This week’s roundup of new Mac apps includes an update from Spark, Readdle’s awesome email client. Plus, Fantastical just got a bit more… fantastical, and more apps continue to get Touch Bar support. Read on!
Turn even the dullest photo into a great shot with It’s About Time Products’s $20 Artistry, a great utility that comes with a vast selection of adjustments and filters.
The app is compatible with the new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar, and lets you selectively apply multiple tweaks to your pictures so that you can easily fine tune the look of smaller areas with precision. Once ready, Artistry can export your work in a variety of formats, and help you share it with friends and family via email and social media.
If you struggle with paying bills on time, help is on the way—LittleFin’s $15 Chronicle ( Mac App Store Link) and its advanced tools were designed to make quick work of managing all your expenses.
The app automatically keeps track of every bill you input into it, promptly informing you of due dates using notifications and a Notification Center widget. You can also use the integrated browser to pay outstanding invoices, and check your payment history at any time.
Tapity’s $4 Drop ( Mac App Store Link) is a color picker, making quick work of capturing inspiration with its handy color selection tools.
The app lets you create or grab colors from pictures and windows, and organize them in swatch sets. Drop supports multiple color formats, is compatible with the new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar, and lets you export your swatches to programs like Adobe’s Photoshop.
A new update is out for Flexibits’s $40 Fantastical 2 ( Mac App Store Link), with support for the new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar and (finally, we might add) the option to automatically add invitees to an event.
Fantastical 2 lets you create events using plain-language expressions like “lunch with John tomorrow at 9,” and the app will detect names, locations, and dates with its advanced algorithm and automatically create a calendar entry. With its companion apps for iPad and iPhone, Fantastical 2 always keeps you up-to-date no matter where you are, as it fully integrates with popular cloud services like iCloud and Google Drive.
Mono’s Keynote Extractor makes sharing your Keynote slides online super easy—all you need to do is drag your slide deck to the app’s window, and Keynote Extractor automatically converts text and images to HTML, preserving their original layout and formatting. You can then upload it to any website, or share it with colleagues, students, or event attendees.
Synium Software’s $30 MacFamilyTree 8 ( Mac App Store Link) sports a revamped interface where you can collect and organize your family history.
The app includes an extensive archive of research materials to help you find your ancestors, supports realtime collaboration with other users, and is capable of displaying family trees in a variety of formats.
Betamagic’s $10 News Explorer ( Mac App Store Link) brings the latest news from your RSS feeds right to your desktop.
The app offers a quick overview of the newest feed items, with the option of downloading full articles and saving them to your hard drive for later reading. News Explorer’s main window sports a fully-customizable layout, and synchronizes all your activities across your devices via iCloud.
Zevrix’s $40 PDF Checkpoint helps you check PDF files to make sure everything is in order before you export and convert them for production and printing.
The app works by systematically examining each element of your documents, advising you when it uncovers errors like missing fonts, wrong colors, and incorrect metadata. PDF Checkpoint also allows you to split PDFs into single pages, and export them to one of several image formats for sharing.
If your day starts with an inbox full of messages, Readdle’s Spark ( Mac App Store Link) lets you tame your email beast with intelligent tools designed to sort and filter your mail for maximum efficiency.
Spark automatically groups messages according to several criteria, separating important emails from newsletters and spam to help reduce clutter. You can “snooze” messages that you can’t answer right away for a quick reminder later in the day, and even use canned replies to quickly dispose of communications that don’t require a full response. Spark integrates with DropBox, iCloud Drive, and Evernote, and comes with a companion app for iPad and iPhone.
Author: Marco Tabini
Marco Tabini is based in Toronto, Canada, where he focuses on software development for mobile devices and for the Web.