The Week in Mac Apps: Tinker tailor soldier spy

There’s a bit of everything in this week’s Mac App roundup, with software that helps you keep track of your finances, share your files, write better documents, and even keep your Windows-toting pals happy.

Don’t worry, though—it’s not all about work! One of our apps lets you create amazing images with nothing more than a bit of light, and another helps you make some great charts at the drop of a hat.

It’s not easy to explain what it does, but Escape Motions’ $15 Amberlight ( Mac App Store Link) is a fun way to create breathtaking abstract images on your Mac.

The app’s controls let you essentially “paint with light,” with support for many different color schemes and symmetry drawing methods that help you make your designs unique every time.

If your Windows-using friends complain about all the extra metadata that OS X leaves on the drives you share with them, Zero One Twenty’s BlueHarvest Lite ( Mac App Store Link) is an easy way to make that problem go away once and for all.

Designed for simplicity, the app allows you to specify one or more disks and then monitors them continuously whenever they are attached to your Mac, removing all those annoying extra files and directories (like .DS_Store) that Apple’s operating system loves to strew all over the place.

Dropbox is probably one of the best inventions of the last decade, and developer Rick Waalders’ Dragshare ( Mac App Store Link) makes it even better by allowing you to share a file by just dragging and dropping it over the app’s icon.

Dragshare works by transparently grabbing whatever content you pass to it, copying it to your Dropbox folder, and then copying the corresponding public URL to your clipboard.

Dataphase’s $4 Home Radio keeps track of over 20,000 different radio stations worldwide, providing you with useful information on their transmission frequencies, genres, and hours of operation.

Of course, thanks to the power of the Internet, you can also listen to your favourite radios directly through the app. New stations are added daily, and the company even takes requests.

Budgeting and personal financial management are hot topics, and IGG Software’s $60 iBank ( Mac App Store Link) is probably one of the most popular apps built for this purpose.

Version 5 of the software helps you keep track of your expenses and income, and even lets you pay bills online using the company’s Direct Access feature (which requires an additional subscription).

CultureZoo’s MarkDrop ( Mac App Store Link) makes editing Markdown text as simple as it can be and still manages to provide a few powerful features, including a live preview that is automatically updated for you as you type.

The app’s strong suit, however, is its sharing capabilities: It comes with built-in support for the company’s Droplr service, which allows you to quickly and securely send a copy of any document to friends and colleagues right as you’re working on it.

Tension Software’s $10 Notelist ( Mac App Store Link) lets you keep track of your note through a simple and intuitive interface that allows you to type and categorize them with ease.

Version 3.2 also includes a new feature called “concatenation” that makes it possible to collapse multiple notes into an individual entry with a single click after selecting them.

Developer Evan Miller’s $80 Wizard ( Mac App Store Link) is not priced for the faint of heart, but if you need to perform statistical analysis and visualization of data, it’s the app for you.

With support for dozens of modelling, transformation, and display tools, the app helps make sense of complex information sets, and can even use several professional packages as sources of data.

After languishing for ages, it looks like development on Twitter’s official OS X client has finally picked up, with version 3.0, which features better timelines, additional features, and an updated design, now available through the App Store.

Meanwhile, Urban Cowboy’s Hourly News, which helps you keep track of newscasts as they happen, has been bumped to version 1.2.1, offering minor fixes and better support for OS X Mavericks.

Version 1.0.1 of note-taking app The Journalist is also out, with support for a calendar view, the ability to print notes, and an improved user interface.

Finally, if you long for some fancy shortcuts, Zen Angst’s Keyboard Cowboy 2.0.1 gets you quick access to any app.