It’s an apps-inundated world. Whether you have a smartphone, a tablet or a PC as your frontier digital companion, apps, and browser extensions, pave the way to accessing every marketplace that routes information and knowledge through different platforms and environments. Here are some to whet your academic appetite.
Tuition.io
With university fees on the rise everywhere, student loans increasingly form a burgeoning part of public debt. Protests in Chile, Canada, Great Britain and the US in 2011 and 2012 against hikes in university fees provide corroboration.
In such a scenario, it pays to know, with a single glance, one’s loan portfolio, and plan in advance for the future. Enter Tuition.io. The app helps students identify their best servicer from a field of options, monthly payments due, when each loan will be paid off, lifetime payments, etc.
Tuition.io also tracks the student’s progress, and by providing charts and visuals, simplifies decision-making and gauging where one’s risks really lie.
Tuition.io is a web-based app in that it runs in your browser. At the moment, it is an invite-only service but invitations are available for anyone who chooses to apply. Also, more importantly, it is mostly free.
Almost all students are voracious readers. More often than not, the rate at which articles accumulate in their reading list is much faster than they are read. Thus, a resulting conundrum is when to read what, and where to make a note of what’s been read and what’s not.
This is where Pocket makes matters that much easier. Just install the free app after registering with Pocket; if you are using a browser, install the bookmarklet.
The next time you find an article that you might want to read later, just share to Pocket in your smartphone/tablet or click the Pocket bookmarklet. Voila! The article gets saved in your common account in a reader-friendly format, and you can access it offline, too.
Another great feature is that Pocket synchronises your articles from your account which means updates made to an article on one device will reflect in the other.
Last, Pocket also includes in-built integration with Twitter, Flipboard, and Google Currents, among others.
Chillwith.me
Chillwith.me is an iOS app and isn’t yet available in the Android ecosystem. Again, it’s completely free, and fills a hole that has been growing bigger in recent years: organising hangouts.
Every student goes through that problem. Usually, a plan drafted in one’s mind ends up getting executed either a week late, a location a couple longitudes away, or with someone being left behind, all this after the exchange of text messages, phone calls, and emails.
Chillwith.me condenses all of this work into one drafting board. With it, you can invite people, send them reminders, share locations and pictures, keep your contact details updated, and capture all your friends’ preferences in a vote!
What’s more, you don’t have to start anew with social media integration. Just use Facebook for communication, while the app reaches out to your venue — say, a restaurant — and through Foursquare, asks for special happy hour deals for you and your friends!
Bon APPetite is a fortnightly feature on student applications.
