Awareness Keeps You Mindful of Your Surroundings, Even While Listening to Music [Music]

iOS: Awareness funnels in outside noise over a certain threshold to your headphones, while you listen to music on your iPhone.

Awareness is perfect for joggers that want to stay alert to oncoming traffic, people waiting in a doctor's office that want to hear their name called, or any other situation in which your music might drown out your surroundings. Just set the mic and volume threshold in the app, hit the power button, and you're good to go. It will funnel in any outside noise that reaches that level, so you can hear it while you listen. You can also set it to just vibrate if you so choose. It's a very, very cool idea, and worked surprisingly well in our tests. It's usually a hefty $8, but you can grab it today for free, so even if you're a tiny bit curious, get it while you can!

Awareness is a free download for iOS only.

Favs Keeps Track of Everything You Like, Wherever You Like It [Mac Downloads]

OS X: If you participate in social media, chances are you like or favorite a few things as you travel the internet. When you start marking your preferences on different sites it can be hard to keep track of them all. Favs is a simple app that aggregates all your favorites across many sites so you can view them from one convenient interface.

You can think of Favs kind of like a version of Instapaper that pulls content from your social media accounts rather than asks you to push content to its own service. It offers the advantage of allowing you to save things you want to remember or look at later without really changing how you do that. You're already liking numerous articles, videos, songs, and other things, so Favs just helps you find them more easily.

To set it up you just add whatever social media accounts you want to add and it'll load your favorites in a few seconds. It supports a lot of different services, such as Delicious, Facebook, Vimeo, Twitter, and even Instapaper itself. You can view each account individually or see everything in a unified inbox-like view. What would be really nice is if you could create smart lists containing groups of accounts so you could view all your video favorites, article favorites, or music favorites (for example). Without that feature it's still a pretty cool app. Although a bit more expensive than we'd like to see ($5), Favs is a great way to keep track of everything you discover and like online.