Some cool, new stuff for Mac users

I try to spend a couple of hours each week expanding my horizons by looking for new, useful products and services for my Mac and other Apple devices. Some weeks are better than others, and last week I found a pair of products I consider helpful, unique and reasonably priced.

The first one is called Grid, and it’s a web-based service to turn Excel or Google sheets documents into interactive web documents. Connect a saved spreadsheet to Grid with a couple of clicks, and you can add interactive elements so viewers can change values and observe the results in realtime.

Numerous display elements are available, such as bar, column, line charts, scatter plots, tables and formula output. And there are even more interactive elements, such as buttons, checkboxes, sliders, input fields, dropdown menus, and others.

One last thing: Grid warns that editing is fully supported only in Google Chrome and may be quirky in other browsers.

Grid is free to use (with a watermark) or $29 per month (with no watermark and custom branding) at grid.is.

The second nifty product is called Camo, and it resolves a pet peeve I’ve had with Apple’s MacBook line since time immemorial. The peeve is MacBook models come with a lousy 720p FaceTime camera that’s inferior to any recent iPhone’s back camera. Before Camo, if you wanted to look decent while using your MacBook for FaceTime or Zoom chats, you bought a third-party webcam.

Camo lets you use the camera on your iDevice running iOS 12 or later instead of the lousy builtin camera.

The free version provides a subset of camera options. Or, upgrade to Camo Pro ($4.99 per month) and choose the camera’s mode (Normal or Portrait), lens (wide, ultrawide, telephoto or selfie) and resolution and ability to adjust the exposure, white balance, brightness, hue, saturation and all the rest.