The Week in Mac Apps: Program HTML animations with Hype 3, run performance tests with Geekbench, and more

This week’s roundup of new Mac apps comes jam-packed with goodies—from a new way to look at the sky to a product that makes quick work of printing your next bright idea. Plus, we bring you new tools to create brilliant HTML animations, measure the performance of your Mac, and much more.

If you’ve ever had to write a research paper, you know how painful it can be to manage citations and bibliographies—unless, of course, you happen to be running Sonny Software’s $60 Bookends (Mac App Store Link).

The app makes easy work of collecting and organizing information from a variety of professional and scientific sources like PubMed and JSTOR, online services like Google and Amazon, and even your own collection of papers. Once loaded, the data can be searched using full-text queries at the click of a button.

X04 Studios’s $7 Easy Voice Changer (Mac App Store Link) adds a bit of fun to your voice by changing it using one or more vocal effects.

The app allows you to modify the pitch of your voice in real time all the way up in chipmunk territory, and then apply filters like reverb and echo.

You really can’t talk about measuring performance on a Mac without mentioning Primate Labs’s $10 Geekbench 3 (Mac App Store Link).

The app is widely considered the standard for benchmarking Apple products, with support for many different tests and practically every piece of hardware that leaves Cupertino. The latest release comes with support for the new MacBook Air and Pro models that Apple released earlier in March, added multi-core capabilities, and a few bug fixes.

Beautiful HTML5 animations are a breeze with Tumult’s $50 Hype 3 (Mac App Store Link), which lets you design and develop full-blown interactive content using a simple and intuitive interface.

The app offers support for multi-track objects, spline-based paths, and all kinds of effects. Its output can be easily imported into existing websites, and will automatically play nicely with desktop formats and mobile devices.

You’ll never look at the sky the same way once you have your hands on Cédric Foellmi’s $30 iObserve.

The app tracks everything there is to know about the world above our world, and brings information about celestial bodies and phenomenons to your fingertips—perfect to use during your next spring camping trip.

Play along with Technimo’s $20 iReal Pro (Mac App Store Link), and find out exactly how your favorite songs are structured.

The app pairs a song with its chord progressions in real time, and follows along as its harmony develops to better understand how you can emulate your most cherished artists—or maybe even improve on their technique. As a bonus, hundreds of fan-made tablatures are available for import—free of charge—from Technimo’s forums.

iSkysoft Studio’s $35 iMedia Converter Deluxe (Mac App Store Link) may well be the answer to all your video conversion woes.

The app offers high-performance transcoding between many popular formats (and some formats that are more obscure), with support for your Mac’s hardware encoding capabilities. For added convenience, it can fetch metadata from a variety of sources and then export your files to a variety of sources, like a DVD or iTunes.

Designing everything from your next party invitation to a brochure for your new business just got a lot easier, thaks to Chronos’s $35 PrintLife 2 (Mac App Store Link).

The app comes loaded with tons of design features, clipart, and effects that should make it easier to produce high-quality content at home—including complicated, multi-part projects.

If you’ve ever envied Windows’ window-arranging capabilities, TaxSmart Technologies’s $7 Split Screen (Mac App Store Link) is designed to finally put your mind at easy.

The app places all of your open windows side-by-side, where they will easily fit the size of your screen without the need to manually fiddle with their frames.