The Week in Mac Apps: Wake up, draw, connect, and listen

In this week’s roundup of new Mac apps, you’ll find no shortage of great tools for everything from keeping you awake to letting you draw beautiful pictures.

Billed as “the ultimate music alarm clock and sleep timer,” Embraceware’s $10 Awaken ( Mac App Store Link) helps you fall asleep—and wake up—to the sound of your favourite iTunes music.

The app supports multiple alarms and timers, can be controlled via the keyboard and an Apple Remote, and even comes with its own set of soothing ambient sounds if music doesn’t relax you quite enough.

David Morneault’s $15 GPS Tracks ( Mac App Store Link) allows you to import, create, and edit GPS routes directly from your Mac.

The app supports multiple data formats, allows you to add arbitrary waypoints to your maps, and works both with on- and off-road tracks.

Made with Mischief’s $25 Mischief ( Mac App Store Link) is a vector drawing app designed with sketching in mind.

It provides infinite canvas space, implements a realistic stroke representation that gives drawings an organic feel, and even supports a variety of background paper textures and colors.

Developer Flavio Tordini’s $9 Musique ( Mac App Store Link) is a music player that sports great looks and an intuitive user interface.

The app supports a wide range of audio formats, displays album artwork alongside additional information like lyrics and info about the artist, and can even fix common spelling mistakes in your titles and descriptions.

If, like us, you occasionally feel like connecting your Mac to a Wi-Fi network is more like playing the lottery than using technology, developer Maximilian Heim’s $1 Pingbar can help you figure out if anything is wrong with the Internet.

The app allows you to periodically verify that a specific website is reachable, and advises you when it can no longer connect to it and when a connection is once again available.

Epicreal Team’s $5 Posta ( Mac App Store Link) lets you track all your shipments through a simple and intuitive user interface.

The app supports the most popular mail carriers, provides detailed status on every shipment, and can even show the progress each package makes right on a map.

Idea2Inspire’s $1 SmartPlayer offers a few unique tools for those who like to watch videos without getting distracted from their busy day.

The app allows you to quickly create playlists by dropping files on its icon, can play a video on the desktop or in a dedicated mini-view, and will even play in a semitransparent window that sits on top of your other content.

Soundness LLC’s $80 SoundSoap 4 ( Mac App Store Link) breathes new life in your audio and video recording by removing background noise and improving overall sound quality.

The app can easily detect and remove unwanted noises, like fans, vinyl pops, and mains buzzing, normalize levels to enhance sounds that were recorded at either too low or high a volume, and improve output quality by selectively boosting a range of frequencies.

Developer Don Clark’s $2 Thermobar allows you to control of your Nest thermostat right from a convenient menu item.

The app allows you to view the current temperature and set the Nest to away mode with the click of a mouse, and even supports multiple thermostats by providing each of them with their own menu entry.