The Week in Mac Apps: Map your thoughts with SimpleMind

In this week’s roundup of new software for your Mac, we bring you apps that help you build websites for all occasions, help you keep things organized, and keep you busy during your downtime.

Love crosswords? Time to give Red Sweater’s $10 Black Ink ( Mac App Store Link) a try.

The app displays puzzles in the Across Lite format, which are available from a variety of sources like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. It also provides you with a handy system for solving these puzzles, either at your pace or in a race against the clock.

JixiPix Software’s $8 Chalkspiration ( Mac App Store Link) brings the beauty of blackboard drawings to your Mac.

Thanks to a bit of programming magic, the app turns your pictures into great-looking chalk drawings, and allows you to tack on your own designs in the form of artwork and text, all with a realistic look that rivals the real thing—minus all the messy dust!

Ah, the wonders of Unicode. Without it, there would be no accents, we couldn’t easily share text in a variety of alphabets, and, of course, we’d have to live in a world that knows no emoji (the horror!). Alas, all this power comes with its fair share of complexity, which makes hunting for the right symbols very hard at times.

With Stephen Oliver’s $2 Codepoints ( Mac App Store Link), however, you can easily make sense of the, uh, alphabet soup of characters that your Mac can produce. Simply type in the name of a glyph, and the app will find it for you, copy it into your pasteboard, and instantly make it available for use in all your apps.

Ready to write the next great American novel? Developer Christian Zweghuis-Zierleyn’s $30 Eboocz wants to help.

The app provides you with a distraction-free environment in which to write your books, and then makes publishing them to the open and widely supported ePub format a breeze, complete with the ability to add cover images, metadata, and front and back matter.

Cocoa App’s Lockdown ( Mac App Store Link) brings two-factor authentication right to your Mac.

You can use this handy app to connect and log on to any services that are compatible with standards like Google Authenticator or 1Password’s own token generator. As an added bonus, it even syncs to its iOS counterpart for easy auth anywhere you go.

Get your thoughts on paper with Vortimac’s $8 Memoir ( Mac App Store Link).

The app allows you to build your very own diary, complete with entries that can contain text, images, and other media, and that can be organized hierarchically according to your own preferences. If you feel like sharing, Memoir supports a variety of document formats—and, if you don’t, it provides military-grade encryption that keeps your thoughts secret.

Sharing important details just got a lot easier, thanks to Aidaluu’s $10 Orion Markup ( Mac App Store Link).

The app lets you open an image (including, of course, screenshots taken from your own Mac), and add all sorts of annotations in the form of text, graphical elements, highlights, callouts, and more. And, when you’re ready, Orion Markup’s powerful sharing features mean that sending your work to friends and colleagues is just a click (or two) away.

Need a website? Ambiera’s $40 RocketCake ( Mac App Store Link) makes building it easy and convenient.

The app offers a WYSIWYG environment in which you can lay out your text and media images using responsive techniques that automatically make everything flow properly on both desktop and mobile devices. The fruits of your work can then be exported either as plain HTML files, or as PHP and ASP scripts.

No need to lose your head over getting things organized! With ModelMaker Tools’ $30 SimpleMind ( Mac App Store Link), planning your next move is as easy as drawing a chart.

The app helps you create mind-mapping diagrams using a simple free-flowing interface that supports text, graphical elements, multimedia, links, and more. When you’re done, you can share your work with friends and colleagues using one of several methods—including cloud providers like Dropbox.