25 Superb Mac Apps for College Students. (MacTeX is the best one available for Mac, available. Written a full note-taking application for Mac with a wealth of.
Apple’s macOS operating system has matured to the point where, out of the box, your new Mac laptop or desktop pretty much has the bases covered when it comes to email, calendar management, and some basic productivity tools. But there’s a whole world of better and more powerful Mac software out there that can make everything from GIF-making to photo editing to window organization a whole lot easier.
While paying for software might seem like some pre-Google anachronism, many of the best Mac applications out there cost just a few dollars and can drastically improve your workflow or your day-to-day computer use — without any privacy concerns or intrusive advertising. And some are so good that they warrant a monthly or annual subscription — especially if they really help you at your job or in a serious hobby like photography. So whether you’re new to the Mac ecosystem, or if you’ve been looking for ways to make your existing Mac more useful, check out these apps. Some of them might totally overhaul how you get stuff done. We here at The Verge have rounded up our favorite and most-used apps, games, and utilities. Look for our app picks for, and; our favorite games for, and our top choices for the, and the. Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Image: Adobe You can’t really go wrong with Adobe’s Creative Cloud.
The photography suite includes Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and Photoshop, a professional-grade collection of software that will cover all the bases when it comes to photo editing and image creation. At $9.99 a month, it’s pricey. But there is no better software package for amateur and pro photographers — or aspiring meme creators who just really like to mess around on Photoshop.
Alfred Alfred is essentially a shortcut creation tool, and it lets you use quick keyboard commands to launch apps, find files, and even search the web. You can create your own extensions, or borrow those developed by a community of diehard Alfred users.
Alfred is a complex beast, and figuring out how to use it can be a bit tricky. But once you’ve locked down a few key formulas, you’ll be shaving off precious seconds to full minutes from everyday computer tasks. Unleashing its full power on your productivity workflow can be a game-changing upgrade to how you get things done.
Bear Notes I live my life through Bear Notes, and many other Mac-using writers will likely tell you the same. Bear Notes is a clean and powerful note-taking app that became my Evernote replacement when it first launched a couple years ago. It’s not as outfitted as some other apps, but it’s got excellent design and contains features I can’t live without, like the ability to pin notes, organize via hashtags, and use Markdown syntax. It’s also got a great iOS app and it’s ultra-fast — a huge plus for people who, like me, do a lot of audio transcription and note taking on the go from my phone. The pro version costs $20 for the year, but it’s well worth the cash if you’re dumping any and all daily scribblings into Bear and using it on multiple devices. Include Google’s excellent Keep app, as well as iA Writer. GIF Brewery 3 The internet runs on GIFs, and no software for creating them is quite as accessible as GIF Brewery 3.
For one, it’s free, which is a huge plus. Most free GIF-making tools can only be found on the web, and usually involve wading through obnoxious advertisements or some cumbersome sign-in process.
GIF Brewery 3 has none of that. It’s a fast and powerful app that can pull in video from a local file or a YouTube link, but you can also use it to stitch together images or record something on your Mac screen or with your smartphone camera.
It has a feature-packed customization panel for extending or shortening length, cropping, changing file sizes, and tinkering with overlays and loops. There’s no better tool out there for what GIF Brewery 3 offers. Moom One of the more frustrating aspects of macOS is the lack of an official window management tool. It makes little sense that Apple makes it so hard to resize and snap app windows with precision and bring them flush with the dock and corners of a multi-monitor display, especially when Windows has had native support for such tools for years. But thankfully, there’s a big ecosystem of third-party apps that perform these tasks, and Moom is far and away the easiest to use. Once installed, it stays in the background, waiting for you to hover your cursor over the green maximize button. From there, you can orient the window in a number of ways, including in horizontal or vertical split-screen mode.
You can create keyboard hotkeys, customize Moom for when you’re using your mouse cursor, and create custom window sizes and layouts to meet your needs. Paprika 3 Managing recipes might be something a casual cook does with a note-taking app or an email folder, but Paprika 3 is the super-powered recipe manager you never thought you needed.
Although it’s expensive at $30, it has basically anything you’d ever want out of a cooking app. You can import recipes from competing services like MacGourmet, and export those recipes as weekly meal plans to your calendar, or turn the required ingredient or grocery lists into check lists in Reminders. You can also create extensive grocery lists, kitchen inventories, and meal plans. You can scale down recipes to match your desired serving size, and sync everything between phone, tablet, and desktop.
It’s also got a neat bookmarklet for instantly storing recipes found online. All in all, Paprika 3 is the home cook’s most vital app, and it’s a great way to start geeking out in the kitchen.
With Mac and these powerful free apps, students write, analyze data and present their work in engaging ways. In, you and your students can design stunning newsletters, book reports, flyers and more. For data-rich projects, helps students build tables, charts and graphs that pop off the page. With, students and teachers can create presentations with stunning transitions, 3D charts and video.
Each app includes templates to get you off to a great start. And they’re compatible with Microsoft Office, so it’s easy to share files with PC users. With iCloud, you can access your documents, presentations and spreadsheets from any device you’re using.
These powerful apps come standard on every Mac, and they bring out the creative side of students and teachers alike. Makes it easy to put together captivating slideshows, make a photo book to recap the school year, or chronicle a field trip with snapshots.
With, your class can use simple yet powerful editing tools to create video projects, like a documentary on a student election or a trailer for a school play. And with, students can record, edit and mix their own music or sound effects for any project. The possibilities for your classroom are endless. The Mac App Store is filled with education apps that students will love.
But you’ll also find apps designed just for teachers. Organize your lessons for the day, homework for the week and school meetings for the entire year with one of many great planning apps. Or use a popular mind-mapping app to improve brainstorms with other teachers and administrators. There are even apps to help you grade essays more efficiently or create an interactive quiz in minutes. IBooks is stacked with materials to help you teach practically any subject.
These interactive books take full advantage of what Mac can do, so you’ll get the full effect of what your students can do. IBooks has a massive selection of books for your class. Discover children’s books, classic novels, biographies, reference guides and textbooks from major education publishers. And many of them are free. You can find curriculum-based textbooks and even custom books created by other teachers. Students can use the iBooks app to download your selected books directly onto Mac or iPad, so they always have access to a locker’s worth of textbooks — or even an entire library.
And with iCloud, they can access their books wherever they go, on any device they use — Mac, iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. Many textbooks from major education publishers are made specifically for iBooks, taking full advantage of the capabilities of Mac. Students can dive into a dynamic timeline about ancient Egypt, rotate a 3D red blood cell or take an interactive chapter review quiz. If they don’t know the definition of a word, one click pulls it up. They can highlight or underline text, make quick notes and create study cards to review later. Studying is an immersive, interactive experience that goes well beyond the words on the page. With iBooks Author on your Mac, you can create your own interactive materials for iPad and Mac that work best for your students.
Because no one knows what they need — or how they learn — better than you. ITunes U is an ever-growing collection of educational content from institutions around the world. Access over 800,000 resources on every topic, many of which can be used to teach Canadian curriculum outcomes and expectations. It’s easy to use iTunes U materials to complement your lessons.
You can bring in an MIT physicist as a guest lecturer. Let history speak for itself with archival films from the Library of Congress. Or add to a math lesson with an origami tutorial from the Asian Art Museum.
Whatever you’re teaching, you can find resources to help your students gain a deeper understanding of the lesson at hand.