The Week in Mac Apps: Meet Alternote, a distraction-free Evernote client

In this week’s roundup of Mac apps, you’ll find apps for taking notes and getting your thoughts organized, even when you’re on the go. Plus, we’re bringing you great tools for managing your photos, drawing your next org chart, and translating foreign languages.

Oleksandr Rakovets’s $5 Alternote ( Mac App Store Link) is an Evernote client that offers a unique distraction-free experience for taking notes.

The app focuses on providing an excellent user experience, with support for distraction-free writing, selective sync, bare-bones “what you see is what you get” editing, and excellent search capabilities.

Speaking of taking notes, Spacestation6’s Dunno ( Mac App Store Link) helps you jot down quick thoughts or pieces of text without switching windows or stepping away from what you’re currently working on.

In addition to your notes, it saves all sorts of metadata, such as location, tags, and keywords, that you can later use to recall the context in which your thoughts were formed.

Is the mountain of photos from your latest vacation starting to get overwhelming? GameTogether’s $1 Batch Editor can help you get them organized.

The app specializes in dealing with huge batches of photos at once. You can rename them, change their size, and even apply a color-correction filter—all with an easy-to-manage visual workflow that can be tweaked to your liking.

Alexey Artemev’s $6 Bubble Translate ( Mac App Store Link) is a language translation tool with an interface that is both simple to use and engaging.

Just select text to translate anywhere within a window and hit a designated keyboard shortcut of your choice, and the app delivers instant translation between 90 different languages. Its looks can be customized to a font and color scheme of your choosing.

Koole Sache’s $7 ColorSnapper 2 ( Mac App Store Link) helps you precisely match colors used in any image, website, or document, storing these colors for you to use later within a design app.

The app offers a special Retina-compatible magnifying tool that can be used for pixel-precision analysis of your screen. It also keeps your favorite colors in a special favorite window, and is compatible with both development tools and design software like Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator.

Kitestack Software’s $8 Flashcard Hero ( Mac App Store Link) is the perfect tool for creating and managing your collection of flash cards.

The app supports a variety of configurations designed for common tasks like studying or preparing for a presentation. It can also track your progress, offer you visual cues and quizzes, and can export your data as a PDF.

Ohanaware’s Magic ( Mac App Store Link) adds more filtering options for your photos.

The app—which is compatible with Apple’s new Photos app—comes with 16 built-in filters, offers fine-grained control over its functionality, and can even be used to crop and resize your files.

Helftone’s $50 Monodraw brings you all the way back to the golden age of computing by helping you create images and diagrams using ASCII art.

The app offers a “WYSIWYG” environment that marries modern concepts like layers and hierarchical structures to a classic drawing technique, and can be used for both fun and serious applications thanks to a variety of complex features—like the ability to automatically manage and connect shapes, for example.

Developer Todd Ditchendorf’s $10 Shapes 4 is a vector graphics program. It boasts of a simple and intuitive interface that makes creating everything from diagrams to org charts quick and easy.

The app supports many popular types of vector objects and can adapt to a variety of different use cases designed with both technical and business users in mind.