The Week in Mac Apps: Photos, paper designs, travel, and fun with Mickey

This week’s roundup of new Mac apps has a bit of Disney magic in it, combined with more serious tools for travelers, scientists, photographers, and those who like to keep tabs on their time.

Graham Nelson’s Inform ( Mac App Store Link) is a design tool that helps you design interactive fiction.

The app, which is completely free, features an interface based on natural language, and can be used for anything from choose-your-own-adventure stories to educational tools.

Clifford Ribaudo’s $50 iPhemeris ( Mac App Store Link) is a tool designed to help astronomy enthusiasts figure out the position of many different celestial objects.

The app can compute a number of different positional parameters for any moment in time between 1700 and 2099, and even supports a convenient “sky now” feature that lets you find out what’s going on above your head.

If you can’t wait for the new Star Wars movie to come out, you can unleash your inner JJ Abrams ahead of its theatrical release using BrainFeverMedia’s $20 LensFlare Studio ( Mac App Store Link).

The app gives you instant access to a wide range of flare effects that can be easily used to give your photos a unique cinematic feel—and even allows you to design your own flare through an intuitive user interface.

Disney’s $5 Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Color and Play ( Mac App Store Link) is a great way to keep your little ones entertained.

The app features popular Disney characters in a variety of scenes that can be colored and decorated with all kinds of patterns, and includes a number of fun games for children of all ages.

Notesmartly allows you to store your notes—text, images, videos, sounds, and more—and organize them according to whatever method fits your need.

The app, which is free, also supports annotations and a special notetaking environment, dubbed “wideboard,” that allows you to bring together all your media in a freeform way.

Ilia’s $10 Photo Octopus helps you manipulate large numbers of images in batches using a simple and intuitive user interface.

The app can crop, resize, rename, and export thousands of photos at a time, applying filters and watermarks to them as they are being processed.

Designing everything from calendars to business cards is easy with BeLight Software’s $22 Printworks ( Mac App Store Link).

The app comes with more than 400 templates that can be customized to your heart’s content with text, colors, and special effects. A collection of 40,000 stock images is also available as an in-app purchase that will set you back an extra $10.

Left Coast Logic’s $30 SmartDay ( Mac App Store Link) keeps tabs of your calendars, and helps you manage your time as you get through your day.

The app can be conveniently accessed through a menu item, or can be docked to one of the sides of your screen for a more permanent position on your desktop.

iLifeTouch.com’s $1 Travel Journal helps you document the places you visit, the people you meet, and the experiences you live.

The app features a simple interface, with support for photos, rich text, and even maps to keep track of where you’ve been.