The Week in Mac Apps: Use your MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar to switch between apps with Rocket

This week’s roundup of new Mac apps includes Rocket, a Touch Bar app that displays icons of your most-used apps. Plus, apps for staying organized, transferring your photos, keeping you focused on the tasks ahead, and much more. Read on!

If you’re tired of dealing with memory cards, Cascable can help ease the pain by offering a convenient tool to move your photos from your camera to your Mac via Wi-Fi.

This $8 app connects to any Wi-Fi enabled camera and lets you seamlessly copy the contents of its memory to a destination of your choice on your Mac. It also generates high-resolution previews of your photos to make picking the right ones easier. Cascable is currently available as a free beta, with a full release expected by the end of the year.

Xwavesoft’s $2 Chrono Plus ( Mac App Store Link) helps you manage your busy schedule with a handy set of features designed to keep track of your activities.

With Chrono Plus, you can quickly add and edit new tasks and record all the hours you put into them to generate invoices for your customers, which you can then email to them in PDF format. The app also comes with a mobile companion app for iPhone and iPad, and keeps your data synchronized across all your devices using iCloud.

Laser Focused’s $20 Focus ( Mac App Store Link) contributes to your productivity with a handy set of timers designed to help you manage your time efficiently.

After you launch the app, you are guided through a simple set-up process that lets you identify your goals and create a list of tasks to complete. Focus then monitors all your work and creates handy statistics that you can consult whenever you want to figure out how you use your time. iCloud and Handoff integration ensure that you can start activities on your Mac and continue tracking them on your iPhone and iPad as well.

Apple’s $50 Motion ( Mac App Store Link) is built for professionals who need advanced effects for their next video project.

Motion supports both 2D and 3D work, and lets you manipulate all kinds of different visual parameters, like perspective, shadows, focus, and even reflections. The app’s output can be imported into Final Cut Pro for additional editing tweaks.

Photolemur helps turns your everyday photos into beautiful pictures with a little AI help.

This $29 app analyzes the important elements of a photo by running it through a series of sophisticated algorithms that can automatically adjust colors and other parameters to enhance the original version. Photolemur is designed to work with batches of images, and can automatically enhance a large photo library with just a few clicks.

Juuso Salonen’s $9 Radio Silence protects your privacy by monitoring your outgoing network connections for untoward activity.

Radio Silence automatically sets up a firewall that runs in the background and generates a handy list of applications that are trying to access the Internet, giving you the chance of blocking any suspicious connection and freeing up valuable bandwidth and memory for everything else.

Julian Thayn’s Rocket integrates with the new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar to make launching your favorite apps easier.

Currently available as a public beta, Rocket keeps a running list of recently used applications right inside the Touch Bar, where you can then launch them with a quick tap.

If your hard disk is starting to burst at the seams with pictures, Realmac’s $8 Squash 2 helps you save precious space by compressing your pictures without compromising their quality.

Using the app is as simple as dragging your photos to its window, where all the magic happens without the need to fiddle with any settings.

Tropical Software’s $40 TopXNotes ( Mac App Store Link) organizes all your notes into a library that’s optimized to help you find all your important information with ease and speed.

The app offers a simple interface for typing in your notes, where it then categorizes them according to arbitrary rules, and can even display a “panorama view” of your library for a bird’s-eye view of your work. TopXNotes can back up its data to iCloud, and then sync all your notes across multiple devices.