Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 121, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, good luck in the Elite Eight, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about Will Wright and sync music and the smartphone theory of everything, picking up The Soul of a New Machine again after hearing that Tracy Kidder died, adding SNL UK to my weekly YouTube clip rotation, watching all my favorite things collide when Hilary Duff went on Hot Ones, moving all my music into Parachord, playing with the NewsBlur Android beta, listening to the new podcast from the Serial folks, playing a bunch of Ball x Pit on my phone, and trying desperately to kick this stupid cold.
I also have for you an app to make your travels easier, a bizarre and delightful new show to watch, a new reason to play an old Mario game, and much more. Let’s do it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / playing / downloading / vibe-coding this week? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)
- Flighty. Ordinarily I’d only recommend Flighty to people who travel a lot — it’s an amazing app, but not cheap, and very much for power users. Right now, though, we could all use a little help navigating security lines, delays, and changes. The new Airport Intelligence feature might pay for itself pretty fast.
- Bait. The premise of this show — about an actor auditioning to be James Bond, and all the weird stuff that follows — is so thoroughly internet-pilled and meta that it definitely shouldn’t work. But at least from what I’ve seen so far, it completely does. Though to be fair, I’ll watch Riz Ahmed in anything.
- Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Like my colleague Andrew Webster says, it’s always a good time to get back into this game. The new Switch 2 update comes with a bunch of new levels, boss battles, and characters — it’s not a ton of new content, but for me it was a great reason to basically start the game all over again. Zero regrets.
- The HTML Review issue 05. This online magazine remains one of the coolest things going in digital literature. This year’s issue is, as always, full of beautiful writing and cartoons and interactive design — the web is so cool, y’all.
- Dropzone 5.0 for Mac. My favorite apps are the ones that just seem to be obviously part of how your device always worked. Dropzone is like that: it’s just an easy, customizable way to save / share / download / whatever all sorts of things, just by dragging a file or a link. The new design looks great, and the app is just so useful.
- “The Ten Pounds Episode.” I mentioned this show in passing last week, but there is something about Friends Keep Secrets that I just cannot stop watching. It’s a celeb podcast meets trashy reality show, filmed and presented in the most fascinating way. I don’t even know if I like it! But I’m hooked.
- Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. I have a list of shows and movies I think could have been hits, except they were ruined by stupid names. (The list is named for Kevin Can F*ck Himself, an incredible show no one watched.) This movie is weird and fun! I’d tell you to watch it if I could remember the name.
- Notion 3.4. I continue to think Notion is a remarkable piece of software that is just slow and annoying enough to make me constantly want to switch. But these are really nice changes: tabs and heading upgrades, a vastly cleaner sidebar, archives in databases, and more. Hey app developers everywhere? Give me fewer AI things and more updates like this.
Casey Liss and I are going to hang out in person one of these days. He’s been one of my favorite podcasters for years, as one of the hosts of Accidental Tech Podcast. (Recent episodes are getting me dangerously close to going all-in on self-hosting…) He’s also the developer of Callsheet, a terrific app for finding movie information and the first-ever thing to be featured in Installer. He also lives like 90 minutes away from me. We need to lunch, Casey.
Anyway, I asked Casey to share his homescreen with us, curious to see how his many lives and occupations coalesce on his phone. Here it is, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: iPhone 17 Pro, 512 GB, in whatever Apple calls “blue” this year.
The wallpaper: Just a blueish gradient I set using Apple’s own tools. Boring, I know.
The apps: AnyList, Settings, Apple Notes, Apple Maps, Apple Music, Sonos, Overcast, Day One, Instagram, Indigo, Slack, NetNewsWire, Home Assistant, Callsheet, Due, Photos, Fastmail, Messages, Fantastical, Safari.
A lot of what’s on my homescreen shouldn’t be surprising. The most surprising thing to me is a switch I made a while ago: I switched from four semi-organized homescreens (and never using Spotlight) to two homescreens, and using Spotlight constantly. I also turned on big icons because I prefer the aesthetics. The main homescreen has weather at the top, and 16 of my most-used apps. (Speaking of aesthetics, team light-in-the-day-and-dark-at-night.)
The second screen has two widget stacks: photos from this day (from the Photos app and Widgetsmith), Fantastical and Parcel, a small Foodnoms widget, and four other frequently used apps. The apps are Pushover, which receives push notifications I send myself from apps like Home Assistant, n8n, and more; Sports Alerts for sports scores, Banktivity for financial tracking, and UniFi Protect to see cameras at home.
After being a devout Spotify person for forever, I eventually switched over to Apple Music, since it is part of the Apple One bundle. It’s… fine. I’m also a huge Sonos fan, and have five rooms in the house with some sort of speaker in it. I almost never AirPlay to them, and instead, use the app. They’re mostly through the dark days of 2025 now, thankfully.
Since covid, I’ve journaled basically every day. This sounds very fancy, but in reality, it’s usually just a brief entry with some photo I’ve taken during the day. I’ve used Day One for this forever, and have no intention to quit.
The purple-ish icon with the lowercase “i” is Indigo, a forthcoming app from my friends Ben McCarthy and Aaron Vegh that I’m beta testing. It’s a unified Mastodon and Bluesky client that interleaves the two timelines as one. It’s really great, and has made it so much less burdensome to keep up with both my nerds (Mastodon) and regular people (Bluesky). I use NetNewsWire as my RSS reader, where I get a ton of both nerdy and local news. Thanks to my The Verge membership, I finally have full-text RSS for here, as well! 🤩
The clapperboard is my app, Callsheet! Imagine if IMDB was written and designed by someone who… well… cares. Instead of people who are just trying to funnel you into buying junk on Amazon. Or auto-playing videos. Or begging you to log in again. Callsheet tries to sit in the same space as IMDB, but it’s designed with people in mind. It’s designed to be fast, to answer whatever question you may have, and then get out of your way.
Next to Callsheet is Due, which I live by. Due will continually re-remind you of things until you clear that task. It’s as close as I get to any sort of formal task management system.
Finally, my wife and I are all-in on Apple Photos, and Shared Photo Library. It’s been surprisingly bulletproof for us.
I also asked Casey to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:
- I’m an unapologetic Scrubs fan, and I was very nervous about the reboot. As I write this, we’re several episodes in, and… it seems really good! They’ve at least acknowledged many of the things about the original Scrubs that didn’t age well, and are also taking characters in new directions.
- I am a Vision Pro owner — it was for my work, I swear! — and I watched the Raye Concert for One when it was new a couple years ago. I recently played her album My 21st Century Blues; it rules. I feel like everyone knew this but me.
- I recently stumbled onto the slowest — but coolest — website on the internet. The Auto Catalog Archive, which has brochures from zillions of cars.
Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email [email protected] or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.
“I’m playing a bunch of Pokémon ROM hacks (like Eternal X and Renegade Platinum) on my AYN Thor and having the absolute time of my life.” — NEAL
“Giving Noteful a try on iPad. It’s good and full of a lot of nice features. But I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to totally ditch pen and paper.” — Nick
“Big into the Bambu Printer A2. Looking for good 3D prints!” – Zach
“Watching The Capture on BBC iPlayer which is very very good and I recommend. Massively into my MacBook Neo, which I bought sans Touch ID because you can enable sign in via Apple Watch.” — Nathan
“I can’t believe I missed the call for notebook comments! For what it’s worth, Beechmore Books is the undisputed champ of paper that doesn’t bleed through. I haven’t found any (other than dedicated sketchbooks) that do it as well. And it’s generally comparable to Leuchtturm1917. I now have one on recurring order with Amazon. “ — Bruce
“I wear a Bulova Computron. Specifically the black and red one. It’s glorious. Like a lil ‘90s alarm clock radio on my wrist.” — Aidan
“Continuing to play with my Synology NAS setup with things like Plex, Jellyfin, the ARR suite, etc… to be prepared for the subscription apocalypse and re-rise of physical media.” — Jamison
“With all the hubbub around the new episode, I FINALLY made time to watch The Amazing Digital Circus. Tons of fun (and psychological torment), I hope indie animation keeps on growing more powerful.” – Hanna
“I found a fantastic E Ink reader, the Xteink X4. Its main features are that it’s pocket-sized and it doesn’t support any DRM. Carrying all my books on an e-reader that fits in my pocket is something else. You can even flash its firmware with an open-source project that makes it even better!“ — Alric
“I suggest you check out Brad Dowdy at The Pen Addict. (Start with his Top Five Pens list.) He also has a long running podcast, also called The Pen Addict.” — Dan
I discovered a website called Obsolete Sounds this week, and immediately fell in love. It is exactly what it sounds like: a trove of sounds you never hear anymore, from a winding pocket watch to a number-crunching calculating machine to melting glacier ice. Fully half of these should be turned into white-noise machines.
And actually, to that end: Cities and Memory, the organization that hosts Obsolete Sounds, hosts an (I think) annual event in which it opens up its sound library to anyone who wants to play with and remix them. Listening back to the submissions from last year is a trip. Seeing both what people record, and what others do with these seemingly mundane sounds, is already changing how I hear the world around me. So cool.