The Week in Mac Apps: Snow Daze makes your summer photos look like Christmas in July

In this week’s roundup of new Mac apps, you’ll find a great way to make sure your bills are never late, tools that help your digital design efforts, and an app that turns summer into winter at the click of your mouse.

If you have trouble staying on top of your tasks, Happy Coding’s Activity Timer ( Mac App Store Link) can help you better track what you do throughout your day.

The app lets you create and run a timer for each of your activities, using either a pre-set amount of time or a custom interval. You can then track and log your work—and easily contain each task so that it doesn’t take up your entire day.

If keeping on top of your due dates isn’t your forte, LittleFin’s $15 Chronicle – Bill Management ( Mac App Store Link) can help you avoid those hated late fees.

The app allows you to record each one of your bills and recurring payments, and advises you when something is due by placing a reminder on your calendar and sending you notifications. You can even make your payments directly from inside Chronicle using its integrated browser.

Love the color scheme of a photo you took? With 3bitlab’s Color Palette from Image, you can extract all its colors into a palette that you can reuse for your own designs.

This free app works on a variety of files types, and it can extract color information from a user-defined area of each photo. The resulting palettes are saved in a standard Adobe format that can be used both on a Mac and on a PC.

Got lots of files? Corduroy Code’s $30 Fileloupe ( Mac App Store Link) helps you rummage through them in a jiffy.

The app allows you to view, sort, filter, and flag a list of documents or images and quickly review them all using a lightning-fast interface designed for speed and efficiency. Depending on the type of each file, you can also review its metadata, play it back, or read through it.

If you work with PDF files a lot, developer Jonas Ribe’s $30 Highlights ( Mac App Store Link) can help you manage your annotations better.

The app gives you a powerful set of annotation tools and allows you to select all sorts of information from inside your documents. You can then export everything to one of several compatible software, including popular reference managers like Papers and Bookends, and a variety of cloud-connected products like Evernote and DEVONthink.

Developer Frank Piper’s Mapped helps you create collections of geotagged items and display them on a map.

You can use the app to keep all kinds of information, including tracking various assets, keeping a running list of dwellings you visit while house hunting, and even making note of where all your appointments are.

AppYogi Software’s $1 News Headlines ( Mac App Store Link) brings the most important news of the day directly to your desktop.

The app has a handy menu bar icon—click it to check out the top headlines from your personalized Google News account in a pop-up window. It’s also compatible with the Today menu, and supports multiple news categories.

If you work in digital design, PixelIngene’s $10 QuickLens ( Mac App Store Link) is a product built just for you.

The app provides a set of tools designed to make working with pixels easier, from a loupe that magnifies the contents of your screen, to rulers and tapes that make measuring things easier, various framing implements, and much more.

JixiPix Software’s $5 Snow Daze ( Mac App Store Link) brings a little Christmas cheer to your pictures… even if you took them in the middle of summer.

The app allows you to add a “snowfall” effect to existing photos, altering both their color profile and contents to match the looks of a snowy day—perfect for postcards, invitations… or even a joke or two.