The Week in Mac Apps: From Mars, with love

This week’s roundup of new Mac apps brings you a way to brighten up your living space, a program that makes your desktop bloom, and another one that makes sure you will never, ever lose another piece of data again—well, probably.

Ah, summer—the perfect time for home owners to start looking around for a renovation project that will keep us busy.

Planner 5D’s $10 Kitchen Design 5D can help you plan and design your dream kitchen, complete with appliances, furniture, and the ability to create a 3D rendering to make sure that you will get the results you want.

Developer Ian Page has updated his venerable Mactracker ( Mac App Store Link) app to a new version that includes info on Apple’s latest hardware.

Mactracker contains a highly-detailed database of every device ever made by Apple, all the way back to the original Apple I that launched in 1976. Alongside each model, you get the launch price, hardware specs, a handy history, and the ability to add your own comments.

Is there anything more awe-inspiring than watching a flower bloom? Well, perhaps, but you won’t get it on your desktop the way Jetson Creative’s $5 Magic Flowers ( Mac App Store Link) can.

The app creates screen savers and wallpaper out of time-lapse videos of a variety of flowers as they open up over several minutes in all their natural glory. With 42 different species to choose from, it’s likely that your Mac will bloom more often than your real backyard (and, probably, with fewer trips to your local gardening store).

Even if you’re not planning a visit to the Red Planet, developer Julian James’s $6 Mars Atlas ( Mac App Store Link) is a great way to acquaint yourself with the features of our otherworldly neighbor.

The app features high-resolution imagery, comes with more than 1600 named features, and can even simulate a specific time of the year or day on request.

Intermorphic’s $40 Noatikl Generative Music Composer ( Mac App Store Link) has a funny-sounding name, but it’s dead serious about creating music using a new interactive paradigm.

The app can generate music over 16 MIDI channels using a combination of instruments and effects that can be scripted to create new melodies and harmonies without the need for note-by-note input.

If we had a dime for every time we mistakenly cut something out of a document and then overwrote our pasteboards, we’d have more than enough money to afford Wirelessheads’s $3 Paste, which would have solved this problem for us a long time ago.

The app keeps a running history of every last scrap of text, images, sounds, links, and just about anything you can cut-and-paste on any of your Mac’s programs, and allows you to quickly search through it. When you’ve found what you’re looking for, Paste makes quick work of pasting it back, sending it to a friend or colleagues, or saving it to disk.

Dubbed “the Dock that doesn’t get in your way,” developer Daniel Schroth’s $5 Ring Menu places your favorite apps right at your fingertips.

When called upon with a trackpad gesture or global keyboard shortcut, the app presents a circular menu right on top of your screen, and allows you to quickly launch one of several programs that you can configure in the settings.

If the PDF files you exchange with your colleagues are starting to suffer from comment fatigue, it might be time to take a look at Tim and Gerry’s TagNotate.

The app allows you to tag your comments in such a way that lets you easily organize them later—you can pick as many tags as you like, and even share tags across multiple files or revisions of the same file.

Feeling grey? Make the most of it with Macphun’s $13 Tonality ( Mac App Store Link), which takes your pictures and turns them into monochromatic masterpieces.

The app handles a wide range of photo formats, can deal with HDR sources, and comes loaded with filters and special effects that make creating professional results easy and quick.