The Week in Mac Apps: Fantastical 2, HoudahSpot 4, GoodTask 2, and more

In this week’s roundup of new Mac apps, you’ll find a brand new version of Fantastical, a program for plastering your desktop with beautiful photography, and even a way to keep your secrets secure in plain sight.

Rob Heague’s Covered scours the iTunes store for high-quality cover art for you to use within your own media library.

The app performs simple text-based searches, and can find everything from album covers to movie posters up to 2400-by-2400 pixels wide—making sure your media displays beautifully in iTunes and your Apple TV.

Flexibits’s popular Fantastical ( Mac App Store Link) has been updated with tons of additions and improvements—and liberates its functionality from the menu bar into its own standalone window.

Among the changes to the $40 app, you’ll find a complete Yosemite-friendly redesign that features all sorts of extension integration, calendar sets, map support, multiple themes, intelligent timezones, and much more.

Haha Interactive’s $15 GoodTask helps you keep track of all your activities, to-do items, and reminders.

The app supports location-based actions, recurring tasks, natural-language based data input, and a host of other great features that will help make getting your life organized a much easier job.

In the developer’s own words, Xeniacode’s $5 Highbrow ( Mac App Store Link) liberates your photos from slavery to window frames.

The app gives you a way to browse your pictures using a full-frame interface that does away with borders and frames to give every photo the room it deserves.

Houdah Software’s $29 HoudahSpot may well be the answer to a question all computer users find themselves asking from time to time: “Where did I put that file?”

The app goes beyond Spotlight’s capabilities to find files in every nook and cranny of your hard drive by name, content, author, pixel count, and all kinds of other metadata. You can make your searches as complex as they need to be, and view your results with a convenient and easy-to-use interface that keeps all the important details at your fingertips.

Like Stickies? Then you’ll love Activity’s Memo ( Mac App Store Link), which brings sticky notes to your desktop—with a twist.

In addition to allowing you to type all kinds of text and plaster it over your desktop, the app supports encryption and password protection, making it easier to keep your, uh, sticky data away from sticky eyes.

Aged & Distilled’s $40 Napkin – Image Annotation and Markup ( Mac App Store Link) makes quick work of adding annotations to images and screenshots.

The app is designed for all kinds of use cases, from tutorials to bug reports, and features many tools that make highlighting certain features of an image easy and worry free, allowing you to focus on communicating better with your audience.

If you find yourself at the end of the month staring at an unexpectedly large Internet bill, you should take a look at Digitician’s $10 PeakHour ( Mac App Store Link), which tracks all your network usage in real time.

The app also helps you figure out how to optimize your wireless access points, make sure your ISP is giving you the speeds you’re paying for, and monitor every device that sits on your network for unusual activity.

If you’ve ever studied music, you’re probably familiar with that particular form of torture called “practicing scales.” Luckily, RoGame Software’s $15 ScaleMaster ( Mac App Store Link) is here to make the process of understanding and learning all kinds of different scales easier.

The app comes with a full complement of more than 200 different musical sequences, each with illustrative schematics and playable samples for banjo, piano, guitar, bass, and mandolin.