The Week in Mac Apps: Holiday puzzles, activity planning, and time-saving utilities

This week’s roundup of new Mac apps brings you a little holiday cheer, a way to keep your burgeoning digital comic library in check, and a couple tools to bring order into the chaos of your daily life.

Dov Frankel’s $20 Comickaze ( Mac App Store Link) helps you keep your library of digital comics neatly organized.

The app supports common file formats like CBR, CBZ, and PDF, can automatically detect information like issue numbers and release date from covers, and makes reading your comics a breeze with a simple user interface.

Xwavesoft’s $5 eXtra Voice Recorder ( Mac App Store Link) is the perfect companion for meetings and lectures.

The app helps you record and edit audio, as well as take notes quickly and efficiently; it even syncs conveniently to multiple devices using Dropbox.

Keith Hertzer’s $25 Graphmatica ( Mac App Store Link) is a one-stop shop of geometrical discovery.

The app allows you to chart and graph everything from mathematical functions to data sets, and provides you with a Cartesian plan onto which multiple plots can be rendered using various color options.

‘Tis the season to… keep yourself entertained with Floor’s $5 Holiday Jigsaw, a collection of hundreds of Yuletide-themed jigsaw puzzles.

The app keeps track of which puzzles you have solved (or are still working on), and even lets you choose their difficulty by tweaking the number of pieces in which each picture is broken.

Batmack Limited’s $10 MyKanban ( Mac App Store Link) is perfect for folks who love being productive but can’t stand getting organized.

The app uses the popular Kanban model to help you quickly sort out your tasks and carry them out without the need for long planning sessions—and with all the flexibility to change things around if your priority shifts suddenly.

If you care about privacy, Mynigma’s eponymous app ( Mac App Store Link) was built with easy encryption in mind.

The app supports industry-standard cyphers, and, at least according to its developers, makes exchanging private messages easy by simplifying many of the steps involved in setting up a secure communication channel between you and your recipients.

Hellmansoft’s $35 Planbook ( Mac App Store Link) makes lesson planning easy and convenient.

The app allows you to schedule your classes and associated notes and materials with them, finally tying everything together into a cohesive lesson plan that can be printed and mailed to parents and students.

NWD’s SnappyApp ( Mac App Store Link) makes quick work of everyday tasks like grabbing screenshots, annotating them, and sharing them with friends and colleagues.

The app is designed with ease-of-use in mind, and, best of all, is free—although some functionality, including support for Evernote and Dropbox, requires in-app purchases.

Topaz Labs’s $100 Topaz Impression ( Mac App Store Link) turns your photos into works of arts.

The app supports a number of filters designed to imitate a number of drawing techniques, and allows you to further customize its output by picking your favorites among dozens of surface textures, brush styles, and color effects.