The Week in Mac Apps: Billions and billions

Time, from microseconds to millennia, is no problem for one of the apps in this week’s roundup. We’ve also got some great graphics software, a virtual music maestro, and an app that will keep you fit everywhere you go.

Flying Meat’s ever-popular $50 Acorn is a great app for performing all sorts of graphical work on your Mac. If Photoshop has always felt too expensive, Acorn can capably handle many of its tasks for a fraction of the price, and with a simple interface that makes a lot more sense.

The most recent releaase of the app adds many options for importing RAW files from a variety of sources, improves the management of large files, and includes “a ton” of bug fixes.

Scribble Code’s Aeon Timeline helps you create interactive timelines that can span everything from a fraction of a second to billion of years.

Designed for everyone from historians to teachers, the app offers an intuitive interface that makes organizing and filtering your data easy, with an emphasis on interaction to help with research and discovery during playback.

Flixel’s $200 Cinemagraph is a cool app that allows you take a few seconds’ worth of video and freeze-frame portions of it; you can then animate the rest and create some very cool effects in the process.

Squarely aimed at a professional market, the app includes a suite of video-editing tools that use an intuitive paintbrush-like interface to determine which part of the video should be animated.

Devstorm’s $5 Dsync is designed to highlight the differences between two folders on your Mac and, optionally, synchronize their contents.

The app can dig deep into your folder structure, and supports a fast asymmetric synchronization mechanism that can help you keep track of changes with minimal effort.

Technimo’s $20 iRealPro ( Mac App Store Link) is a great tool for musicians of all skill levels. It can import, organize, and print chord charts from a variety of sources (including those you’ve created yourself), and then allows you to play alongside a realistic piano, bass, and drum accompaniment so you can practice until you’re proficient with each song.

The app comes with tutorials; it also offers chord and scale diagrams as in-app purchases for a small additional fee.

If you ever find yourself having trouble following your own notes, Luminant Software’s Note Studio could be what you’ve been looking for.

The app allows you to take textual and graphical notes while recording audio. Everything is timestamped and synchronized at the time of backup, so that you can easily and effortlessly place your every doodle in context.

Developer Markus Spoettl’s $40 RubiTrack is designed with active users in mind; it can track virtually every aspect of your workouts, including mapping your whereabouts, heart rate, calorie consumption, and more.

It’s compatible with several activity-tracking hardware products, including Garmin’s personal GPS systems and Fitbit’s various pedometers.

Cf/x’s Watermark Pro ( Mac App Store Link) is an app that allows you to add all sorts of watermarks to your pictures, from titles all the way to QR codes—even a minimap of the location the photos were taken, based on their GPS metadata.

Although free for everyday use, large batches of images require a $20 in-app purchase.

Note-taking app GrowlyNotes has been bumped to version 2.0.3, which includes a number of important bug fixes and improvements to the app’s backup capabilities.

Popular mail app Airmail has also been updated to version 1.3.2, which includes dozens of new features and bug fixes, including a brand new Microsoft Exchange engine, better preferences, and support for many external apps, from Evernote to Omnifocus.