Pimp my iPad/iPhone/Macbook with £70
October 6, 2013 10:58 AM   Subscribe

I bought a new macbook and it came with a £70 ($110) gift card for use in iTunes, iBookstore, and Mac App store. I have a Macbook air, iPad 3 and iPhone 4, and I'm definitely not making full use of any of them, especially the iPad. I know I can sell it but I'd rather see if there's anything I could use it for first. What should I use the gift card for?

I'm a med student, so something that will be a useful study aide or productivity apps would be nice. I'm also learning languages (French). I'm not interested in games unless it's extraordinarily amazing. I may be interested in things like exercise, calorie counting, budgeting, or any other lifehack-esque thing with the right app.

Non-free apps/applications I have already are Anki, Instapaper, Papers (haven't actually used it yet) and an ultralingua French dictionary. Otherwise I've only ever really used free apps. What are your suggestions?
posted by pikeandshield to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)
 
For reading ePubs: Marvin (I adore this app so hard)
for Amazon books and filetype: Amazon Kindle app
For marking up PDFs and work well with dropbox, skydrive, gdrive and all that: Notability, iAnnotate and GoodReader
Maps: gMaps
Cloud drives: dropbox.com; gdrive
Checklists: Wunderlist or if you are VERY detail oriented then OmniFocus
Drawing for notebooks: Paper and maybe Penultimate
posted by jadepearl at 1:12 PM on October 6, 2013


DuoLingo is free, but might help out with the French.
posted by cjorgensen at 12:08 PM on October 7, 2013 [1 favorite]


If you want to live the multiple operating system life, the Parallels with an install of Windows 7 rocks it. I run on multiple machines and use software spread across osx and windows. Being able to just seamlessly have windows apps open and work in osx is fabulous. Parallels also lets you have an ipad access as well. I have an ipad and macbook pro so this works well for me.

An example of how my life is so much more pleasant: The UI and functionality of MS Office on windows is way better than OSX, which is a hot mess. I just installed Office on the PC side with parallels running and just work with Windows MS Office while still fiddling around with my OSX apps. No need to boot camp it because it literally runs with OSX simultaneously. I also like the fact that I can cut and paste between OSX and Windows 7.

No need to give up any PC stuff, just get parallels, it is well worth the money.

Oh, for photo editing: pixelmator
posted by jadepearl at 7:11 PM on October 8, 2013


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