Continuity in Modern Life - Annoying or Genius?

I have always been an Apple fan, ever since I first owned a Power PC many years ago. Even when I got my first Power PC, it was out of date and if I remember correctly it was OS X 10.5 which is crazy old now.
Between my current Yosemite 10.10.1 system and my OS X 10.5, I also owned a Windows 7 and a Windows 8.1 system shortly after. My last laptop before this one was actually a Windows 8.1 system, great OS and machine but I must say that the OS X has really nailed it with Yosemite.

I love the system its a great piece of engineering from Apple, but the feature that has been the most hyped and the one that has stood out to me has to be the Continuity. Although it is only really useful if you own another Apple device it has some very useful features.

Genius?
The best features to the Continuity is the ability to sit on the toilet away from your MacBook, and still read the article you were reading. We have all found ourselves reading an article and about half way through you have needed the toilet, the phrase ''do I finish reading or not?'' usually comes to mind. With the new feature from Apple, it is now possible to walk away and have that number two while having that excellent reading material.
Another great feature is the ability to text while you are away from your iPhone, have you ever had that annoying person that just keeps texting? Now you can open the Messages app in the background and no longer hear that constant buzz coming from your silent phone. I admit though it is great, when you get a text message that you want to reply to about a meet up but do not want to come away from Angry Birds or Candy Crush.
Another great feature I have noticed is you can now answer ordinary phone calls on your Mac, this is great for the busy working person. To be able to answer the call with just one click and carry on working.

Annoying?
For the annoying argument, I have found that one very annoying thing about the whole continuity is that if you have not switched it off like me, you will find that when someone rings you on your iPhone, it will ring on ALL of your devices. This is very annoying if you have 3+ devices like me and a few of my house mates. Although if you decline it on one device then you no longer have the ringing on the others even though I have noticed the slight delay of it still ringing on my iPad even after I have already started speaking.

This is all something that I have not seen before, even though I have heard about the Android users having this feature for a while now, Continuity is a new Yosemite feature although some of the features are just sped up Mavericks features, like the ability to continue reading the same web page on your iPad from your Macbook, that was already available for Mavericks but they have made it faster and more reliable. Not to mention prettier to look at.

I have seen this ability been advertised on the Windows format though for Windows 10, and it looks really good for them too. Although it was advertised for Windows first and didn't actually kick off until after Apple had already installed it. Windows 10 plans to use this feature over their Surface, Desktop/Laptop and Mobile formats calling it 'One Windows'.

Do you think this is a feature that is no longer THAT useful? or Do you think its genius that needs more features? What features? Comment below :)

Best Apps to Help Any Student.

I recently started at a new university after a transfer from London, I was really worried about joining this university because it was rated much better than my previous university, and I had heard they had better contacts in the industry, while trying to prove I was a good student during my first few days starting I decided I would purchase an iPad, I already had a MacBook and iPhone so I was looking around the App Store for apps that would be really useful and also had an option to sync to my other Apple devices as well, here is the best apps I found on the Apple App Store that really help me out as a student.

5. Shpock.
This great little app got me through the hard times at university, helping you sell all that bric-a-brac you no longer need or impulse bought when your student loan came in. It has many features like finding items for sale near you, categories which are organised into Fashion, Electronics etc. and it also uses your phones camera to take images without saving them to your phone and using up space.

It is totally free although you will need to create an account and add your phone number for them to verify you are real, but that's pretty standard for many selling apps.
Available for FREE on Apple and Andriod.

4. Key Note
Key Note is Apple's answer to Microsoft's PowerPoint, which is vastly used and promoted in universities across the UK, and is also available free for students if you log in to your uni email. Key Note is a great competing app, available across all the Apple products in different forms and links together so if you save something on your iPhone while on the bus, it will transfer to your MacBook once connected to the Internet. It does everything a presentation app could be used for, including using apps in built ICloud Drive to save your work too.
The iOS app can do everything the full app can do (that I know so far). Very usual for saving your presentations from lectures and let's you add notes to those slides too.

Available for FREE on iOS and Mac Store (Andriod unknown).

3. Simple Mind+
Simple Mind+ is a very useful app for doing mind maps and spider diagrams and then saving them to your iOS device, it's a very simple and effective app that allows you to move the 'legs' of the diagram anywhere you wish and as big as you wish, and then allows you to save the finished product as a JPEG file and email it to who ever you wish, very useful for group work when someone cannot turn up as you can all do the mind map work and then send it to the absent, lazy ones of the group.

Available for FREE on iOS, not available for Andriod.

2. RefME
A very useful referencing app that makes essays and dissertations a lot simpler. A lot of my friends in uni seem to struggle with Harvard referencing and in all honesty, without a book or this app I do too. Very easily asks you the information and once you have put that in it will automatically tell you what you need to put where in your essay, it also comes with a barcode scanner for books so that you don't even need to enter much information.
  
Very useful and recommended now by many universities.
Available for FREE on iOS and Andriod.

2. Smart Sheet
This app is only really considered great if you have joined the apple device craze like me (ha), as you apple people who study events or project management may already know, Microsoft Project is not available for the Mac or IPad/iPhone. If you have been wondering what else you could use, then Smart Sheet is a great alternative to Project! Comes with many of the same features and is only available for the iPad and iPhone devices at the moment, this app is a great one to use. Not much I can say really about this, it's just a great project management app that could help you no longer wanting a windows laptop just to get those few things Microsoft didn't release to us Apple users, although we still all want Sims 4 from Maxis.
Also comes with a few templates and options as seen below which makes this a great contender for the Project suite if it was available for Windows.

Available for FREE on iOS only.

1. iStudiez Pro / Free
Saving the best til last, this is easier the must have student app to help you get through university. It has many features on the free version firstly, which will allow you to colour code your modules in with your coursework that's due, it will let you add contact details for lecturers and email them through the mail app.
The paid version, although a little expensive at £8.99, will allow you so many features! Firstly you can get notifications on due coursework and even a reminder that you have lecture coming up. Once you have put in your timetable for the semester, you can add the next semester too. This app does get annoying though if you allow it to sync with your Facebook events or google calendar, as it will notify you when an event is coming up that your attending on Facebook, so do not sync with either of them unless your Google is not as clogged up. Another great feature is that if you purchase the iPhone and Mac Store apps, it will sync the whole lot over all your devices, so if you forget your iPad for a lecture, you can still put updates to your schedule in your phones app and sync when you have an Internet connection.
The only downside to this app is the price though, £8.99 for MacBook, and £1.99 for iOS but once you have bought it, you will not regret it! It is also available for free on all devices but this does not allow syncin, cloud back up, or notifications.


Available for Mac App Store, £8.99, and iOS, £1.99, or on a limited FREE version.

If you use all these apps on an iPad 16GB, with a few games and pictures you will run out of space quite fast so be careful, the iStudiez Pro app is a huge help for me with organisation, and the RefME app is very good for the essays. If anyone struggles to find these on the App Store or finds these on the Windows store or Andriod where I have said they are not available please let me know.
This is my first ever blog and didn't know what else to write about so thought I would make people aware of the amazing apps that I am using for university. Please forgive me if the grammar is not 100% I was up from 5am the morning I wrote this lol.

Hope you enjoyed this blog entry, and please don't forget to click the follow button or comment if you have any app ideas that I could have used instead.