College professors hate this trick

Happy Friday Eve! In today's Leaderboard we have: a worthwhile competitor to take the Apple Notes crown, a tool that might make your college professor cry, and finally an app for all you list lovers. Let's dive in.

Raycast Notes: A fast, light, and frictionless note-taking app. 

Raycast Notes might finally replace Apple Notes for me and it’s not because it does anything mind-blowing — in fact it’s because it takes the simplicity of Apple Notes and improves it. You can bring it up with the stroke of a key and from there it just floats while you work. You can track todos, save meeting notes, capture ideas, and quickly search between them. Most importantly for me, it’s fully keyboard accessible and markdown enabled. It hits the sweet spot of note-taking apps by not going too far outside the basic. Note-taking is basic, keep it that way but just make it a little more enjoyable. My only feature request would be syncing across mobile. 

PaperGen: Generates well-structured essays with real citations in one click.

PaperGen stands out from the sea of AI essay generators with two features: its context-aware citations and its “humanize” button, which apparently makes AI-generated prose undetectable to monitors. After playing around with it for a few minutes, I got it to generate a fairly reasonable (maybe C+, on the conventional American grading scale) essay about the effects of excessive news consumption on mental health. The prose was uninspired, but the citations were all accurate and relevant. So, I’d treat this tool as a helpful research assistant, not a surrogate. 

Listy: Save and track everything you love in one app.

Listy feels like the first real contender to tackle my ever-growing list chaos. My Apple Notes are bursting at the seams with things I want to watch, read, or try, but Listy steps up with organization and a dash of elegance. It pulls info from Goodreads, TMDB, and Maps, so every book, movie, and restaurant in my lists has a link and image to jog my memory (trust me, some things sit there for ages). I signed up for Listy right when I found it this year, but I’m stuck until there’s a simple way to import my existing lists—otherwise, I’d have to track down every item manually. Also, imagine if Listy made it easy to share lists across platforms! It could be more than just a personal organizer; it could help me swap recommendations with friends and family in a way that's actually fun and easy.