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Hello, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 132, your guide to the best is On the edge– things in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy football, and you can read past posts at Installer landing page.)
This week, I have been preparing for a month without doing anything for the World Cup. I have also been reading about Steven Spielberg and Clothes and and the Boeing 747Filled with computer nostalgia thanks The Virtual OS Museumlook who has won the Knicks game again and again, listening to new interesting things This was SportsCenter podcast is a beautiful past The Renner Files podcast, trying to declutter my ever-increasing inbox I am. It’s going… medium.
Also for those of you who want to watch a summer movie, a new way to watch old movies, a portable camera and mouse to watch, and more. Shall we do this? Let’s do this.
(As always, the best part of Installer and your thoughts and advice. Are you watching / reading / downloading / playing / listening / socializing with sunscreen this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone who would be interested Installergive it to them and tell them to do it register here.)
- A pool. I’m still convinced that “take more pictures and let the AI do the math” is very nice view using computers. Pool, which is finally out of beta, is exactly that – a way to store and interact with everything you see on your screen. It starts by capturing and editing all your old photos, which have been blown up in the past.
- Disclosure Day. Spielberg makes a strange movie: always a good thing! The trailer for this one gave me goosebumps, but the reviews are really good. Even if the negatives are like, “It’s a lot of fun and it’s a weird Spielberg movie,” that’s what I’m looking for.
- Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. A TV show for generations of kids is finally on YouTube. The video is new, but it already has videos, full episodes, and previews. That’s my toddler’s YouTube feed sorted for the future.
- Logitech Mobi Fold. If you carry a portable mouse to work on the go, it’s there good luck This $80 is a raise. I am small, it has a few useful options, and I think I like that it’s a touchpad instead of a scroll wheel? I really want to leave this one in my iPad collection.
- Claude Fable 5. Leaving aside my many feelings about the fact that Anthropic sent a variation of the model that two months ago they called too dangerous to release, I have been very impressed with Fable’s strength and depth so far. It’s a powerful vibe-coding tool. And apply now, as it goes up in price in nine days!
- Insta360 Luna Ultra. This is like the Rolls-Royce of gimbal cameras. Dual lenses, high resolution, super bright screen/remote control, and more. The price of $769 is too high for me, but I suspect it will be worth it for many developers.
- Incorruptible and Eric Ries. Another book by Ries, Introduction to Leanit’s one you can find in the office of any technology company. This newbie asks a very good and timely question: Is it possible to be successful without violating all your morals and values? Ries says yes, and boy do I hope he’s right.
- Bluesky group chat. It seems like Twitter’s style, it’s time for the feed. Which is good news. Bluesky’s genius for going above and beyond, and I really like the idea of creating places like this that are small but more than one-on-one chats. If you add me to the group, I promise to send a a few Unchanged memes every day.
- Boox Go 6 Gen II. This is a very similar Boox device, and the new version adds more features, has more color options, and comes with access to all your Android apps. I’d be all for this thing if it didn’t run a SIX-YEAR-OLD version of Android, but I’m still eager to show it off.
- NotebookLM. Google’s little search tool continues to impress me, and bump up to Gemini 3.5 both make the app smarter and give it a bunch of new ways to display more information. As a way to download and query multiple websites/documents/PDFs, NotebookLM is hard to beat.
The big story this week was WWDC, Apple’s annual conference. It’s where Apple announces all the most important software coming this year. This edition was about AI: the new Siri looks great so farlots of graphic design stuff that looks cool and creepy and badass, and Apple Intelligence stuff all over the place. I have a lot of testing to do, and the developers have a lot of tweaking to do, before we know how this will turn out.
But there is one thing that has already changed the way I use my phone: widgets. Especially, the beast, widgets for the entire home page Apple now supports it. Almost as soon as I started playing around with it, I did a redesign of my home screen, so I have the apps page and then what looks like big widgets. I like it, thought I’d share it:
Photo: David Pierce/The Verge
I have destroyed it forever trying to build or find a better way to see everything I’m doing – my calendar, my tasks, the weather, all that stuff – little by little. Something about these large widgets feels static in a way that I like. I will end up with 100 pages of them.
Hopefully the great widgets will please you as much as they did me, a few quick caveats. First, you don’t need to install beta developers on your main device; so far I’ve found iOS 27 to be stable, but bad for my battery life. Also, most apps don’t offer these large widgets and won’t for a few months as developers get new tools. Finally, these widgets are great, but they are not of course open the whole window, and that might annoy you too.
However, although widgets may not be the most important part of iOS 27, or the ones that change the way you use your phone the most (it would be Siri in both cases), I am very much in favor of anything that gives me information without making me open apps. Large widgets do the same thing.
This is what it is Installer community is in this week. I want to know what you are doing right now! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal – @davidpierce.11 - with your thoughts on anything and everything, and we’ll have our favorites here every week. For more good information, see the answers to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.
“My kids and I *love* Bluey’s new game, Bluey’s Quest for the Golden Pen. This story is fun for them, but it’s a great introduction to platform machines for kids. And there is no way to ‘die’ or lose things, so the stress is very low (unlike how they see me trying to figure things out inside. Breath of the Wild…) ”- Craig
“Animal Kingdom on Netflix. I can’t believe I waited this long to watch it. — Justin
“Maybe late, but I just downloaded it Moses a few weeks back and I absolutely love it. It might be the best baseball scores/news/info app. Still in beta but very good. “
“The indie web is alive and well. Donkeys and another attempt to highlight blogs to follow. Built on top of fediverse, it’s RSS, and online articles. ” – Renganathan
“I’m concerned about Mood. camera app. It also does video recording, and I no longer use the built-in camera app on my iPhone. There is a lot of fun to be had with creating your own presets or scouring and the Mood subreddit to test those who are placed with others.” — Tom
“Last play for Destiny 2It’s been 12 years! Bittersweet, but it’s a great send-off for a game that could have been more. ” -Nikki
“I’ve been obsessed with the Teenage Engineering x Kanye West collaboration – a little play on ‘Jesus is King’ called ‘Jesus is King’. SP-1 which I think is not mentioned. A a few curious people on Reddit and the group was called Solderless I ended up finding a way to let you search Kanye’s music and upload new songs. Huzzah! You can get it for under $50 and it’s a lot of fun. ” — Spencer
“Skrillex’s new album, Soma, it’s very good. It may be his best work. Just dance and dance, I never get tired of it!” – It is
“I recently started my summer college semester and I wanted to stop carrying a laptop around all the time, and I love taking notes, so I decided to move my little iPad from the shelf to my desk for the millionth time. Nillkin Cube Pocket Foldableand it has honestly been one of the best purchases I’ve made in a while. It folds into a large bag circle and is very light and comfortable to carry when I need to put notes in Obsidian. Also, swipes work there, so that’s another thing when I open apps I refuse to close even if they’re not in use. ” – Brandon
I have included Widow’s Bay in these letters several times already, but the worst is happening: Every time I ask you for your opinion, week after week the most popular thing in my box is. Widow’s Bay. I will have to stop talking about this for another time, but the way it happens I agree with you. It’s my favorite show of the year, a show with ideas and shtick that doesn’t have to work and instead thrives on success.
The season finale is this week, and the show it has just been updated for its second season. I’m preaching to the choir here, but I can’t say this strongly enough: STAY SHOWN BAY IS SOFT. It is special. And we all have to talk about the end.
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