Mac: Ever wished your Dock had more levels? Station is a replacement Dock that allows you to create groupings that can then be stacked up into multiple levels.

Mac: There are plenty of Pomodoro timers to choose from but I like apps that disappear when you don't need them -- and are a single click away when you do. With that in mind, Pomodoro Time lets you time your tasks and manage your to-do list right in your menu bar.

Mac: There's a lot you can do to improve gaming performance on the Mac, but a lot of it starts with benchmarking your current performance. Count It is a framerate counter that can help you figure out what's dragging your performance down, and what tweaks boost it.

Mac: Hemingboard began as an iOS keyboard that works like an amped-up thesaurus, not only suggesting synonyms to whatever you're typing, but also rhymes and similar-sounding words that you can use as puns. Now they have brought their wordplay weaponry to your desktop.

Mac: If you frequently visit Wikipedia with your questions and want the encyclopedic resource to be one click away, Qwiki for Mac brings the site to your menu bar without ever having to launch your browser.

OS X: Browsing Instagram on the web works well enough, but it's a fairly minimal experience and you can't post photos through your browser. Now with the newly updated desktop Instagram client Flume 2.0, you can.

Mac: Airmail, one of our favourite email apps on Mac, just got a slew of new features today, including smart folders to more easily sort your mail, VIP contacts and notifications and 'send later' email queuing.

It's been a while since we've heard from some of our favourite to-do apps, Wunderlist and Any.Do, which means it's a perfect time for a fresh look at both apps. Both are still some of the best, cross-platform, free to-do managers available, but let's see how far they have come.

Mac/Linux: CloudBerry Lab is giving away free licenses to its premium backup client, which normally costs $US29.99 ($39). It offers encryption, compression and unlimited backups to cloud storage providers such as Amazon S3, Google Nearline, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace.

Mac: Write!, a good-looking writing tool (previously Windows-only), now has a Mac version that brings all of its best features over, including auto-saving, cloud-synced documents, offline editing, day and night editing themes and unlimited undo.

iOS/Android/Mac/Windows: iDisplay, a utility that turns your tablet into a fully-functional second screen for your computer, just updated with a big speed boost, much lower latency over Wi-Fi, and support for Android tablets and OS X El Capitan.

OS X: HazeOver makes it easy to focus on the task at hand, even if you have multiple windows open on your Mac. All it does is dim background windows and your desktop, while keeping the front, active window bright on top of all of them. When you switch so does the lighting, helping you to stay focused without distractions.