As a college student, I didn’t have access to the huge number of great apps now available to assist my educational endeavors (in fact, I didn’t even have an iPhone or iPad – they didn’t exist yet!). There are many iOS and Mac applications that can serve an indispensable part any student’s collegiate success. I’ve recently tried out a great app that I can see being especially useful in academic work.
The app that I give so much credit to? iStudiez Pro. This wonderfully designed and executed application by the aptly-named iStudiez Group offers a powerful set of class-scheduling and assignment-tracking tools that help people like me – who are generally bad at remembering due dates or remembering exam dates – get a grasp on their scholastic career.
iStudiez Pro aims to be a digital student planner, letting you track which classes you’re taking, your Professor’s and T.A.’s contact information and office hours, your homework assignments and due dates, and even your grades.
Upon the beginning of a new semester, you can add all your classes under iStudiez’s “Planner” section. Here, you can add in details about individual classes and organize them by semester. iStudiez allows you to title the class, and also to specify what days of the week (and what time of the day) the class meets on, along with building and room numbers. You can even set reminders of the dates of your exams – I highly suggest entering these dates into the app as soon as you see your syllabus, which you’ll inevitably loose.
As I said before, one of the main draws of iStudiez is to track your homework assignments and due dates. For me, this is the most important part of the application. I found it useful to keep the Assignment screen as my frontmost app during classes (or in my case, meetings). that way I can quickly enter any new assignments into the app the moment my professor assigns them, rather than trusting myself to remember to jot the assignment down later. If you’re lucky enough to have a professor that clearly lays out homework due dates ahead of time, it’s a great idea to populate the Assignment list at the beginning of the semester, so you can get a clearer idea of what the busiest times of your semester will be.
The calendar view is incredibly useful, showing both a monthly calendar view and a list of your classes and assignments below that strongly resembles the built-in iOS Calendar app. By default, this view shows only the class meetings, exams, and assignments due that you’ve entered into the app, but in the settings you can actually enable the app to display events from the standard system calendar, making this one view a full-on replacement for the built-in Calendar app.
While comparatively simple compared to other aspects of the app, the “Today” view will probably be your most-used part of application. This section displays any and all classes, calendar events, exams, or due assignments for the day. It’s a wonderful way to get a quick at-a-glance overview of what you need to do.
iStudiez Pro for iOS and Mac offers a simple and relatively stable synching platform that will push changes made on one device to all your other devices, so you can, for example, add assignments on your iPhone after class, then sit down at your Mac and review what homework you need to work on that night.
The app also offers Notification alerts, telling you when your class is about to start or if an assignment is due soon with a popup message and customizable sound. The combination of class time alerts and the Today screen make it a lot easier to get to know my new schedule.
Verdict[rating:4.5]
iStudiez is so far probably the only app that is a must-have on my iPhone. It’s the first application that gets installed on a new install of iOS or OS X, and it’s quite possibly the reason I haven’t failed out of college due to forgetfulness and lack of organization. I highly suggest that if you are a college student, and are looking for a seamless and simple way to get a grip on your academic life, you need to check out iStudiez Pro.
There’s a lot to love about the iStudiez suite if you’re a student. iStudiez Pro for iOS is a Universal app that runs on iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads, and costs just $2.99. iStudiez Pro for Mac is available on the Mac App Store for $9.99.
Pros
- Affordable and easy to use
- Very efficient for organizing assignments and tasks, and even keeping notes
- Works on any recent Mac or iOS device
Cons
- Can take a while to get use to using it
