Back to School with an iOS Device: Essential Apps

College and school is just around the corner… or right over us. Here at whatsoniphone.com we want to make your re-entry a little more enjoyable with this selection of apps for your iPhone or iPad. With this you’ll ace your courses, unless you just start playing Plants vs Zombies. 

Scheduling, courses and general calendaring

BlackBoard: Blackboard connects to your institutions’ blackboard system to deliver you timetables, discussion boards, grades and whatever your school has set up.

Wunderlist: The Swiss army knife of lists and calendars, Wunderlist is used for many things. Give it a try and tell us if it has disappointed you.

inClass: an excellent organizer with many features. Exams, classes, homework, notes. A nice thing: the app keeps track on which class you are taking the notes. Fancy for low memory people. And you can even record live lectures with the camera/mic if you just don’t want to write/type.

iStudiez Pro: A killer app, with cloud syncing to allow you to use both your iPhone and iPad at the same time as class managers. Very well designed.

Grades 2: An app to check your grades. With it you’ll know if you can afford to get a C in the last exam, or if you don’t turn out your voluntary homework. There’s also notifications for tests and assignments.

Bookkeeping, reading, storing files

GoodReader: a multi-system reader and editor. You can read your PDF and even make annotations on them. If your teacher gives you advanced slides, this is a must to annotate them.

iAnnotate: if you are really into annotating your files, this IS the app. Much more than a reader, with this you’ll annotate like crazy, just for the sake of it.

Pages: people at Apple are not dumb, and this is why they have created an iPad version of their awesome Pages application. Create, edit and read, beautifully.

Dropbox: if you still don’t have Dropbox, you should be ashamed. How do you expect to sync all the data between your iPad and your desktop computer?

Notetaking, writing

Plaintext: Plaintext is just that. A simple text editor, with Dropbox sync. Simple, clean, neat, whatever. Works like a charm.

Penultimate: if you happen to have an iPad stylus, this is the app you want for note-taking. It has an awesomely smooth inking system and works wonders for in-class note-taking as soon as you are used to it. It also sports several kinds of papers, and splits notebooks for your different classes.

NoteTaker HD: High quality note taking app. You can zoom to write small things, and insert your own images or pictures. And if you fancy that, you can display notes on a TV or projector with the iPad VGA adaptor.

SoundNote: Record AND annotate. You can record the class at the same time that you take notes. If you fall asleep or get distracted by what you see outside the window, this is for you.

uPad: Ultimate Pad is the ultimate annotator. Its clean writing system allows you to hand-write with big characters in part of the screen, while the content appears in a normal size. It’s hard to explain… Just believe me, it is worth every penny.

iThoughtsHD: If you know and love mind maps, iThoughts HD is the best in the iPad world. At least, it has the best price%2Ffeature relation. Remember everything with this awesome app.

Other things you may need:

m48: an iPad and iPod version of the best calculator in the world (for some), the HP48GX If you know how to use it, it rocks the calculator world

QuickGraph: plots made easy with this universal application. Plot anything, from simple x-y plots to 3D implicit objects.

Papers: if you are a researcher, Papers syncs with your desktop version. Read on the go, store on one place and get references like a research pro.

Keynote: If you need to do presentations, you already know Keynote. Just buy the iPad app, you can now do them on your commute. Easy, isn’t it?

Budget with Back in Black: We’ve just received this app and are still amazed by its versatility and "niceness". It will help you keep your finances sane after too much in-campus partying.

Share your own favourites in the comments!

Unrelated beautiful picture courtesy of evoo73 at Flickr