Top student applications?

[Trip]

I'm just about to begin my first year of college here in a few days. To get prepared for the new school year I've got a MacBook, a new printer, and plenty of paper and pencils. But what I don't have are the applications that could help me (if even slightly) this year at school.

So, I come to the general macosx.com public! What computer applications would you see fit for a new university student? What will help me get through those long health lectures, or boring math classes?

[ora]

Wahay, nice one Trip, i hope you have fun in college world. What helps depends what subject you are taking, but I guess in the US you have the whole freshman undecided year (my first year was 9-5 work every day).

For me OmniOutliner was invaluable, i used it a lot for notes as it was entirely keyboard navigable and allowed embedding of all sorts of files etc.

OmniOutliner is also very useful as a to do list, and if you are aimign to be a diligent student not a slacker, todo lists do help a lot (though i didn't manage thsi till i was a postgrad).

I found Illustrator invaluable as i used it for all diagrams etc, but i was already familiar with it. If you know how to use its its awesomely quick to illustrate your papers with.

As an undergrad i sadly spent most of my time in word/excel, and hated them. In the end i started doing all my actual text writing in TextEdit then just using word to do formatting and layout at the end.

Parallels and a copy of Windows is probably also a damn good plan for compatibility.

Adium (or another chat client), for time wasting That and soem nice simple games. Just whatever you do, do not even think of buying world or warcraft, i now know 5 WoW induced college dropouts.

[Trip]

Thanks for the reply Ora! You've got some good advice in there.
And just as an update: I'm going to be studying visual communications (eventually). This simester I'm just taking some general classes to get started on my path to greater education.

Keep the advice coming!

[ora]

Hey Trip.

To extend TextEdit into a very nice word processor, try this stiff recommended by RacerX in an old post:

I love TextEdit... it has been my primary word processor for years now. And thanks to third party services, it can do a ton of things for me.

Here is a list of the services I make the most use of with TextEdit:
Nisus Thesaurus
OmniDictionary
WordService
MacJournal (the version I still use)
Create
And then I added the services menu to my contextual menu via ICeCoffEE.

Apple's Text Services provide a ton of cool features for TextEdit (and other cocoa applications). There are even services that I use that can be access via standard menus rather than just from the services menu like TextExtras and FontSight.

I don't think any of the services I mentioned would add line numbering, but a lot of them will extend TextEdit in other helpful ways (for coding, I would suggest TextExtras... it works with 10.4).

I had to look up what visual communications was, but it looks fun! I guess your college may well use mac anyway, in which case they might even have student licenses for apps. A copy of Adobe CS2 suite would certainly prove useful by the look of it (but it is very pricy), else i guess gimp.app etc for photo manipulation etc, but I know you've done a bunch of design so I guess you know this.

Also remember you'll be able to get student discounts from apple, so stuff from the online store might be worth looking at.

[CharlieJ]

Do you have internet access in your college?

[Trip]

Originally Posted by CJ MAC OSX IPOD

Do you have internet access in your college?

As sad as it is: I don't know yet.

[Trip]

There is wireless through-out the college, but you have to pay to get it during the year. So no, I won't have internet access at the school during the year.

Any other recommendations? Anybody? I've started school and it seems VERY intimidating right now. Anything to ease the stress? :P

[mdnky]

xPad is a handy little app for jotting down notes during class.

What school do you go to, if you don't mind my asking? I can't believe they actually charge students for WiFi access on campus...that's what the tech fee they added to your tuition bill is supposed to cover.

Check with you college to see if they have anything setup to download software. Some have nice systems full of free (for academic) editions of various programs. You might also want to check to see if your college is part of that Microsoft program (hope they are...means a free copy of Office to you).