With iWeb already on your Mac, you might not bother to explore alternative web-design applications. But since it didn’t get updated for iLife ’11, now might be the perfect time to shop around for something new—especially if you’ve outgrown iWeb’s simplistic feature set. Adobe’s popular Dreamweaver is a huge, complex, and expensive piece of software that’s out of reach for casual designers. Thankfully, RapidWeaver just got a brand-new update, and it’s both simpler and cheaper than Dreamweaver.

Perhaps it’s only us old folks who remember a time when taking screenshots involved a kludgey and arcane process requiring multiple applications. It’s much easier these days to save an image of what’s on your display, but even OS X’s built-in tools leave room for improvement. Voila from Smith Micro is a one-stop solution for grabbing everything from simple screens to video, and it has some handy features that elevate it far beyond your Mac’s stock capture tools.

In a world studded with Photoshop-style image editors and Painter-like natural-media tools, it’s really tough to find a new kind of artistic software that brings something truly unique and innovative to the table. But the little-known Studio Artist 4 totally pulls it off, delivering a one-of-a-kind creative application that can craft visuals like nothing else—if you’re prepared to spend some time mastering its intricacies.