It’s tough to beat old-fashioned arts and crafts: There’s something magical about being able to make something out of nothing more than paper, paste, and scissors. Except for the ensuing cleanup—seemingly endless and somehow futile—they’re still among the best activities for kids of all ages.

Still, these days kids sometimes want to set aside old-fashioned tools and explore their creativity using the family Mac. The results are often amazing and satisfying—and much easier to clean up.

Enter Aquafadas's $25 KidsMotion (Mac App Store link), an OS X app that helps kids use their photos, videos, and music to create high-quality slideshows with minimal effort. KidsMotion takes many cues from its more-advanced cousin, PulpMotion, but features a simpler interface that’s designed to minimize the frustration that goes into building a complex slideshow.

The app comes with a selection of fifty templates designed specifically for a young audience, with themes that range from sports to cartoons, from holiday cheer to artistic landscapes. Cute animations accompany the transitions between slides and photos. Thanks to the simplified design of the app, templates can be swapped in and out at any time, making the process fun and stress-free—something that, frankly, is not all that bad for adults, too.

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In my work as a writing coach, I’d appreciate a reliable program that automatically checked text for serious spelling and grammar errors. Despite its earnest and considerable efforts, Grammarian Pro2 X doesn’t entirely fit that description.

Grammarian runs primarily from a pencil icon in the Mac OS menubar, working with any program where you enter and edit text. I used it successfully with TextEdit, TextWrangler, Microsoft Word, Apple Mail, and Literature & Latte’s Scrivener. I liked Grammarian’s customizable level of assistance. If you only need occasional aid, you can run manual spelling and/or grammar checks of selected text or an entire document. Turn on Interactive Checking to flag errors and suggest corrections as you type. (Grammarian can even whimsically speak warnings like “phrase usage!” or “punctuation error!”)

A built-in AutoCorrect system brings this longtime Word feature to any text editor, allowing you to specify common misspellings and their correct substitutions. AutoType capability transforms quick abbreviations into full phrases—“idk” to “I don’t know,” for example.

I was also impressed by Grammarian’s statistical analysis. It can measure your work’s readability on the Flesch, Flesch-Kincaid, or Gunning FOG scales. Further features analyze each sentence for passive voice, confusing syntax, and other measures of writing proficiency.

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While it’s fairly easy to read an ebook on your iPad or iPhone, doing so on the Mac has proved more difficult. Apple offers no Mac version of iBooks, and dedicated ePub reader apps for the Mac have only recently surfaced. Bookle (Mac App Store link), created by Stairways Software with help and input from Tidbits Publishing, is the latest offering to hit the market, and it aims to provide users with a way to read and store their ePubs.

Bookle brings some nice basic features you’d expect from an ebook reader. The app is broken up into two panes, allowing you to see a list of your books and the chapter titles for the currently selected book on the left, and the currently selected book page on the right. Bookle supports the ePub standard used by both iBooks on iOS devices and the Nook, though files encumbered with digital rights management (DRM) aren't supported—import an ebook with DRM into Bookle, and you’ll see gibberish. (According to Tidbits publisher Adam Engst, this has to do with DRM licensing: Very few formats are available for developers to license, and all are very expensive.)

With regular ePub files, however, Bookle works very well. You open a book—and simultaneously add it to Bookle's library—by dragging the book onto the app’s Dock icon or by choosing File -> Open. Bookle makes a duplicate of the book in its library, providing easy access to it in the future. The app also saves your place in each respective book you open.

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Ask people in educational publishing about Apple’s foray into e-textbooks, and you’ll hear a consistent message: It’s good for all of us—and good luck to Apple.

It’s good for e-textbooks in general because “Every time Apple enters a market, that market gets attention,” as Dan Rosensweig, CEO of textbook-rental firm Chegg, puts it. Widespread availability of e-textbooks on the iPad could help alert a lot of students, teachers, and parents who didn’t know otherwise that such things exist.

And authoring tools like the just-released iBooks Author could help raise expectations about what’s possible in such texts—things like interactivity, multimedia, and personalized content. “This could be where innovation in publishing comes from,” says Sarah Rotman Epps, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

Epps points out that there’s no lack of digital content for schools; there are thousands of apps and e-texts available now. But much of that content wasn’t optimized for digital; it’s often the replica of a print original with a few digital enhancements. iBooks Author could help change that. In the process, it could also enable a new generation of developers who are currently locked out of the education publishing market.

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Digging back into your family history used to mean journeying to dusty records offices, scanning microfiches, and trudging round brambly graveyards. That can be fun but time consuming, which is one reason genealogy is presumed an activity reserved for old folk with retirement time on their hands.

For those of us with less time to spare, the rise of online genealogical resources makes researching our family history not just easier but possible in the first place. There are several impressive online genealogical services, and the most popular family history site is Ancestry.com, a subscription service that costs $159 per year for U.S. only access, or $299 a year for the full Worldwide service. Ancestry’s online resources stretch past 4 billion searchable records from historical censuses and parish records, to military records and passenger lists.

Starting an Ancestry family tree is simple, and the interface is both simple and quickly expandable in depth. The only drawback with such a cloud-based service is that you need to be online to access your tree, although there are free, quality companion apps for iPhone and iPad.

So even though Ancestry fulfils your researching and recording requirements, there remains a need for an offline resource. There are several family history applications for Mac. Mac Family Tree ($60; Mac App Store link) is great for the basics, and easy to learn. Reunion ($99) is the more established, more complex Mac family tree program. Both are great options but suffer somewhat from un-Mac-like interfaces and require digging through several levels of information to get what you’re looking for.

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Jumsoft’s Relationship 2.1.1 (Mac App Store link) is a customer relationship management (CRM) and project management (PM) application that leverages your existing iCal events and address book contacts, making it easy for you to group contacts and events, as well as e-mail messages, documents, and Web pages in a central location. While the concept behind Relationship is great, it lacks the basic features necessary for any good CRM or PM application, which makes Relationship an ineffective CRM/PM tool, and something more like a container in which you can collect your project data.

Like every Jumsoft application, Relationship is a beautifully designed application that puts all of its major tools right at your fingertips. The program uses a three-part window that consists of two sidebars, one on the left and the other on the right, with a Workspace window in the middle that displays detailed information about the part of the project you’re working on at the moment.

The first time you open Relationship it links to your Address Book and, if you use iCal, includes all of your iCal events in Relationship’s calendar. So, while you can add individual contacts and calendar events to Relationship, you’re also able to easily link existing contacts and events from your address book and calendar.

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Earth Addresser is a fun little program that works with Google Earth and the Mac’s Address Book. It takes your contacts and maps them out on the Google Earth globe.

When you first launch the program, a disclaimer appears to let you know that Earth Addresser will send addresses in your contact lists to the Google Maps service in order to translate the address into coordinates to be used in Google Earth. According to the disclaimer, only address information is sent; the name associated to the address isn’t sent, nor is any other information noted in Address Book sent. If you don’t feel comfortable sending this data, you can opt out, but then you can’t use Earth Addresser.

After reading the disclaimer, Earth Addresser takes very little effort to use. The program automatically finds your Address Book contacts, and you select what address group you want to get coordinates for. Once you select your contacts, you click the Look Up Coordinates button, and in a short while (the more contacts you have, the longer it takes), Earth Addresser gets Google Earth coordinates for each address.

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You’d be forgiven for thinking that the biggest differences between calculator programs for Mac OS X are found in the functions they offer and the way their buttons are laid out. Soulver, on the other hand, aims to change the way you make the calculations themselves. Although you can type traditional mathematical equations, such as 365 x 24 x 60, into Soulver’s list-like interface, the program is unique in letting you also use something approaching normal language.

For example, if you’re trying to figure out the price of a $199 product at a 15% discount, you can just type 15% off $199. To convert currency, you can type $50 in Yen. To convert time, type 5 minutes 18 seconds in seconds. A handy Total display shows the sum of all the current window’s answers.

If you’re a spreadsheet pro, Soulver can also reference results by line: 18% of line7 calculates 18% of the result from line 7. You can even drag answers from the answer column to another calculation line, and you can edit existing lines to get updated calculations. Creating temporary variables, which can be used in subsequent calculations, is as simple as typing x=73.

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Not all brains think alike. Some people can work out complicated ideas in their heads, some need to write it down in words and numbers, and others find that making a diagram with illustrations and arrows is the best approach. Inspiration 9, a tool for creating diagrams and mind maps, is aimed at that last group, the “visual thinkers.”

Inspiration’s diagramming feature offers the standard capabilities you’d expect. Fundamentally, whether you’re making an organization chart, seating chart, or sentence diagram, you’re dropping text and shapes on a canvas and drawing lines to connect them. Inspiration has tools for drawing ovals, polygons, and irregular shapes, but you can also use the scores of “symbols” (think clip art) for the objects in your diagram. Connect any two objects together and the line between them will adapt as you move the objects around on the canvas. If you’re not happy with the results, a handy Auto-Arrange feature will corral the pieces of your chart into a neat, compact configuration.

For brainstorming or recording ideas that don’t neatly fit into a chart, Inspiration offers mind maps. Starting with a central idea, related concepts are placed on radiating branches and sub-branches. Each branch is a distinct color and those symbols can be used here, too. For those inspired moments, a Rapid Fire mode automatically creates a new branch every time you press return. Once the creative burst has played out, you can go back to those branches are rearrange them as desired. If you experience a less-than-inspired moment the Word Guide (a sort of combination dictionary and thesaurus) might help you avoid using the word “nice” when what you really mean is “gracious.”

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