Scouring the hundreds of news feeds I follow, I often stumble upon interesting software - unfortunately, I don’t always have time to look at it at the time and it ends up in the vast expanse of the “Look Into” folder on my desktop. Currently there are three programs relative to student life in the folder, hardly expansive as I’d like but I’m good at keeping up with it. At any rate, I write this right before I install and test them. Come, let me take you on a trip as we investigate Ebbinghaus, iProcrastinate, and newTunes (a Dashboard widget.) All these programs, btw, are mac only.
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Ebbinghaus
Ebbinghaus, named after the famous German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus as he had a particular way of organizing ideas (though I’m not entirely clear what this was - it involved a box from what I understand, is essentially a flashcard program. It can use pictures, randomize the cards, and provide statistical info. It’s also free - which is great!
The program doesn’t do a lot for me, at the moment, because I don’t tend to use flashcards in studying - check back this summer when I’m taking Latin.
Still, for what it does, it does a good job.
iProcastinate
This is essentially a study program - or rather, an assignment tracker. I don’t generally like these sorts of programs because they rarely integrate into my standard practices and I don’t like using more programs than I have to. One of the reasons I like Gradefix so much is feeds into 30boxes and thus I only have to look at one Calendar to see what I have to do. Still, not everyone is as crazy as me.
iProcastinate is pretty straight forward, you add classes, then assignments, then you can break down that into parts and chart your progress and assign a priority level. The problem here is the program is kind of stupid in many ways (you have to manually type in dates as far as I could tell - and it doesn’t take cues from other dates you assigned such as having an assignment due at time x, then when you create a sub assignment it puts the date after it.) You can stick grades in, but it just gives you a percentage on the actual assignment (22 out of 25 points equals an 88% for instance) but doesn’t do much more than that.
It’s free (it may be donation-ware, I’m not sure), however, and that’s always good. But so is Schoolhouse, and it does a lot more better (and I’ve not looked at it in a few versions, I need to take another peek.)
Personally, I wouldn’t bother with iProcastinate.
iProcrastinate
Lastly, and certainly least….
newTunes
Well… this is a widget, and I fudged - I forgot I had installed this last night. It evidently searched your music collection and lets you know when new albums are coming out by artists already in your library. Handy, but not vital.
It, I imagine as it has no documentation, searches your library to establish this list. I left it searching all night, and it did nothing. I started it over, it still did nothing. So.. not having any more to work with, I just deleted it (option-click on the dashboard widget to bring up the “x” to close it.)
So.. maybe it works, I honestly couldn’t tell you.
Conclusions
So… Ebbinghaus good (for a flashcard program), iProcastinate - not so impressive, and newTunes - uh.. I dunno? Everything just got AppZapped by me, but I’ll probably revisit Ebbinghaus this summer.
Listening to:
Our Hell from the album
“Knives Don’t Have Your Back” (Emily Haines)
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