The Week in Mac Apps: Tools for budgeting, social media, podcasts, entertainment, and more

This week’s roundup of new Mac apps comes with a great selection of everything you need to start the new year the right way, from helping you stick with your resolutions, to keeping track of what’s happening in your social media circles—with a little entertainment thrown in for good measure.

If you love your social media but can’t stand Facebook’s web-based experience, AppDen’s $2 Current ( Mac App Store Link) is probably worth a good look.

The app creates a native OS X experience around everything from timelines to chat, and comes with the ability to separate out each component into its own window for added convenience.

Time for a break? Giovanni Dal Negro’s $8 DiscoBrick ( Mac App Store Link) brings your music to life with over 90 different visual effects.

The app automatically detects the tempo of each song and synchronizes its 3D animations with it; it also supports 3D displays for a truly immersive experience.

Jamawkinaw Enterprises’ $10 Downcast ( Mac App Store Link) brings the company’s popular podcast software, previously only available on iOS, to your Mac.

The app offers everything you need to listen to your favorite shows, and can sync to its siblings via iCloud or using Jamawkinaw’s own services.

Developer Jonas Ribe’s $10 Highlights ( Mac App Store Link) helps your extract annotations from your PDF files and save them to a file.

The app comes with built-in support for Markdown text, and can export data to a variety of formats, including HTML, plain text, Evernote—and, of course, PDF.

Information Architects Inc.’s $10 iA Writer ( Mac App Store Link) is one of the original crop of “zen writing” word processors that first appeared on the market a few years ago.

The app, which receives regular updates, supports converting back and forth between Markdown and Microsoft Word documents, and offers a simple, focused writing experience that helps you concentrate your efforts on what matters—your words.

ZurApps’ $10 MathPad ( Mac App Store Link) allows you to create documents in which you can freely mix regular text and mathematical expressions of any complexity.

The app supports the creation of charts and graphical representations of your equations, and can export them either as images or LaTeX expressions.

Boinx Software’s $10 Mouseposé ( Mac App Store Link) adds a number of on-screen visual effects associated with keyboard and mouse events.

The app, ideal for presentations and webcasts, can highlight the location of your cursor, play a special animation when you click your mouse button, and even display each key you press in big, bold letters on the screen.

As far as new year’s resolutions go, you could do much worse than saving a bit of dough—and Blue Plum Software’s $2 Nifty Savings Goal ( Mac App Store Link) wants to be the tool that helps you achieve your objective.

The app can tell you how long it will take you to reach a particular goal, and help you budget for periods of any length.

Wondering what’s going on inside your Mac? Glencode’s $2 Particulars ( Mac App Store Link) conveniently displays a number of technical details about your machine right on your desktop or Today panel.

The app can show information about your network connection, hardware status, and storage media; a convenient pop-up menu makes copying specific details—like, say, your Mac’s serial number—a quick point-and-click affair.