The Week in Mac Apps: A formula for success

In this week’s Mac app roundup, you’ll find a bit of science mixed with art, a way to write out all those complex equations that always swirl around in your head, and a great way to keep tabs on everything your business does.

SproutedApps’s $60 Blueprint ( Mac App Store Link) is designed to help you get (and keep) a good handle on everything that goes on with your business.

Its interface keeps project tracking, contact management, tasks and to-do lists, and much more all under one roof, with a simple and intuitive interface that helps you save time and get more done.

LoudLAB’s Fluctus ( Mac App Store Link) makes simple audio editing a breeze with an intuitive interface that gives you a quick overview of your files, and the ability to make simple edits to them.

Fluctus can both read and write a wide range of formats, and can be had for the hard-to-beat price of … free.

If you manage a large collection of movie files, Jendrick Bertram’s $20 iFlicks 2 ( Mac App Store Link) is a great way to spend less time organizing it and more time actually enjoying your videos.

Among its features, iFlick supports a multitude of formats, provides easy conversion and importing into iTunes, and can automatically look up and populate the metadata for many videos via the Internet.

Despite the minor version bump, Vemedio’s podcast app Instacast ( Mac App Store Link) has received a few significant updates, including support for automation through AppleScript.

Also new in the $20 app are improved compatibility with Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil, better cloud sync, and the ability to export media files you download from podcast feeds.

Not many people start their day thinking about equations and formulas, but those who do will appreciate Seed’s $2 Magic Number ( Mac App Store Link), which creates beautifully formatted mathematical expressions and computes their results with ease.

The app supports most of the common math operations you’d normally find in a scientific calculator, and provides a variety of formatting options.

Do you know what’s going on over your network? If you’re curious or need to do some troubleshooting, developer Lyle Andrews’s Network Logger Pro can help you make sense of the bits and bytes that flow through your wires (and Wi-Fi radio waves).

The app can actively monitor traffic patterns and speeds with a variety of methods, helping you identify problem clients and time-dependendent slowdowns.

CF/X’s $30 Photo Mosaic ( Mac App Store Link) combines your pictures into beautiful-looking mosaics—themselves based on a master image of your choice.

The app supports a variety of mosaic composition methods and effects, and can even create a movie of each mosaic as it assembles itself out of its individual component images.

Soft Digital’s $20 Record Studio Pro ( Mac App Store Link) is a jack-of-all-trades recorder for your desktop. It can grab video from one of your windows, the entire screen, and even from popular websites like YouTube.

You can then use the app’s built-in editor to put finishing touches like transitions, voiceovers, and titles on your recordings for a professional end result.

Binary Formations’s Home Inventory has been bumped to version 3.1.1, with the addition of a number of bug fixes and new features like better barcode support, improved management of exchange rates, and more … and Apple went on an upgrade spree with its iWork suite, releasing new versions of Keynote, Pages, and Numbers that bring back some of the functionality lost in the transition to the latest release and offer a number of improvements.