What's up, dock?

Happy Monday and welcome back to the Leaderboard. In today's edition, we're chatting about an app that generates podcasts on the fly, an AI tool that could eliminate online language barriers, and a product that injects some fun into your Mac dock. Let's dive in.

Ellipsis News: Custom daily news podcasts on any topic.

Ellipsis News generates custom daily news podcasts based on the topics you are interested in. It’s pretty simple to set up. Choose the topics you’re interested in, pick a narrator voice and you’ll get a podcast delivered to you everyday. It’s like a productivity hack for me since I can start work while feeding my news addiction. Although I wonder how long before I eventually just succumb to Apple News once again.

EasyDict: Translate any text or image across multiple LLMs.

EasyDict is a MacOS app that takes anything on your screen (text, image, or video) and gives you its translation across multiple LLMs. The UI is incredibly clean and the app comes with a bunch of intuitive shortcuts — screenshot-to-translate, highlight-to-translate, copy OCR to clipboard — that make it handy even for those who don’t often need translation. The only hitch I’ve found so far is some of the displayed translation options (like GPT 4o, Gemini and Baidu Translate) default to error messages about missing API keys. But translations from DeepL, Google Translate and Youdao work out of the box, so this isn’t really a barrier to functionality.

Dockfix 3.0: Customize your Mac dock to your heart's content.

M1, 2, 3... 4? While the hardware upgrades are impressive, it feels like the focus on performance has come at the expense of what once made Macs feel magical—its software and overall experience. It's no surprise we're seeing apps like Dockfix, NotchNook, and Ball emerge to make the Mac feel more... human. Dockfix, the latest of these, does something surprisingly simple—allowing you to fully customize your dock, something you'd think Apple would have done by now. This personalization goes a long way in making your device feel more like your own and brings some of that magic back to the Mac. I suspect this is just the beginning, and we'll likely see more MacOS customization tools taking advantage of the machine's power soon.