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Hello friends! Welcome to Installer No. 132 Your guide to the best and edge-The most wonderful things in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy football, and you can also read all the old issues on the site Installer Home.)
This week I’ve been preparing for a month in which I did absolutely nothing during the World Cup. I’ve also been reading about Steven Spielberg and Wearable devices and Boeing 747overload on computer nostalgia thanks Virtual OS Museumto watch That Knicks game winner Over and over again, listening to new wonderful things This was the sports center Podcast and great old Renner files Podcasts, and trying to tame my increasingly disastrous inbox with. It’s going…average.
I also have an early summer movie candidate, a new way to watch an old classic, a portable camera and mouse worth watching, and much more. Let’s do this? Let’s do this.
(As always, the best part of… Installer These are your thoughts and advice. What are you watching/reading/downloading/playing/listening to/applying sunscreen this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy it InstallerSend it to them and let them know Subscribe here.)
- Swimming pool. I’m still pretty convinced that “taking a bunch of screenshots and letting the AI figure it out” is what it is Basically a great interface To use computers. Pool, which has finally come out of beta, is exactly the way to bookmark and do things with anything you see on your screen. It starts with taking all the old screenshots and sorting them as well, which was a huge blast from the past.
- Disclosure day. Spielberg makes a space movie: always a good thing! The trailer for this movie made me nervous, but the reviews were mostly good. Even the not-so-good movies say, “It’s a lot of fun but it’s also just a Spielberg space movie,” which is actually exactly what I’m looking for.
- Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. A formative TV show for generations of kids is officially on YouTube. The channel is brand new, but it already has clips, full episodes, and live streams for you to watch. This is the YouTube diet my toddler will be on for the foreseeable future.
- Logitech MobiFold. If you carry a portable mouse for working on the go, there you have it Good chance This $80 is an upgrade. that it small size, It has a few useful customization options, and I think I’d like it to be a touchpad instead of a scroll wheel? It’s very strange for me to put this in my travel iPad setup.
- Cloud Fable 5. Leaving aside my many feelings about the fact that Anthropic shipped a variant of a model that was too risky to launch a couple of months ago, I’ve been very impressed with Fable’s strength and comprehensiveness so far. It’s a great tool for coding. And use it now, because it will start adding up in nine days!
- Insta360 Luna Ultra. This is like the Rolls Royce of gimbals. Two lenses, upgraded processing, detachable ultra-smart display/remote control, and more. The $769 price tag is a little high for me, but I think it will be worth it for many creators.
- Incorruptible By Eric Ries. Reese’s other book, Lean startupis one of the offices you will find in any technology company office. This new question poses a good and timely question: Is it possible to be successful without compromising all of your morals and values? Reese says yes, and I hope he’s right.
- Bluesky Group Talks. It truly seems that the era of Twitter-style social media is over. Which is great news. It’s smart for Bluesky to get around that, and I really like the idea of creating spaces like this that are much smaller but still more than just a one-on-one chat. If you add me to a group, I promise to just send A few Troubled memes every day.
- The Box Go 6 2nd generation. This is the most Kindle-like device from Boox, and the new model adds note-taking features, has a range of color options, and of course comes with access to all your Android apps. I’d be interested in this thing if it wasn’t running a six-year-old version of Android, but even I’m still curious to try it out.
- LM notebook. Google’s little search tool continues to impress me Bump up to Gemini 3.5 They both make the app smarter and give it a host of new ways to present information. As a way to upload and query a range of websites/documents/PDFs, NotebookLM is hard to beat.
The big news this week was WWDC, Apple’s annual developers conference. This is where Apple announces the most important software coming to it this year. This edition was largely about artificial intelligence: the new Siri It seems so good so farlots of creative photo editing stuff that looks cool and scary and bad all at the same time, and Apple Intelligence stuff all over the place. I have a lot of testing to do, and the developers have a lot of updates to do, before we know exactly how things will go.
But there’s one feature that’s really changing the way I use my phone: widgets. Specifically the monster Home page widgets for the entire page Apple now supports. Almost as soon as I started playing with them, I ended up completely redesigning my home screen setup, so that I had a page of apps and then what amounted to a side-scrolling array of giant widgets. I loved it, and decided to share:
Photo: David Pearce/The Verge
I spent it Forever I’m trying to build or find a great way to see everything I do — calendar, tasks, weather, all that stuff — at a glance. There’s something about these large tools that seem arranged in a way that I quite like. I’ll definitely end up with 100 pages of it.
In case giant gadgets interest you as much as they do me, here are some quick warnings. First, you probably shouldn’t install developer betas on your primary device; So far I’ve found iOS 27 to be very stable, but it’s definitely bad for battery life. Also, most apps don’t offer these bulky tools and will only do so for a few months while developers get familiar with the new tools. Finally, these tools are bulky, but they still aren’t completely It takes up the entire screen, and that can be aesthetically disruptive as well.
However, while widgets may not be the most important feature in iOS 27, or even the one that changes the way you use your phone (that would be Siri in either case), I’m very much in favor of any feature that gives me more information without making me open apps. Big widgets do just that.
Here’s what Installer community this week. I want to know what you’re up to now too! Email installer@theverge.com Or send me a message on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here each week. For more great recommendations, check out the responses to This post is on topics and This post is on Bluesky.
“My kids and I *love* the new Bluey toy,” Bluey searched for the golden pen. The story is fun for them, but it’s also a very good introduction to platforming mechanics for kids. And there’s basically no way to “die” or lose things, so the stress level is very low (unlike when they watch me trying to figure things out in… Breath of the wild…)” – Craig
“Animal kingdom On Netflix. I can’t believe I waited so long to watch it.” – Justin
“It may be very late, but I just downloaded mosaic A few weeks ago and I absolutely love it. It could be the perfect app for baseball scores/news/information. It’s still in beta but it’s pretty good.
“The independent Internet is alive and thriving. Bubbles It’s another attempt to highlight blogs you can follow. Built on Fed Signals, RSS and Web.” – Renganathan
“I’m obsessed with mood.camera program. It recreates film photography, and I don’t use the built-in camera app on my iPhone anymore. There’s a lot of fun to be had creating your own presets or cleaning up Sub mood To try those collected by others. —Tom
“Run the final update for Destiny 2It was the end of an era that lasted 12 years! Bittersweet, but it’s a good send-off to a game that could have been so much more. – Nikki
“I’ve been obsessed with the collaboration between Teenage Engineering and Kanye West, a little stem riff on ‘Jesus is King’ called SP-1 I think it was largely unreleased. A A few enterprising people on Reddit And a group called welding We ended up discovering a way that lets you scan a Kanye album and upload new audio tracks. The estate! You can find it for under $50 and it’s a lot of fun. -Spencer
Skrillex’s new album, Soma, very good. It is perhaps his best work. Just dancing one pop after another, I never get tired of it!” – Ali
“I recently started the summer semester at college and wanted to get away from constantly carrying a laptop, but I also enjoy taking notes, so I decided to move my iPad mini from the shelf to my desk again for the millionth time. I found a nifty little device called Nillkin cube foldable pocketIt was truly one of the best things I’ve bought in a while. It folds into a pocket-sized square and is very light but is also nice to write on when I want to put a note in Obsidian. Gesture swipes also work on it, so that’s a plus when I’m swiping through apps that I refuse to close even though I’m not using them. -Brandon
I have included Widow’s Bay In this newsletter several times already, but the strangest thing keeps happening: Every time I ask you all for recommendations, week after week, the most common thing in my inbox is Widow’s Bay. Maybe I should stop talking about it at some point, but I actually agree with you. It’s my favorite show of the year so far, a show with a premise and comedy style that should never work, and instead somehow keeps getting better.
The season finale is this week and the show is on Just renovated For its second season. I’m preaching to the choir here, but I can’t say this strongly enough: Go watch Widow’s Bay. It’s special. And we all need to talk about the end when it falls.
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