Review: Schoolhouse

by Judson Collier • 11/28/2006 at 03:30 PM

Ah, it feels like summer was here just yesterday. It?s almost half way into the school year, and you’re finally getting comfortable with the idea of school again- then, the teachers begin to flood you with study guides, homework and projects! So how do you get this all organized? The answer is easy: SchoolHouse.app.

Schoolhouse is an application that helps organize your entire life? or at least your life from Monday to Friday. It manages any assignments, projects, tests and classes. You can add your assignments to Schoolhouse, set priority, due date, grade, and more. Schoolhouse also lets you add on some other nifty things like URLs, notes, files, and the type of assignment to keep you organized.

SchoolHouse interacts with a lot of different applications, allowing it to Export to iCal and your iPod. You can publish an RSS feed (or what they call a ClassCast), using .Mac to share with your friends. You can also send assignments to email, and even directly email your instructor to ask questions. One of my favorite features is School House’s ability to calculate your grade if enter your scores after completing each assignment. It can also calculate your GPA, but the application requires you to type in every single grade you make, rather than pulling them from the grades you have put in after you complete an assignment.

The interface is very clean; think of it as a cross between iCal and Mail. However, there are some issues. For instance, there are multiple ?Add” buttons on the interface, which is confusing. Also, the ?Ask Instructor” button is too simple. The only two options given are ?Subject” and ?Text”. This makes life harder as you can?t attach files and the program doesn’t have the overall flexibility of Mail. It would probably be a better idea to just launch a new window in Mail. Finally, when creating ClassCasts, there?s no easy way to manually update your feed.

Schoolhouse is a free, feature-rich app, and although it has its flaws, I would recommend it to anyone who needs a boost in organizing.