best for secondary school and above
study for free with this guide!
Your digital classroom is just a tap away!
✓ You can study ✓ Learn faster ✓ Key subjects on the move with apps included ABZ37 2013
PRINTED IN THE UK
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Contents INTRO
HOW-TO
Ready to learn? Here’s your guide to finding everything you need to know inside
SCIENCES
Discover the best educational resources available from your iPad
Vital techniques and tips to help you get more from your iPad
A roundup of all the best science apps – plus, start to learn coding
iLearn, therefore iPad – the iPad in education ................................................... 06 iTunes U and other sources of educational materials ...................................14 Learning with podcasts and YouTube ....... 20
Parental Controls........................................... 24 Networking and printing with your iPad ... 26 Using a Bluetooth keyboard ........................ 28 Read and annotate PDFs with GoodReader ................................................... 29 Use Dropbox with iOS................................... 30 Scan documents with your iPad ..................32 Create and organise multimedia notes with Evernote ..................................... 34 Keynote presentations in education ......... 36 Group work with the iPad ............................ 38
Reference apps ............................................42 Astronomy apps ...........................................44 Science apps .................................................54 Learn coding with your iPad .......................60 Maths apps ....................................................66
A TO Z ALL THE APPS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT 30/30 ................................................143 4th Grade Maths: Splash Math ... 66 7 Billion ............................................... 77 AA Time Machine ............................ 82 Adobe Ideas .....................................123 Adobe Photoshop Touch .............130 Adobe Reader ................................ 144 AirBoard .......................................... 144 Alphabet Fun .................................... 13 Anne Frank .......................................84 Armchair Archaeologist ................ 81 Art Authority for iPad ..................139 Art Guide ..........................................139 Artifact ............................................. 131 ArtRage .................................... 14, 135 ArtStudio for iPad .........................136 Atlas by Collins ................................. 73 Bagpipes Royale ............................114 Barefoot World Atlas ...................... 74 Bee-Bot .............................................. 63 Beethoven’s 9th Symphony .....118 Bird Id .................................................. 58 BrainpPOP UK .................................. 13 Brian Cox’s Wonder of the Universe 48 Britannica Kids – Rainforests ...... 13 Busuu ..................................................98 Byword ............................................... 96 Cardiovascular System Pro, The 57 Cargo Bot ............................................64 Catch Notes ..............................140 Cato’s Hike .........................................64
Chambers Dictionary ..............13, 96 Chambers Thesaurus ..................... 96 Chord Detector ............................... 111 Chord! ................................................110 Clear ...................................................143 Cloud Outliner ................................142 Collins Grammar and Practice ..... 99 Conflict in Vietnam ......................... 81 Contour ............................................... 95 Conundra Math ................................68 Corkulous Pro .................................143 Daisy the Dinosaur ......................... 63 Dinosaur Zoo .................................... 55 Drafts ............................................... 140 Dragonbox Algebra 12+ ................ 70 Dropbox .....................15, 30, 40, 144 Drum School for iPad ................... 112 Duolingo .............................................98 Earth 101 ........................................... 75 Earthlapse ......................................... 52 EarthViewer ..................................... 77 Elements, The ............................14, 59 Encyclopedia-Britannica .............. 42 Evernote ....................14, 34, 39, 140 Evernote Peek .................................. 99 Faster Scan HD ................................. 32 Fingering for iPad ......................... 115 Flowboard ...................................... 144 Flute Fingering Chart ................... 115 GarageBand ....................................105 Geo Walk HD ..................................... 43
Geography GCSE .............................. 74 GeoMaster Plus HD ......................... 13 GeoQuiz .............................................. 74 GoodReader ............................29, 144 Google Drive .....................39, 75, 143 Google Translate ............................. 99 GoSkyWatch Planetarium ............ 45 Graphing Calculator/HD ................ 14 Grovo ................................................... 18 Guitar Tuner ................................... 108 GuitarPad ......................................... 111 GuitarPro .......................................... 111 GuitarToolkit ................................... 111 GuitarTuna ..................................... 108 Harmonica .......................................114 History: Maps of World ..................80 Hopscotch .......................................... 61 HowStuffWorks .............................. 43 Human Face of Big Data, The ...... 77 iA Writer ...................................94, 143 iBone .................................................114 iBooks .................................................88 iCrosss ................................................. 70 iDraw .................................................129 iGeology ............................................. 77 iMathematics Pro ............................ 70 Index Card .......................................... 97 Inkflow .............................................122 Inkist .................................................138 Inkpad ...............................................128 Instacast 3 .......................................102
Instapaper ...................................... 144 insTuner Lite ................................. 108 Inter Atlas .......................................... 53 Intro to Letters ................................. 13 iPhoto ................................................132 iStudiez Pro .....................................143 ithoughtsHD ..................................... 13 iTranslate ........................................... 14 iTunes U ............................................. 15 Jammit ............................................... 113 Juno’s Piano .................................... 106 Keynote .............................14, 36, 143 Khan Academy ................................ 15 King of Maths ................................... 70 Kingdom of Plants .......................... 58 Kodable Pro ....................................... 63 Learnist ........................................... 144 Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy ....... 57 Lists for Writers ............................... 96 LogMeIn .......................................... 144 Luminos – Astronomy for iOS ..... 45 Macbeth: Explore Shakespeare .. 92 Magic of Reality, The ...................... 56 MapBox ............................................... 77 Marble Math ...................................... 67 Math Blaster HyperBlast 2 HD ... 69 Math Kid .............................................68 MathBoard ................................. 13, 67 Mathemagics ....................................68 Mathmateer ...................................... 66 Meeting-Recorder .........................141
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HOW-TO
Security & Restrictions
Parental controls Keep your children safe when they’re using your iPad (or one of their own) QUICK TIP On the opposite page we explain how to set up an additional Apple ID for your kids to use. To give them a paidfor app, you can gift it from another Apple ID. Sign in to the Store with the other ID, find the app, tap Share, then Gift and enter the email address of the child’s account. To set up an allowance, tap Send iTunes Gifts under Quick Links. Tap Learn more, scroll down, tap Set Up An Allowance and enter your child’s Apple ID (or set one up).
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ith its very responsive, intuitive touchscreen, the iPad is incredibly easy to use, but that also means it’s easy to misuse. Whether you’re lending your iPad to your children or setting up an iPad of their own, you need to be sure they’ll be safe using it. Particularly if they’re techsavvy older children, you might want to ensure that they won’t be visiting inappropriate websites, installing and playing games, or running up huge bills buying extras as In-App Purchases (IAPs). What are IAPs? Simply put, an IAP is any extra bundle of content or features that you can buy within an app, as distinct from in the App Store itself. IAPs are widely used to unlock added features, or to buy real or virtual goods. In games, for example, you might have to pay to unlock levels, acquire extra lives or power-ups, and so on. Some free apps turn out to be sparse “samplers” or more-or-less
empty “containers”, requiring you to pay for the actual content. This is not to say that there’s anything inherently bad about IAPs – they can be a perfectly fair and reasonable way to offer you extra content or optional modules you mightn’t need or want to pay for up front, such as additional languages in a language-learning app, for example. The only problem is that you’re spending real money, which might not be immediately obvious, particularly to younger children or in the context of a game.
Keep them safe The simplest and safest option is therefore often to disable IAPs entirely, which is easily done using the iPad’s “Restrictions” options. You’ll find these by opening the Settings app and tapping General ➜ Restrictions. As we’ll show you opposite, these include the options to disallow access to a range of apps one-by-one and even to block
internet access completely. This last option, however, won’t always be suitable, for example where the children involved are older or will need to use the iPad to find information online. The alternative can be to set age-rating-based restrictions – we’ll explain how. It’s important to note that it’s not possible to set up multiple “user accounts” on one iPad and switch between them, as you can on your Mac: any restrictions and settings will apply on that device until you change them (although we’ll show you how to ensure that only you can change them). It is, however, possible to set up a separate App Store account for a child (over 13) and either set an allowance for this account or stop it downloading paid apps at all. This gives your kids a certain degree of independence and might be ideal if you’re setting up an iPad for them to use on their own but want to prevent unexpected bills. ●
QUICK LOOK YOUR iPAD’S PARENTAL CONTROLS 01 Finding the settings
You’ll find the parental controls by tapping Settings. Then tap General in the left-hand column, followed by Restrictions on the right.
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02 Allow/disallow
These On/Off switches enable you to allow or disallow access to certain apps on your iPad, including the Safari web browser, as well as the App Store.
03 Restricting content
In this section you can use age-related ratings to protect children of any age from potentially unsuitable content in apps, music, books and more.
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04 More options
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Scroll down for any further settings you need, including a section to protect your privacy and some restrictions for Game Center.
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Security & Restrictions
HOW-TO
HOW TO SECURE YOUR iPAD AND SET UP RESTRICTIONS For a first line of defence, open the Settings app, tap General ➜ Passcode Lock and set a four-digit passcode. This will then have to be entered to wake or start up your iPad. For greater security, turn off “Simple Passcode” and set a longer password with letters and symbols as well as numbers. Either way, your kids will have to enter the code to use the iPad. Make sure this is different from your Apple ID password – the one you use to buy items from the App Store or iTunes – so they can’t also buy things.
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To access the iPad’s parental controls, tap Settings ➜ General ➜ Restrictions and tap Enable Restrictions. You’ll be asked to set another passcode, which you’ll need to enter to make any changes to the restrictions later. Make sure it is NOT the same as the passcode you set in step 1.
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You can now disable some key apps: Safari, Camera, FaceTime, Siri, and the three stores – iBookstore, iTunes, and the App Store (the Installing Apps switch controls the last; use the separate switch to prevent users deleting apps as well). Set a switch Off and the relevant app will immediately vanish from the Home screen.
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To stop kids spending money on the iPad, switching off both iTunes and Installing Apps isn’t quite all. Swipe down and also set In-App Purchases to Off.
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By default, when you buy an item from the App Store or via IAP, you can buy more without re-entering your password for 15 minutes. But if you buy something for your kids and then hand them the device, this means they have 15 minutes of free reign on your account. To prevent this, tap Require Password and change the setting to Immediately. Now the password needs to be entered every time you want to make a purchase, no matter how recently the previous one was authorised.
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Under “Privacy” you can prevent apps from accessing your location, contacts, calendars, reminders, Twitter and Facebook information, and stop them sharing data over Bluetooth. Tap Location Services, for example, to see a list of apps that have requested use of that service. If you want your kids to be able to find their location in Maps, say, set Maps to On but other apps to Off. Then tap Don’t Allow Changes to lock these settings in place. Note that this isn’t a blanket
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AGE RATINGS You can set agerelated limits for different types of content on your iPad, including apps. Every app has a rating – to find it, search for the app in the App Store, tap its icon and scroll down to the “Information” section. Limiting apps by age rating will hide those rated for older users from your Home screen, and also prevent users from downloading them from the App Store (though they’ll still show up in search results).
“disable” switch; it just prevents users and apps from altering these settings. Be aware too that some apps may already have imported and stored your contacts, so they might still show up in that app. Swipe down for some options relating to Game Center. Switch Multiplayer Games Off and users won’t be able to request a match, send or receive invitations to play games, or add friends in Game Center. Switch Adding Friends Off and they can’t make or receive friend requests in Game Center – but if Multiplayer Games is On, they can continue to play with existing friends.
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Tap Settings ➜ General ➜ Accounts ➜ Don’t Allow Changes and the current Mail, Contacts, Calendar settings will be locked. Users won’t be able to add, modify or delete accounts or modify iCloud settings. ●
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HOW TO SET UP AN ADDITIONAL APPLE ID FOR FREE APPS ONLY
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Create a new Apple ID
If you’ve got older children (13 or older) and want to let them download free content, you can set up an Apple ID with no payment card attached to it. Visit appleID.apple.com, tap Create an Apple ID, fill in the details and tap Create Apple ID. Now check your emails, tap Verify Now and follow the instructions.
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Finish setting it up
Tap the Home button, open the App Store and pick a free app. Tap Free, then Install. Tap Use Existing Apple ID and enter the email address you set the account up with. Tap Review, then Next, agree to the Ts&Cs and enter your card details. After the “success” message, tap the Home button.
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Unlink payment card
Now tap Settings ➜ iTunes & App Stores ➜ Apple ID ➜ View Apple ID. Sign in, tap Payment Information, tap None, then Done twice. When your children access the Store with this account they’ll now be able to download free apps but will be prompted to re-enter the card details for paid-for apps.
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SCIENCES
Learning to program
Learn to code Coding and programming might sound rather too heavy to introduce to your children, but there are apps out there that can subtly teach the basics
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hen it comes to coding or programming, many parents might think it’s too complex a task to teach to their children – not least as a result of the fear that we couldn’t do it justice because we don’t understand it properly ourselves. When broken down, though, programming is essentially the process of creating the simplest possible formula to solve a problem – and even if you’re not aware that this is what you’re doing, this kind of problem-solving can be paralleled in other forms which can be learned using your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.
Coming to your school… When the Department for Education revealed its plans for the latest update to the English National Curriculum, it was notable how much emphasis will now fall on ICT. From the start of the new school year in 2014, learning the basics of computer programming will be part of English education, with plans being brought into effect that will see this start as early as Key Stage 1. This means that children of five to seven years old will be introduced to the idea of what an algorithm is and what its function is, followed by the early steps of creating and debugging basic code.
Further Key Stages will look at using programs where simulation of code will act out the processes, as well as dealing with physical systems like a turtle or “Bee-Bot”, a small robot that can be commanded to move in elaborate ways with a series of basic commands – which, essentially, is the crux of computer programming. With this on the horizon, it makes sense to make the most of your iOS device and give even young children a helping hand into the world of programming. The introductory levels conveyed in the sort of apps we’ll look at are so well disguised behind layers of cartoon characters, wonderful interfaces and organic tutorials that kids won’t even realise they’re learning the vital skills required to solve these logical problems while they’re having fun. Whether it’s getting a blinking ball of fur to the end of a maze or moving boxes in a specific order using a crane, kids will be grasping looping sequences and other such commands, and absorbing the introductory lingo in no time. It’s not just for the very young, though. Indeed, some of the advanced apps we’ll showcase here might even get teenagers and adults furrowing their brows. So come on, let’s get a head start on 2014! ●
Make the most of your iOS device and give your children a helping hand into the world of programming
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Lerning to program
SCIENCES
Hopscotch A fun, educational programming app to help kids explore the basics KEY INFO Price: Free Works with: iPad Version: 1.2 App size: 4.8MB Developer: Hopscotch Technologies Age rating 4+
Inspired by an MIT education project, Hopscotch is a neat computer programming app that could one day turn your child into a whizz-kid developer. Children as young as four can use its drag-anddrop instruction blocks to create simple actions and animations that will keep them enthralled for hours. Our test subjects – an 8-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl – quickly caught on to how Hopscotch works, although since
Your child simply chooses a character, such as Space Pod, and then combines and arranges instructions
STEP BY STEP Breaking down actions into steps makes programming easy.
there’s little in the way of instruction or tutorial included in the app, it’s probably best if you help them through the initial stages (if only to give you a chance to get up to speed, too). To create an animation or action, your child simply chooses a character, such as Space Pod,
VISUAL AID Colour-coding helps to keep related actions together – nesting, in programming lingo – which means you can easily see what’s happening.
and then combines and arranges instructions based on motion, lines, control, and so on. By tapping Play, they’ll see these come to rudimentary life. They can even specify how the actions are set off – by shaking or tilting the iPad, for
example – and you can combine the actions of many different characters if you wish. Proud programmers and their parents can easily share their creations via email, although the recipient will need to have a copy of Hopscotch installed on their own iPad to see them – you can’t save an animation. All in all, this is a great educational app. ●
EASY ON THE EYE There are plenty of characters and interesting visual effects to play with and to engage kids.
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HUMANITIES
History apps
Anne Frank Anne Frank’s diary goes interactive with photos and interviews KEY INFO Price: £6.99 / $9.99 Works with: iPad, iPhone, iPod Version: 1.0 App size: 493MB Developer: Penguin Books Age rating 9+
The tragic story of Anne Frank is one of the most poignant of the Second World War. The teenage Anne was forced into hiding in wartime Amsterdam with relatives and other families. Faced with living in such a confined space – which she dubbed the “Secret Annexe” – she
turned to her diary to help keep her sane. The diary spans from June 1942, just after Anne turns 13, to August 1944, when it ends abruptly days before the Annexe was discovered by Nazi agents. The app aims to fill in the gaps before and after the diary was written, to provide a full account of Anne’s life along with the historical context in which it played out. The idea is that as the Second World War fades into history, the horrors of what went on will lose their resonance with each passing generation. The app aims to bring to life the events surrounding the diary by making it relevant for a modern audience – in particular teenagers studying the diary for school projects. The app is split into three main sections: the actual diary itself, a series of story trails, and two timelines, one spanning Anne’s life and legacy, the other covering the
wider historical context. The diary itself is the richest part of the app. It’s a faithful adaptation, although couched in rather over-modern US-style prose. It’s presented like a book, where you can tap to the left and right to move between pages. Swipe up from the bottom to access extra options.
Mixed extras As you read through the diary, a number of underlined words – names, places and even apparently random phrases – appear. Tapping these will reveal links to extra elements, from simple information panels and photos to audio and video clips. There are also shortcuts to the timelines, a couple of maps and a 3D model of the Secret Annexe. While this extra information is welcome, it would be nice to be able to switch off the underlined text for a distractionfree reading option.
BRINGING IT TO LIFE Much of the general information is genuinely useful.
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History apps
The quality of the extra elements varies from genuinely useful to rather basic information that you’d expect most people to already know. The two maps best exemplify this: the local map of Amsterdam is useful, but the map of Europe is too rudimentary to be of much use. The audio clips continue this mixed story: there are useful interviews and insights from Anne’s contemporaries, but sometimes the clip is simply a narration of part of the diary, which feels like padding. The lack of playback controls on the audio is also frustrating. Similarly, not being able to magnify the photos can be annoying, particularly when you’re shown a tiny thumbnail of a newspaper. On the other hand, the video clips – mostly archived interviews with contemporaries of Anne – work well and add welcome context to Anne’s story.
You’ll also occasionally come across a tab marked “Slide to see diary layout”, which reveals a facsimile of how parts of the diary looked in their original form, with photos and fly-out paper stuck in among the text. It’s gimmicky, but still a nice extra touch. Of the other story elements, the timelines provide useful background information – particularly in revealing Anne’s tragic fate. Sadly the story trails don’t add much, simply highlighting parts of the diary around four rather basic themes. We’d rather
have seen a more detailed interactive 3D model of the Secret Annexe for readers to explore at their leisure. Nevertheless, the diary itself remains a compelling read, and while there’s definite room for improvement, it should breathe new life into Anne Frank’s story for a new generation. ●
HUMANITIES
BACKGROUND The information is clear and simply written, with plenty of detail.
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MUSIC & ART Learning to play an instrument
Learn the guitar: rock out with virtual strings
Learning to play guitar is easier than ever, thanks to iPad and iPhone apps
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o, you want to be a rock and roll star? Then listen now to what we say. All you need is an electric guitar, then you can use your iPad to learn how to play. With apologies to The Byrds, all the tools you need to learn guitar are available on your iOS device, whether it’s an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. From guitar tuning applications to sheet music, they’re all waiting in the App Store. Over the next few pages, we’ll show you which apps to choose and how to use them as you master rock’s most popular instrument. Did you know that John Lennon couldn’t tune his guitar until he met Paul McCartney? The baby-faced soon-to-be Beatle showed Lennon the technique at their first meeting. You probably don’t have a hotline to Macca, but you’re in luck – if you have an iOS device. The most accurate way to tune your instrument is using a chromatic tuner. Now available in app form, these analyse the pitch of the string you play through your iOS device’s microphone. A visual display shows you how sharp or flat the note is.
A special mention goes to the free and funky GuitarTuna (www.ovelin. com/guitartuna). It‘s a chromatic tuner that constantly monitors audio
SMULE & STRUM Turn strumming and picking into a game with Smule Guitar! Earn points to unlock songs.
coming in and draws the current note on a little graph. We also like insTuner Lite (www.eumlab.com/instuner) – another free app that enables you to tune a range of instruments. Another method is “relative tuning”. This is tuning your instrument to a note played at concert pitch. For example, free app Guitar Tuner by
Grab a free chromatic tuner app and tune your guitar by analysing the pitch of the string you play Alvin Yu doesn’t analyse the pitch of your instrument at all. Instead, it’s packed with a sample bank of guitar notes you can listen and tune your guitar to. A simple idea, well done. TUNA CHECK GuitarTuna will show how sharp or flat your note is on its graph.
Training tools Now that you know how to tune a guitar, you can begin learning to play. We’ll break it down to the very basics.
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Learning to play an instrument MUSIC & ART
ACCESS ALL AREAS Though it is subscription only, Tab Pro HD makes the Ultimate Guitar music archive beautifully accessible.
SCALE AWAY ScaleBank’s strength is its simplicity. Pick a root note, then a mode and start shredding through scales until you’ve committed them to memory.
When you play guitar, your left and right hands perform different but coordinated tasks. You play the strings or strum with one hand (the right if you’re right-handed) and you fret notes on the guitar neck with the other hand. It’s worth working on each of those tasks individually to begin with until you become proficient at both. A great way to improve the rhythm in your strumming hand – and to play tunes straight away – is to use Guitar Tuner to temporarily tune your instrument to an “open chord”. Chords are combinations of notes in the same scale that you can strum or pick. If you tune your guitar to an open chord you can strum along tunefully without doing anything with your left hand. E major is a good choice for this. Once you’ve got some rhythm going, you can then play major chords all the way up the neck by pressing
down or “barring” across the fret. Barre at the 1st fret for F, the 3rd for G, the 5th for A and so on. Playing along to songs on iTunes or Spotify will soon help you get your strumming up to speed – all before you’ve even learned to play a chord. There are also iOS tools you can use to improve your playing. Smule Guitar! (www.smule.com/ magicguitar) may seem like just a Guitar Hero or Rock Band clone when you first try it, but it actually offers a great deal more. It helps you to practise your strumming and plucking technique while playing along to wellknown tunes, without even picking up your guitar. Just pop your earbuds in and while you’re learning, you’ll be able to practise wherever you are.
Music theory So, that’s the right hand taken care of – but if you want to strum more
CHORD! APP A simple, must-have for your iPhone. Having a chord book to hand at rehearsal or when practising is essential.
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STUDENTS
Essential utilities & accessories
Useful apps for students No matter what you’re studying or how old you are, there are certain apps you just can’t afford to be without. Here’s our pick of the best of them…
Notebooks
Take note: without an app to quickly copy-and-paste or jot things down, you’ll be lost!
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ith the iPad’s large touchsensitive screen, it makes perfect sense to use it as a digital notebook – and it didn’t take long for developers to take advantage of this with a host of apps that mimic physical notebooks. Of course, the iPad advantage is that in addition to jotting things down, you can also copy and paste text – plus images, web articles, recordings, links and more. Noteshelf (£3.99 / $5.99) is a notetaking app specifically designed for handwritten notes, with an interface that replicates a physical notebook.
It gives you a magnified area to write in at the bottom of the screen, and it reproduces what you’ve written at the top – a simple but effective idea. You can easily cut, copy and paste notes, as well as export to Evernote and Dropbox. A similar approach is taken by Penultimate (Free), one of the oldest handwriting apps for the iPad. The main draw (ahem) here is the large number of paper types available, both free and paid-for – from graph paper to music notation, suiting just about any subject.
Books of note The big concept behind Taposé (£1.99 / $2.99) is to enable you to split the notebook page into two halves, using a draggable bar. You can use the left half to browse the web with a fully functional browser, enabling you to research online and take notes as well as cut-and-paste text from the browser to the notebook. Drop a pin on the map, tap on it, and you can copy-and-paste the map on to the notebook. Swipe up on the bar, and you can open a calculator, your contacts list, or maps instead. It’s something of an acquired taste, but
you might find it suits your own way of working. Catch Notes (Free) is essentially a front end for the Catch.com online notes service, and it does a fine job of it too. Notes can be labelled using Twitter-style hashtags, and five different kinds are available, including recordings and photos. In fact, you don’t need an online Catch account to use it, but it makes everything so much easier. It’s the only way to back up your notes if anything goes wrong, for one thing, and the only way to share your notes. Drafts (£2.49 / $3.99) is a smart app for capturing, storing and sharing written nuggets of wonder rather than scribbling notes. There’s a live word and character count, with the latter turning red once you breach Twitter’s 140-character limit — a nice touch. Old drafts are easily accessible and searchable from the app’s toolbar, and there are many sharing options. Finally, if all you need is a quick way to jot down brief notes without fancy features, try Sticky Notes for iPad (Free), which simply replicates good old Post-it Notes – with the added bonus that you can dictate them! ●
EVERNOTE It’s the big daddy of scrapbooking/notebooking/journalling/call it what you will… Price: Free (£3.99 / $5.99 monthly Premium subscription) Works with: iPad, iPhone, iPod touch Version: 5.4.1 App size: 42.8MB Dev: Evernote Corporation Age: 4+
EverNote is the de facto king of notetaking – mainly because it’s so much more than a note-taking app. You can type notes directly and organise them into folders, where they’re backed up on Evernote’s servers and available through the browser, iOS client and desktop app. Every note is indexed and filed by date. You can go further and organise them into discrete collections, called notebooks, and describe them using keywords to help you search. Get
into the habit of using it to take notes or jotting down quick ideas when you’re at your desk and those same sketched thoughts will be at your fingertips on the move. Although the app is free, you’ll almost definitely want to opt for the £3.99 / $5.99 monthly Premium service, which enables you to take notebooks offline and sync with the desktop client – which in turn means you can clip web pages directly to your account. It’s the quickest way to build up a digital scrapbook.
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Essential utilities & accessories
STUDENTS
Audio note-taking and calculators Writing or typing is so old-school – why not let the audio speak for itself?
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t’s all very well using your iPad to write notes, but if you’re in a lecture, you want to concentrate on what’s being said, not on writing – so why not record the audio instead? Audio note apps are also invaluable for day-to-day thoughts, ideas, reminders and more. Soundmarks (Free; 69p / 99¢ IAP for import and export) is designed for anyone who needs to record audio. It also allows you to add notes at specific points on the timeline – these can be text, images or drawings, and notes can be made either while you record or later. Thankfully, it’s easy to edit the timestamp on notes, meaning you can sync audio and images once the lecture is over. That’s important, because the notes act as a bookmark; tap on one and the playhead jumps to the point in the recording that corresponds to the note’s timestamp. It’s a very useful way of navigating long recordings, even if all you write is “Important bit!” SoundNote (£2.99 / $3.99) also does the recording/annotation thing. The system works brilliantly, with the
only weakness being that drawing on a touchscreen isn’t much fun. It’s incredibly simple to use and to experiment with – type out a study plan, for instance, and underline headings when you get to them, or take a completely freeform approach. However, it isn’t a comprehensive note-taking tool in its own right: there’s no importing of other media, handwriting recognition or similar note-taking assistants. In Recordium (69p / 99¢), you can edit recordings by marking In and Out points and hitting the Trim button, meaning that any accidental coughing (say) can be cut out. You can also copy snippets of recordings to a new file. Recordings can be shared, and you can even send recordings to Recordium from a Mac or PC.
Calculators and more You’d think having a calculator on your iPad is such a basic that you wouldn’t need to think about it, but mysteriously Apple decided otherwise. While there’s no built-in IOS version, there are plenty of replacement apps – many of them useful for specific purposes. For example, Student Pad (£1.99 / $2.99) is a combination of Epsilon Mobile’s notebook and calculator apps, with some organisation features specifically for students added. As a result, the app comes across a bit disjointed, but with the right aims in mind. The module organisation tools reflect how a lot
of university courses really work, and we can see them being genuinely useful. The calculator and graphing tools are a little niche, but the memory functions are great. There’s an interesting variation in MyScript Calculator (Free), which enables you to physically draw out your calculations. It converts your scrawl into recognised text, and you make corrections by drawing over anything that it might get wrong (so make sure you write neatly). MyScript Calculator includes support for exponentials, trigonometry, logarithms and other basic functions, so it’s good enough for classroom use. On the other hand, for a simple, no-fuss, entirely free calculator that nevertheless has plenty of features, try PCalc Lite – it has a scientific mode, unit conversions and more, with IAPs available for adding extras such as programming. ●
MEETING-RECORDER Never mind the meetings, this beauty is essential for any sort of tuition Price: £1.49 / $1.99 Works with: iPad, iPhone, iPod touch Version: 1.0.2 App size: 3.3MB Dev: Lin Fei Age: 4+
This fine app goes way beyond merely recording notes and lectures; it enables you to contextualise your recordings in a way that captures much more than just the audio. You can, of course, name and tag recordings, and they are then timeand date-stamped. But in addition to this you can also add text notes, photographs, and star “ratings”, to allow you to capture as much of the material as possible and find the recording again easily afterwards. When
you’ve finished, you can share the audio in a variety of ways – including sending it to Dropbox, storing it as a note in Evernote, or sending it over to iCloud. There’s even an option to create a video that displays photos as the audio plays, but sadly the app froze every time we tried to do this. Otherwise, Meeting-Recorder has been exceptionally well thought-through. It’s chockfull of brilliant features that lift it easily above a standard voice recorder.
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