Apps for Daily life:

1. Diarium:

Helps you keep a personal diary/ journal with numerous ways of recording your thoughts – whether it be by video, audio, text, handwriting, photos, screenshots etc. You can also setup the app to retrieve your feeds and posts from various accounts – Instagram, Facebook and Twitter – back into your Diary. Likewise, the app can automatically incorporate the weather, your daily activity and exercise (if you have a Fitbit or Google Fit account…). Also, You can go over your memories by date, timeline view etc, making it a rather interactive way of reminiscing over the past. Check out the following links to get the app on iPhone, Android or Windows.

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2. Adobe Scan:

Adobe Scan turns your phone into a scanner whether you have an iPhone or Android. Thus, you can get rid of excess receipts, papers, documents and leaflets by instead keeping them in digital form.

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3. To-Do:

Keeps you organised and on top of daily tasks. It is a great app for collaboration and for use within the family, allowing each member to add or be assigned tasks whether groceries, chores or anything else. Check out the following links to get the app on iPhone, Android and Windows.

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Go paperless in 3 steps:

1. Replace physical paper with digital ones:

By using an app like Adobe Scan, you can turn your phone into a scanner and eliminate the need of hoarding hard copies. Thus, you can get rid of excess receipts, papers, documents and leaflets by instead keeping digital copies. Better still, the app recognises text from whatever you scan, which can help you easily find whatever your looking by using search (with the keywords). This means no longer having to sift through piles of paper and receipts to find what your looking for.

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2. Shifting to an e-reader and to eBooks:

An e-reader eliminates the need of a printer, paper, pens, highlighters and other stationary. Using a pdf reader (e-reader) furthermore enables you to annotate, search (using keywords) and listen to what you want read out to you.

Similarly, with eBooks making physical books obsolete, it can be a good idea to jump to the ebook bandwagon. Play Books (Google), Kindle eBooks (Amazon) and Apple Books are all great options. Though you would find iBooks to be restrictive if you use non-Apple devices.

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3. Digital notebooks:

Digital notebooks helps you stay organised with all your notes, slides and info at your fingertips. Furthermore, they can help replace the countless notebooks you may need over the course of your studies. The benefits of using digital notebooks are endless as they give you the ability to tag your notes, insert stuff – like text, lecture slides (whether they be Images or Microsoft Office docs), audio, video, drawings and shapes etc. Microsoft OneNote is a great app to do this, since it is available on all platforms.

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Exclusive savings for Students:

1. Get the best Student Discounts:

One of the benefits of being a University student is getting access to the best deals all year round, this means not needing to wait for Black Friday sales. Two websites in particular, MyUniDays and StudentBeans give students access to some unbelievable offers. For instance, I bought a HP 2in1 laptop, with a “40% off coupon” from MyUniDays. Similarly, to make this website using WordPress, I managed to find a 50% off coupon through StudentBeans. These student discounts are not limited to tech since 100’s of retailers offer savings through these two websites – from clothing outlets, shoe stores, designer brands, sporting goods and stationary stores. There is NO membership fee, all you need is to signup using your university/ school email address.

Additionally, ShopBack is a unique way to get cashback on many of your purchases plus you don’t need to be a student to get some cash back every time you shop. So in the case of the aforementioned HP 2in1 laptop that I bought with a 40% off coupon, I availed a 14% cashback offered by HP through ShopBack. This added upto an additional $300 in cashback, on top of the MyUniDays student discount. Thus, ShopBack would make the funds available within a month or two and allow me to transfer the money to my bank account. The best part is you accumulate real money (instead of points) every time you buy something, plus you DON’T need to pay ShopBack any membership fee.

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2. Find out which apps your institution offers for free:

Most education institutions pay software companies a lot of money to give its students and staff free access to vital* apps and software on personal devices. Thus, as soon as you start a new course at a school, college or university, be sure to check out your institution’s website. Doing this can help you avoid paying for software (apps) unnecessarily, that may be otherwise offered through your institution for free. Simply Google: the name of your University with words like ‘Software Catalogue’ or ‘free software for students’ etc.

* Essential apps like Microsoft Office can often be available for installation on a student’s personal device.

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