The Week in Mac Apps: Prevent iMovie editing disasters with Backups

This week’s roundup includes apps that will help you stay organized, keep your computer safe, and give you a heads-up on your taxes.

There’s little worse than spending several hours editing your favorite videos on iMovie only to find out your files have been corrupted. NP Associates’s $10 Backups for iMovie ( Mac App Store Link) solves this problem by automatically generating backups of your work in progress as often as every two minutes.

The app creates labeled snapshots that give you a way to recover to a precise point in time, and keeps extensive logs all of your backup history, so that you can easily delete old files when you no longer need them.

Based on the Eisenhower method for organizing tasks, New Technologies’s $5 Eisenhower Planner keeps you organized by grouping your tasks according to their importance and urgency.

The app includes a handy calendar with four sections for each priority level—urgent, important, secondary, unnecessary—and allows you to set notification reminders for important events or dates.

Dripgrind Oy’s $30 Mindly ( Mac App Store Link) lets you brainstorm and collect ideas in a visual clipboard.

The app allows you to organize your entries in a variety of ways; tag them with different colors for quick reference; and attach notes, images, and icons to their contents. You can also generate PDF, text, or image files to share with friends and colleagues, and synchonize your mindmaps over all your devices with the companion iOS app.

Mizage’s $2 Padlock ( Mac App Store Link) is great for those times when you need to leave your computer unattended. It lets you quickly lock your Mac using a keyboard shortcut that immediately starts your screen saver or turns off your screen.

The app also performs periodic security audits on your Mac, and it includes a handy dashboard that calls attention to potential problems and helps you address them.

Marcelo Leite’s $5 Should I Sleep Pro ( Mac App Store Link) prevents your screen from dimming while you’re watching a movie or giving a presentation.

The app uses a number of sensor functions, such as face detection and camera motion, to automatically prevent your screen from sleeping when in use. You can, of course, also manually instruct it to stick to a specific schedule and keep the lights on for a fixed amount of time.

Tax season is coming up, and Vincent J Sansevero Jr’s $2 Tax Check helps you to stay on top of your return by providing estimates of your payables—or, hopefully, your refund!

To address all your planning needs, the app lets you evaluate your filing options and itemized deductions using calculation tables that have been updated for the 2015 fiscal year.

Elite Bits’s $20 TCleaner Pro ( Mac App Store Link) removes unwanted formatting from the text stored in your pasteboard so that you can more easily cut and paste it between apps.

The app allows you to create personalized conversion profiles based on specific editing needs, and you can quickly access it through its menu bar icon at any time.

If you are wondering why it’s taking longer than usual to get through your workday, Solis Lab Solution’s Timenerd can help you by automatically tracking the time you spend using each of your Mac apps.

The app’s organization tools let you group apps in arbitrary categories, and quickly keep usage stats at your fingertips for ongoing reference.

Developer Brett Walker’s $15 Versatil Markdown ( Mac App Store Link) streamlines your note-taking process and technical writing by integrating the popular Markdown syntax into a handy text-editing tool.

The app includes 1Password integration, allowing you to create links to your stored websites. The smart drag-and-drop feature lets you insert an image from the Web, while document aliasing makes it easier to centralize your information. You can also choose different editor themes and a dark appearance mode if you prefer working in low-light conditions.