for anything more you’re going to want a more powerful PDF editor in your arsenal.
Everything Else – A quick internet search will show that there is no shortage of PDF editing software options, but many of them look like they haven’t been updated since before 2008 when Adobe released the PDF file format as an open standard per ISO 32000-1, and most lack even basic features that are present in Preview. Even if these companies are legit (and a lot of them aren’t), it’s not worth your time to look here. If you’re looking for a cheap/free PDF editor for basic PDF editing, try Preview first.
Conclusion
Best App For Students Mac Or Microsoft
If you’re looking to edit PDFs on your Mac, quality options are hard to come by, and PDFpen is the cream of the (very limited) crop. PDFpen offers enough features to complete just about any standard PDF editing task quickly and easily, and offers a Pro version for those who need the extra features. If you don’t work with PDFs regularly or don’t need all the bells and whistles that PDFpen offers, PDF Expert offers a great user interface for basic edits and is probably powerful enough for most people at a much lower price point.
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Best Apps For Students Macbook
Get your copy of this free quick-start guide to going paperless. From apps to scanners, discover everything you need to go paperless at home or the office.