The Week in Mac Apps: Voyage in the third (and a half) dimension

One of the subjects in this week’s Mac app roundup opens up your Mac to the wonderful world of fractals, while others help you organize and manipulate your images, keep an eye on your personal finances, and even design your backyard down to the most minute detail.

Learning to play new songs is a cinch with Anystone’s $30 Anytune ( Mac App Store Link), which slows down playback to help you better capture every little nuance of your favorite performances.

Anytune also comes with a number of features designed to isolate and enhance specific portions of a music piece, like electric guitar, vocals, and so on.

NeverCenter’s popular $12 CameraBag ( Mac App Store Link) has been updated to support a number of new features, including blur, tone and color timing, watermarks, and more.

The app also includes a large selection of filters and styles, which allow you to quickly render a photo in a multitude of different ways with little effort.

Macphun’s $10 Focus 2 ( Mac App Store Link) helps you gain fine control over every aspect of your pictures’ focus.

With a great selection of effects like macro enhancements and tilt-shift, the app helps you hone in on the the exact look you want with minimal effort.

Centcom’s $50 Fractal Architect 3D ( Mac App Store Link) brings the wonderful world of fractals to your fingertips with a great selection of effects, models, and rendering options.

The app supports both random and procedural renderings at any resolution, and can export images in a variety of formats.

If you’re like me, your idea of landscaping scheming to get out of mowing the lawn. If, on the other hand, you like to keep things a little tidier, Encore’s $60 Landscape Design ( Mac App Store Link) is a great tool for planning every last aspect of your yard.

In addition to organizing the layout of your lawn, the app allows you to render it in 3D, with support for a large variety of decorations, vegetation, and outdoor living spaces.

As the speed of protocols like USB and Thunderbolt continues to increase, external storage is becoming an increasingly popular option. Enter developer Ethan Bell’s $3 StorageStatus, which helps you keep tabs on everything that’s connected to your Mac.

In addition to providing important information about each device, the app also lets you know when your external drives are in sleep mode, allowing you to monitor their power usage.

Like to share? Compiled’s $2 SwiftDrop ( Mac App Store Link) allows you to quickly drag and drop any file from your Mac and make it available to your friends and colleagues.

Best of all, SwiftDrop uses your existing Dropbox or Google Drive account a cloud storage, which means that you won’t have to sign up for yet another service in order to use the app.

If you have trouble figuring out where all your hard-earned money goes, Steine’s $60 You Need a Budget ( Mac App Store Link) may be the right app for you.

With great categorization features, clear graphs that show you how to allocate your expenses, and companion mobile apps that handle your everyday budgeting, this app is built to help you get out of debt—and stay there.

SproutedApp’s BluePrint business management app has received minor stability updates designed to improve its performance and reliability … iLifeTouch’s Daily Expenses is now compatible with iCloud and has also been the recipient of a few bug fixes and speed-ups.

Speaking of fixes, Apple has recently bumped it Remote Desktop Client to version 3.7, which improves the reliability of kickstart and solves a few firewall issues … and ICQ is now at version 1.1.2, which, in addition to a few minor fixes and improvements, is probably most notable for reminding us that ICQ still exists.