Must-have Mac apps for college students
Make your Mac the best campus companion
Soon college campuses across the world will once again be buzzing with students. First-year freshmen are hustling to get to each and every lecture alongside the seniors, who won’t notice that the semester has started until two weeks after the fact. Of course, accompanying many of these students will be their Macs.
Possibly brand new MacBook Airs with the latest M2 chip, machines that barely have been touched before, while some others may rely on their 10-year-old MacBook Pro, clustered with stickers from all the bars, organizations, and brands their owners love. Each computer will become a reliable workhorse for the next four months, accompanying the students from the lecture hall to the shared flat.
Keeping them company during the sleepless nights to hand in a paper before the deadline, witnessing the hours of studying for the exams, providing the necessary information about the best club to forget all about the exams, all the while being a great companion for all these endeavors. However, while Macs are great machines for students out of the box, two apps will make them an even more capable companion.
Magnet, $7.99
There are a few areas where MacOS is clearly lacking compared to Windows. However, Window management is one of these areas. Not only are the options MacOS gives you severely limited and hard to access, but they also feel clunky and dated.
Magnet changes that. The small app, which costs 7.99$, brings excellent window management to the Mac. It sits as a small icon in the menu bar, and a click displays all the available options for window management. Alternatively, dragging a window into a corner will lead to that window taking up the corresponding quarter of the screen, while pulling it to the side leads to the window taking up that half of it.
Magnet’s functions are pretty limited, yet they provide extreme functionality and solve a significant shortcoming of MacOS’ user experience. While eight dollars may seem like a steep price to pay for a window manager, it is more than worth it. It vastly enhances multitasking and makes every student’s life much easier.
Alfred 5, free or £34
The second must-have mac Programme for students is Alfred 5. Contrary to Magnet Alfred 5, it is far from being a “one-trick-pony. “Alfred 5 is Apple’s built-in spotlight feature on PEDs (performance-enhancing-drug). Spotlight can be used as an app launcher and is primarily used to find documents.
Alfred 5 is also a great app launcher and an even better file search engine. However, its use does not stop there, as it can also execute more complex workflows that chain multiple tasks. It can do a host of other things, and the customization options for workflows and keywords are only limited by the imagination. Alfred’s unmatched ability to find files is what makes it a must-have for students.
Whether a file is hidden on a helplessly cluttered desktop or in a long-forgotten folder, Alfred 5 will find it in seconds. This feature is invaluable for students, as it not only is a massive timesaver, but it can also come in clutch for those times when you need to find your paper to avoid missing your deadline.
What is even more amazing for students, whose Budgets are always tight, is that the excellent base version of Alfred is free. The base version includes the powerful file manager as well as the app launcher, which means most students won’t feel the need to upgrade to the powerpack for 34£.
Of course, depending on the specific field of study, some further apps and Programmes will help students get the most out of their Mac. For example, students who are required to write many papers will love citation managers and word plugins such as Endnote and Grammarly. However, these helpers are not universal, whereas I believe that Magnet and Alfred 5 should be installed on any student’s Mac.
As always, stay safe
Raffael
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