The Week in Mac Apps: Let Tick Task create your daily schedule, so you don’t have to

In this week’s roundup of new Mac apps, we bring you tools that help you organize your desktop, keep your data safe, and safely manage and share all of your photos.

Did you save your work today? With Ohanaware’s  Backup To Go ( Mac App Store Link) you can keep your data safe—and take it everywhere you go even if your Mac can’t come with you.

This easy-to-use (and free!) app lets you synchronize files from your hard drive to external storage (like, say, a USB stick) as a handy way to save important information and make it mobile. A $4 in-app purchase unlocks additional features, like notifications and the ability to find and recover deleted files.

Tame window wilderness with Irradiated Software’s $7 Cinch ( Mac App Store Link).

This handy app helps you organize your desktop by automatically resizing and stacking your windows based on a set of simple gestures, making it easy to set things up exactly the way you want them.

If you have little ones roaming around, they’ll love Norbyte’s $8 HuePaint Pro ( Mac App Store Link).

This app brings a simple set of drawing tools to your Mac, and makes drawing easy and fun with dreamy brushes and a simple and intuitive user interface.

Aching for a change of venue? Leonspok’s Irvue ( Mac App Store Link) will take you—or, at least, your desktop—all kinds of places.

This free app brings thousands of beautiful backgrounds from all around the Internet directly to your desktop, and can be set to automatically rotate them on a time schedule for an ever-changing view of the world around you.

ThinkTime Creations’s $5 PhotoSketcher ( Mac App Store Link) automatically turns your photos into beautiful hand-drawn sketches—perfect for a unique gift and or for a great party trick.

The app works on any kind of photo without the need for special processing, and can produce output in a variety of styles and textures.

ThnkDev’s $5 QuickShot ( Mac App Store Link) lets you view, manage, and share your images directly from your Mac’s menu.

The app tracks images as they are added to your hard drive, filters them through a set of criteria of your choosing, and allows you to quickly find and share them with your friends and colleagues.

If you’re serious about your scholarly work, you should check out Jim McGowan’s $29 Reference Tracker ( Mac App Store Link).

The app helps you track all the references you need for your papers and articles, and automatically produces professional-quality reference lists and biography for your use.

NWD’s Snappy ( Mac App Store Link) makes grabbing and sharing screenshots as easy as pie.

The app sits quietly in the background until you call upon it, at which point it lets you grab a portion (or all) of your screen, annotate and filter it, and share it through email or text, with the option to encrypt it and even make it self-destruct after a preset number of views or period of time.

Everyday Tools’s $2 Tick Task helps you organize a hectic day by creating a structure around your tasks work routine.

With this app, you can plan your entire day, and break out individual to-dos into discrete chunks of time that incorporate breaks and “me time.” Tick Task tracks everything for you and even offers a handy set of statistics that show you where your time goes.