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The best creative and productivity apps for students

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Ableton Live 10

albeton live 10

If you’re majoring in music or just have a passion for making it, you’ll want a digital audio workstation. We think the best choice is Ableton Live: It’s packed with software instruments and effects, and it sports a clean modern design. It’s also intuitive to use; the “session” view in particular is ideal for live performance and exploring combinations of loops, riffs and rhythms. And Live 10 adds a handy feature that will “capture” your jams even if you forget to hit record.

That said, even with a hefty 40 percent education discount, Ableton Live isn’t cheap. Live Standard costs $269, but if you can afford it (and are serious about your music), consider springing for the $449 Live Suite. It has three times the instruments, more than double the number of presets and samples, and more than 30 additional effects. Perhaps most important, it comes packed with Max for Live. Max is a powerful development tool that can be used to create new instruments and effects, control external instruments, or control almost any knob and button on your screen.
— Terrence O’Brien, Managing Editor

Get Ableton Live 10 – $74+

Adobe Creative Cloud Photography

adobe creative cloud

If you’re taking digital art classes or just enjoy snapping pictures in your off-hours, Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography subscription could be vital, not to mention a good deal. Pay $10 per month and you’ll get the latest versions of Photoshop for advanced editing, Lightroom for managing your class photo projects and Spark to create your web portfolios and highlight videos. And you should strongly consider the Creative Cloud All Apps plan if you think you’ll need tools like Illustrator or Premiere, as students get a huge discount over the usual rate, at $30 per month.
— Jon Fingas, Contributing Editor

Get Adobe CC Photography – $20/month

Elf Audio Koala

koala

There are all kinds of beat-making apps out there, and they range from basic to advanced. They can also be expensive if you include synthesizer apps in your search. For less than $5, you can kickstart an audio-production hobby with a piece of software for your iPhone or iPad. The Koala sampler lets you record noises with your device’s microphone that you can turn into beats. Your voice, claps, stomps and more become the basis for samples and loops. Beyond being easy to use, you can make something in a matter of minutes — even if it’s your first time using the app.

Koala allows you to track up to 64 samples, tweaking them how you see fit thanks to built-in effects. There’s also a keyboard mode so you can play chromatically or use one of nine scales. When you have something you like, there’s the ability to save WAV files or export to Ableton Live Set, or you can use a MIDI controller to play them. If you want to use more than the noise you can capture on your phone’s mic, Koala also allows importing from the iOS Files app. That’s a lot of music-production tools in an easy-to-use app — let alone one that only costs you $3.99. And when you don’t have the space (or money) for a robust setup, apps are your best bet.
— Billy Steele, Senior News Editor

Evernote

evernote

We love pen and paper as much as the next person, but we highly recommend you transfer your hand-scrawled notes to a digital note-taking app for posterity. And Evernote is still one of our favorites. It works on any platform, has checklists and reminders, and can scan text in photos to make it searchable. It’s a must-have for collecting research and organizing your thoughts before sitting down to write a paper or start a project.

Evernote is free, but a premium subscription could be worth it, at $70 per year. That lets you search text inside attached documents like PDFs and Word files. You can even mark up those PDFs to highlight the important material. Plus, as a student, you get a steep 50 percent discount, which makes it almost a no-brainer. — T.O.

Headspace: Mediation & Sleep

headspace

The world is going to hell in a handbasket. And the fact that you waited until the absolute last minute to start cramming for your philosophy midterm isn’t helping. In short: Life is stressful. One way to manage that stress and avoid burnout is to meditate. There are tons of apps out there for guided meditation, but we especially like Headspace. It’s available on mobile and desktop, and it works with Google Home- and Alexa-powered devices as well.

We dig the simple explanations and cute animations that make meditation feel approachable. And once you’re finished with the basics, there are lessons focused on creativity, motivation and improving self-esteem, just in case anxiety isn’t the only reason you need to take a breather. There’s plenty of free content in the app, though some of it is for subscribers only. Plans cost either $13 monthly or $96 for a year. But students get a pretty incredible discount: $9.99 per year. That’s less than that gym membership you never use. — T.O.

Insight Timer

insight timer

Between class assignments, extracurriculars and campus social life, college can be overwhelming. Now’s the time to learn balance, and meditation is an increasingly popular way to build downtime into jam-packed days. The Insight Timer app stands out because you have free access to thousands of guided meditations, whereas most platforms, like Headspace and Calm, only open up a fraction of their library to nonsubscribers. Insight has a premium tier for $5 per month that includes offline listening — the same price as Calm but less than Headspace, which is $96 per year. Insight also has a simple but effective meditation timer if that’s all you need.
— Chris Ip, Associate Features Editor

Scrivener

scrivener

Outlining an essay can quickly devolve into a jumble of notes, research and nixed outlines. Scrivener is an app for writing, but more importantly it’s an app for organizing your thoughts and sources in one window. The features get granular: You can break your essay down into tiny pieces to rearrange, storyboard it with virtual index cards and go into a minimalist “composition mode” for actual writing. But just compiling and searching everything you need for that term paper or thesis in one spot is a level up on your standard writing app. With a discount for students, Scrivener costs $38.25 for Windows and $41.65 for macOS. — C.I.

Pixelmator Photos (iOS) / Pixelmator Pro (Mac)

pixelmator

Back when Adobe’s Photoshop cost hundreds of dollars, Pixelmator was an affordable and powerful alternative. Now the company has two excellent apps: Pixelmator Pro for the Mac and Pixelmator Photo for the iPad. Pixelmator Pro has a simple, one-window design that hides its power; the app is equally suited to working with illustration, painting and photo editing, thanks to support for external drawing tablets. Naturally, it has nondestructive editing features, and you can save your favorite set of adjustments as a “recipe” and share it with friends if they’re clamoring to bring your vibe to their photos. And if you use Apple’s built-in Photos app for organization, you can have it open an image in Pixelmator Pro, make some edits and sync everything back to your main library.

As its name suggests, Pixelmator Photo for the iPad is focused on, well, photos. With support for RAW images, it’s good for a lot more than just editing shots from your iPhone. Like its Mac sibling, Pixelmator Photo uses machine learning to help perfect your edits and crops — it’s even smart enough to let you remove unwanted objects in your image, recreating the missing background with startling accuracy. Adobe may have promised Photoshop for the iPad this year, but why wait when you can get Pixelmator Photo for five bucks right now?
— Nathan Ingraham, Deputy Managing Editor

Procreate / Procreate Pocket

procreate

If you’re an artist who likes using the Apple Pencil, Procreate should be well worth your $10. It invariably shows up on any list of the best iPad drawing apps, and with good reason. The app skillfully re-creates traditional tools like oil pastels, charcoal, pencil, watercolors and many more. If the built-in tools aren’t quite what you’re looking for, Procreate lets you built your own, as well. You can draw using all of these with the Apple Pencil, and you can also use the touchscreen to “smudge” or blur your artwork, just like you could in real life.

Procreate has a robust export system, letting you bounce your creation to PSD, TIFF, PDF, web-ready JPG and many more formats. A recent update added a robust text-creation framework, which lets you import your favorite fonts and add typography to your creation quickly. There’s also a time-lapse recording of your creations, so if you want to give fans an inside look at how your latest masterpiece came together, the app will do that too. There may be plenty of good, free drawing tools in the App Store, but it’s hard to say that Procreate isn’t worth the money. — N.I.

Bear

bear

There are tons of apps out there for taking notes, but if you use Apple hardware, Bear is among the best. Whether you’re using it on a Mac, iPad or iPhone, it exudes polish and simplicity. The default three-column view gives you a look at all of your tags, notes and whatever you’re currently writing, but you can switch to a single window when you want to focus on the words. Beyond this simple writing view, Bear hides a lot of customization.

Instead of organizing notes into folders, you can add as many tags as you want as you type by throwing a hashtag symbol in front of a word. And if you really want to get crazy, you can infinitely nest tags, creating an organizational system as complex as your heart desires. Bear also lets you link notes to one another, so you can click back and forth between a document full of research and one containing the draft of your term paper. There are also a host of different themes, fonts and styles to use in Bear, and you can export your notes to plain text, Markdown, Word docs, PDFs and many more formats. Bear’s free version is quite robust on its own, but a $1.50-per-month or $15-per-year subscription unlocks a number of additional features, including syncing between all of your Apple devices.
— N.I.

Sleep Cycle

sleep cycle

Better sleep means better mental performance. One of the easiest ways to regulate rest is with a simple tracker like the free app Sleep Cycle. It works like this: You set the time you want to wake up and leave your phone on the nightstand. The app uses the phone’s mic (or accelerometer, if you secure the phone to your mattress) to monitor your motion, thus tracking which of the five stages of sleep you’re in. It will then gently wake you within a 30-minute window before your desired time, when you’re in your lightest phase of sleep. It’s a seamless replacement for your alarm app but with plenty more under the hood. — C.I.

Todoist

todoist

A to-do app is almost a necessity when you have to juggle school, work and a social life. Todoist is one of the best, especially if you rely on Gmail to communicate with classmates and colleagues. You can add tasks from within Gmail on Chrome by clicking the Todoist icon directly above an email — the entry will consist of the email subject and a link to the email itself, though you can manually type out more details if you wish.

Todoist also has mobile apps you can check while you’re out running errands and browser extensions that make it easy to add any webpage as a task. Plus, it has Apple Watch and Wear OS apps, so you don’t even have to look at your phone. Additionally, there’s a premium version with some nice perks, like setting exact date, time and location reminders and creating automatic backups and your own labels. While you can get by with the free version, the $3-per-month premium option might be worth it if you need the additional features to help manage your hectic schedule.
— Mariella Moon, Contributing Editor

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Navigation apps still lack railroad safety info the NTSB requested

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Both Google and Apple agreed to update their navigation apps with railroad information, but haven’t given a reason for the delay. The search giant initially partnered with the Federal Railroad Administration back in 2015 to integrate its railroad data with Google Maps, but didn’t commit to a timeline. A Google spokesperson told Politico that the company remains “aware” of the recommendation and will continue to work on new safety features.

The FRA has its own app for railroad crossings, but reviews have largely been negative. Users complain about that the app is slow to load, out-of-date and glitchy.

Since the NTSB’s request, Google has unveiled new features to help navigate drivers away from natural disasters like hurricanes and floods, warn them of speed cameras and AR navigation. But railroad crossings don’t appear to be in Google Map’s plans for the immediate future. Apple Maps revamped its entire Maps app earlier this year — but it still lacks railroad information.

Other apps are doing slightly better. The Waze app will occasionally register a stuck train as traffic and route drivers in a different direction. The app partnered with the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority to introduce railroad crossing alerts around Long Island. OpenStreetMaps is also building its own railroad mapping system, OpenRailwayMap. Given that 2,214 vehicle-train collisions happened in 2018 alone according to FRA data, it’s clear that more action is needed.

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Venmo can instantly transfer money to your bank account

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This should be generally available in the “coming weeks,” and free bank transfers are still available if you’re willing to wait the customary one to three business days. There’s certainly no mystery as to the strategy here. Venmo is betting that there will be enough of an urgent need for cash (or at least, enough impatient people) that it can make a profit from an otherwise free service.

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BBC to pull all radio services from TuneIn UK

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TuneIn indicated that it couldn’t meet the BBC’s specific demands for its listeners. “This change is driven primarily by the BBC’s efforts to standardize how listeners in the UK access BBC stations, which unfortunately, is something we are unable to accommodate at this time,” stated the streaming service in a press release.

According to a blog post on the BBC website, TuneIn wasn’t able to provide it with the user data it needed. The British broadcaster asks third-party platforms to require listeners to sign-in to their BBC accounts. Barring that, the platforms can offer the BBC data on user’s listening habits directly. “Unfortunately, TuneIn doesn’t do either of these, so we couldn’t reach a data sharing agreement with them,” wrote the BBC.

UK owners of Amazon Alexa speakers may have relied on TuneIn to listen to Radio 4 or get the latest Premier League scores. Luckily, they can still do that via the BBC’s own Alexa skill. As always, UK listeners can turn to the iPlayer iOS and Android apps, or the recently launched BBC Sounds app. If you own a Google Home speaker, the combo of either the BBC Sounds or iPlayer app and Chromecast is currently your only method of listening to live BBC radio.

Owners of Sonos speakers can rest easy — the BBC will still support live radio streaming via TuneIn — at least for now. A number of older audio devices that power TuneIn will also be spared from the change.

The BBC’s pulling out of certain third-party platforms isn’t just a pure data grab — it will force more listeners to flock to the BBC Sounds app. Intended as an eventual replacement to the widely used iPlayer app, the broadcast debuted the BBC Sounds app debuted earlier this year in order to appeal to younger, more podcast-oriented listeners. Users immediately complained about its poor search function and lack of ability to share content. As it strives to standardize the listening experience, it’s likely the BBC will also need to improve the user experience of its own native platform.

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Nike rolls out a subscription service for kids’ sneakers

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Parents will have the option to order shoes for sizes 4C to 7Y (for kids aged roughly two to 10) on a monthly, bimonthly or quarterly basis, costing $50, $30 or $20 per month respectively. Kids’ sneakers typically retail for $60, so monthly subscribers will save about $10 a pair. You can alter the frequency of deliveries or pause your plan as you see fit.

Focusing on children for this plan is a smart idea. Kids can outgrow (or ruin) shoes quickly, so having a pair drop into one’s mailbox every so often could help parents save time and money, if they opt for the monthly option in particular.

There are more than 100 varieties of shoes to choose from on the Nike Adventure Club website, including Converse sneakers. Each box will have the youngster’s name on the side and will include stickers and a guide for games and activities, as well as a bonus gift, such as a drawstring backpack.

Nike is also hoping to make returns a cinch, as you’ll be able to order a different size and have it sent out before you return the pair that just arrived. It’ll donate or recycle the returned pair. You’ll also be able to send back your kids’ old shoes to be donated or recycled via a bag with prepaid shipping that Nike will subscribers twice a year.

The company had been testing the model under the radar for a couple of years, enticing around 10,000 members to a service called Easy Kicks through Facebook ads. The group helped Nike figure out what parents would most want from Kids Adventure Club.

Nike’s subscription may not stop with kids, as it suggested to CNBC there may be more plans on the way. Among them could be a service for runners, who naturally wear out sneakers fairly quickly. Perhaps there’ll also be one tailored to sneakerheads desperate to get their hands on the latest Jordans.

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The best laptops for students in 2019

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We know, we know: We just recommended the standard Dell XPS 13. But the two-in-one variant is also stellar, and it’s different enough from the traditional clamshell version that we felt it deserved its own mention. Simply put, if the XPS 13 is our favorite Windows laptop, then the XPS 13 2-in-1 is our favorite convertible. We like it for many of the same reasons we like the regular XPS 13, including an HDR display and better-placed webcam. But we also appreciate its taller, 13.4-inch screen with a 16:10 ratio and even more premium design, which features more metal elements than the regular XPS 13. It’s slightly more expensive, though, with a starting price of $1,000.

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Samsung’s midrange phones helped its market share surge in Europe

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That was reflected in the other victor from the quarter. Xiaomi’s share nearly grew by half to 9.6 percent on the back of mid-priced phones like the Redmi Note 7.

It wasn’t pretty for other vendors. Huawei appeared to have reeled from the effects of the US blacklisting, sinking to 18.8 percent share. Nokia phone maker HMD Global also suffered in this market. And Apple’s weak iPhone sales manifested themselves here, with a dip to 14.1 percent share. Not surprisingly, its most popular model was the relatively affordable iPhone XR — cost is still a concern even in the premium phone space.

These rankings might not hold for long. Samsung’s renewed focus on midrange phones could keep it out in front, but Huawei faces a murky future if it can’t rely on Android. Xiaomi might also enjoy more meteoric growth thanks to team-ups with carriers for early 5G phones. Apple, meanwhile, is likely just weeks away from introducing a new wave of iPhones that could include an iPhone XR equivalent with dual rear cameras. The pecking order could be considerably different within a matter of months, let alone a year.

Smartphone market share in Europe Q2 2019

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Adobes Fresco brings realistic painting to the iPad

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It’s one thing to see a demo or even art created with these Live Brushes, but it’s another thing entirely to try them yourself. Every time I opened the app, I was amazed at how closely they resemble the real thing. And they’re not only powerful, they’re also a lot of fun.

Indeed, the oil Live Brushes react just like oil paint in the studio. There’s dimension to the brush strokes, and you’re able to mix colors on the “canvas” in a way you can’t replicate in digital scenarios with a color wheel and solid swatches. Ditto for the watercolor dynamic brushes. Based on your pressure and customizable variables, you can watch the color flow from underneath the Pencil.

There are four watercolor Live Brushes (round detail, wash soft, wash flat and wet spatter) and seven oil options (flat, round, filbert, detail, glaze, chunky and short). Like any brush, you can change the size and flow to meet your needs. For watercolor, you can also adjust the water flow level, and for the oil brushes, you can tweak the amount of paint mix. You can also futz with variables like shape, pressure and velocity dynamics, as well as the angle of the brush. Lastly, you can turn the canvas texture off for the oil Live Brushes, and there’s the option to adjust spacing and scatter for watercolors.

Though Live Brushes have the wow factor in Fresco that many will gravitate to, the app is also a powerful illustration, drawing and painting app with a lot of desktop-quality features. There are vector and raster brushes, so you can bring in your favorite tools easily and feel comfortable working on an iPad. Layers, masking, selections and shortcuts are here as well — tools that make creating and editing not only faster, but non-destructive as well. You can also choose a simplified view that reduces the toolbars to just the active tool and visible layers. This means you can focus on drawing without the distraction of ugly side panels.

Adobe Fresco

Fresco works in tandem with Photoshop on the desktop, so you can move back and forth between the two. It also allows you to export a PDF to edit in Illustrator, should you need to do so. Adobe Fresco works with other Creative Cloud apps, too — like Adobe Capture that helps turn things you see into assets like brushes. How well Fresco and Photoshop for iPad work alongside the full desktop apps will be key for creatives deciding to add a tablet to their workflow. And given how Fresco works alongside Photoshop CC, it seems like Adobe has already figured out how to make that a reality.

It will be interesting to see what Adobe does with its stable of apps. If it’s truly able to create all-in-one pieces of software for illustrators (Fresco) and photo editing or design work (Photoshop), the company can probably afford to nix a few. Adobe isn’t saying what will happen just yet, opting to wait until Fresco and Photoshop are out in the wild on iPads later this year before deciding how to progress further. Which means if there’s a current offering you like, it’s probably going to stick around for a bit.

For now, Adobe Fresco will only be available on iPad. More specifically, you’ll need iOS 12.4 or higher and the iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air (3rd generation), iPad (5th and 6th generation) or iPad mini (5th generation). Adobe says the plan is to bring the app to more devices and platforms in the future — like Microsoft Surface and Wacom Mobile Studio Pro. However, there’s no timeline on when that might happen. And, of course, to make the most of it, you’ll need a Creative Cloud subscription.

It’s safe to say that as devices like the iPad continue to get more powerful, Adobe will have the ability to beef up its arsenal. And that probably means more full versions of desktop apps or more pieces of robust software like Fresco are on the way.

Images: Adobe (Illustrators: Tommy Lee Edwards, Kyle T. Webster, Daniel Presedo)

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Microsoft drops one-off Office licenses from its Home Use Program

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Microsoft will no longer sell one-off licenses for Office 2019 as part of its Home Use Program (HUP). As spotted by Computer World, the company updated it HUP frequently asked questions page to confirm: “Office Professional Plus 2019 and Office Home and Business 2019 are no longer available as Home Use Program offers.”

The HUP is a program aimed at employees in eligible companies, allowing them to buy the same Microsoft products they use at work to use at home. Previously, employees had been offered discounted rates for perpetual licenses. Now, they will have to purchase a subscription with a 30 percent discount, costing $69.99 a year for Office 365 Personal or $48.99 a year for Office 365 Home.

If you already have a perpetual license purchased through the program, it will continue to work. And if you buy a subscription under the new HUP, you will continue to receive the discount on future renewals even if you leave your current employer.

For now, Microsoft will continue to offer Office 2019 perpetual licenses for users who would rather buy software than rent it. However, the company makes it clear that this is one move in its continuing efforts to nudge users over to a Office 365 subscription instead.

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Samsung’s 108-megapixel smartphone camera sensor

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He said it damages his brand.
Ninja calls out Twitch after his dormant channel highlights porn

Over the weekend, Ninja posted a video chastising Twitch for not only using his dormant channel to promote other streamers but also allowing porn to find its way into those recommendations. Worse still, the number one stream on Twitch the morning of August 11th was a bootleg porn broadcast that lasted for more than two hours — imagine someone looking for Fortnite gameplay only to find X-rated material. The issue wasn’t just that Twitch effectively replaced his presence with recommendations, but kids could have seen this material, and Ninja didn’t have any control over it. While Ninja apologized, he also stressed that he was trying to get rid of the promotions, if not remove the Twitch channel altogether. Later on, the streaming service reverted Ninja’s old page to a regular offline screen, including chat, where people are roasting Twitch — naturally.

It was supposed to help the government shape federal policy around self-driving cars.
US government quietly kills autonomous vehicle committee

The Department of Transportation’s Advisory Committee on Automation in Transportation (ACAT) hasn’t been active since it was formed in 2017. And it won’t be active anytime in the future because, according to a report from The Verge, the administration has quietly killed it without even telling its members.

A subtle effort to kill repair shops, or clumsiness?
Thank Google for making it harder to find a phone-repair service

Imagine you dropped your smartphone and its display shattered — something that happens around 50 million times in the US each year. You’d probably hit up Google to look for a nearby repair store, but there’s a problem. The search engine has blocked paid-for ads below relevant search terms, making it harder to find help.

Why? Maybe it’s the first blow in a proxy war over the right to repair, or simply the unintended results of a heavy-handed attempt to tackle fraud. A year after the change was implemented, however, the repair-store community is demanding answers — something Google promised but has yet to deliver on.

The large 1/1.33-inch sensor can also record 6K video at 30 fps.
Samsung’s 108-megapixel mobile sensor closes in on mirrorless cameras

The future of smartphone cameras is hundreds of megapixels. That’s according to Samsung and Xiaomi. The ISOCELL Bright HMX, developed between the two companies, is one of the largest smartphone sensors ever at 1/1.33-inches, about three quarters the size of the 1-inch sensor on Sony’s RX100 VII — a high-end point-and-shoot camera.

Even at that size, a 108-megapixel sensor will have ridiculously small pixels. By default, though, Samsung’s Tetracell tech will gather the light from four pixels, transforming it into a 27-megapixel sensor. Don’t worry, you’ll still be able to snap 108-megapixel photos, but you’ll need to make sure your scene is brightly lit to get any decent shots from it.

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