Minireview: Schoolhouse

[Magnus]

Schoolhouse is a very nice little application that can help organize schoolwork. The developer describes it this way:

With the ability to sort and organize your assignments, exams, and projects quickly and easily Schoolhouse is a must have for any student on-the-go. The power of smart groups allow you to interact with your work as simply as your iTunes library. Newly introduced in this version are Classcasts, the ability to publish your assignments to the web automatically for anyone to subscribe to. And with powerful automatic graphing of your grades and a GPA & Finals calculator you’ll never be in the dark at the end of the semester.

What struck me first about Schoolhouse was how Mac-y it looks. You know, sometimes you run software and you just get a feeling that whoever designed it just doesn't get the Mac, Mac programming, and the Mac OS X interface. With Schoolhouse, they've done a great job. It looks, works, and feels like a true Mac application, full of nice, helpful functionality. That starts with the icon, which is a work of art in itself.

Schoolhouse's developer, Logan Collins, is 18 years old and he's still in school himself. Actually he just started college, it seems like, so perhaps Schoolhouse is born out of his own need for organizing his studies. The basic functionality in Schoolhouse is to keep track of courses and assignments. You set up basic course information, and then create assignments for those courses

Schoolhouse supports something Logan calls Classcasts, which is simply a way of publishing and subscribing to RSS feeds. So as long as your class-information is published as a RSS feed you can from within Schoolhouse subscribe it.

The interface is very Cocoa, and if you've ever used apps like Apple's Mail you know what it looks like and how it works. Schoolhouse has support for Smart Groups. Smart Groups is based on the same idea as Smart Playlists in iTunes. You could, for example, set up a Smart Group for all your A-grades.

There is integration to iPod and iCal. Assignments in Schoolhouse can be added to iCal, and you can put assignment information on your iPod. In addition there is some integration with Mail to be able to send assignments to the teacher and ask them questions via email.

I've tried other similar apps before and I can say Schoolhouse is the most pleasant experience I've ever had. For a student with a Mac it's a great piece of software that I hope will keep improving. As a teacher, I wish Logan would now write a corresponding client app that I could use to plan my teaching and keep in touch with my students. Now that would be really interesting.

Also posted to EmiratesBaby.

[Yasir]

IS it freeware?