Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 122, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, go ’Zona, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about early Apple employees and weather apps and one-page productivity systems, watching Avatar: Fire and Ash on my phone in installments the way James Cameron intended, trying and failing to find a better Gmail address than the dumb one I picked 20 years ago, watching the Artemis II launch because space is awesome, buying a new mug that was too expensive but is extremely awesome, replacing my work soundtrack with this incredible DJ set from Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, listening to the Darknet Diaries episode about music fraud (thanks to Josh for the rec), and fine-tuning the first vibe-coded thing I’ve ever made that’s actually any good.
I also have for you a new way to read the internet, a new Mario movie, a more private way to do video chat, and more. Lots of apps this week! You love to see it. Let’s do it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / playing / reading / listening to / spreading cheese on 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.)
- Sofa 5. A huge update to an Installerverse favorite, this app is now a great way to manage everything you want to watch, read, play, and even do IRL. I never quite made it stick when it was mostly just movies and shows, but now I think of it as like a Notion for my personal life. Apple devices only, alas, but boy do I love this app.
- Surf. After a long beta, this feed reader / social network / timeline app finally launched, and I still think it’s a great idea. The fediverse doesn’t have to look like Twitter! It can be lots of things! Surf is one of those things.
- The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. The cast for this movie is just unbelievably stacked, and while the reviews aren’t great, they weren’t for the last one, either, and I loved that movie! I suspect my kid and I will watch this approximately 446 times.
- Hozy. I’ve only really recently come to appreciate the cozy game genre. Life is hard, y’all; it’s nice to have something calmingly mindless to do. In this case, that thing is home renovation and decoration, and it’s far more fun than it has any right to be.
- Proton Meet. There are a lot of good reasons to be worried about the privacy of your meetings, the recordings of those meetings, the AI summaries of those meetings, and everything else. Proton’s new tool is encrypted, simple, and seems to work well. Gonna swap a lot of Google Meets for this.
- “Jeopardy! YouTube Edition.” Do not watch this thinking it’s a terrific episode of Jeopardy. Watch it for the nonstop meme references, Ken Jennings trying his best to be young and hip, and a bunch of extremely answerable questions for anyone who’s a little too online.
- Day One Chat. A chatbot that prompts you through a journal entry, so that every day is a conversation instead of a monologue. It’s definitely not how everybody journals, but it might make the habit easier to start. (You should also worry about giving journal entries to AI tools, by the way, but Day One seems to be handling this one the right way.)
- NewsBlur for Android. There are not enough good RSS readers for Android. NewsBlur is one of the best, and the new version got a much-needed redesign plus a bunch of new organization and discovery features. Might be my new go-to feeds app on Android.
- “Cindy Cohn – Fighting for Digital Human Rights in Privacy’s Defender.” A terrific, extended Daily Show segment with the head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which turns into an incredibly comprehensible take on why privacy matters and what we can do to preserve it. So many conversations about this turn wonky and circular, but Cohn is crystal clear. I need to go read her book now.
I’ve been using Twos, a note-taking and to-do list app, a lot over the last couple of years. The app does a lot, but in a very straightforward way, and it just works the way my brain does. All of my problems with the app have been with its design and its polish — the app just never quite felt done to me.
Well, Parker Klein, the developer behind Twos, shipped a new version of the app this week that is a huge improvement in that respect. Every corner of the app feels cleaner and more polished, and I’ve been loving it in beta for the last few weeks. The wildest part? The whole thing was made with Claude Code. Parker tells me he’s basically not writing any code himself anymore — he is orchestrating the process, and understands deeply how the whole thing works, but Claude is doing the coding.
I asked Parker to share his AI setup with us, to see what I might be able to steal for my own projects. Here it is, and a few details about it:
- “I use the Claude Mac app on my MacBook Pro, on their Max plan. It works directly with the directory and files on my computer, and then I commit to GitHub and deploy on my own. Occasionally, I use the Claude Code extension in VSCode, but it kept crashing while working on New Twos, so I switched to the Claude app.
- I currently use Opus 4.6 and previously used the Auto mode on Cursor until they changed their pricing.”
- “This photo shows Claude on the right and the iOS simulator on the left. I was working on cropping photos for the custom wallpaper in the capture view of New Twos. I use a similar flow for Android and now the new web. You can see I use very simple language and let it do its thing.”
Parker said he doesn’t have any special prompts he uses over and over, but did offer a clever trick: have Claude create its own documentation for larger features and architecture, and then share that documentation back with the tool when it’s time to work on bugs or new features. Saves a bunch of “let me go read all these files” time, and keeps everything a lot more organized.
I also asked Parker if he had any tips for the new Twos, and he gave me the one he always gives me: “My advice probably won’t ever change. Write things down. We’ve designed around quickly capturing anything, so that’s what we’re optimizing for. I still heavily use lists, bookmarks, search, and chat for recall, but those are only useful if you’re writing things down.” Friends, he’s not wrong.
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.
“John Siracusa’s app Hyperspace on the Mac App Store — great for saving space on your Mac (but it doesn’t actually delete any files through the use of APFS).” — Quack
“I got a terrible/wonderful color e-ink photo frame: the VidaBay Snap. No wires, no battery. Transfer exactly one (1) photo via NFC. It only works on iOS (for now?), I have to transfer a white image to clear it thoroughly before changing the photo, and it’s SUPER janky. But it’s cool and it makes me happy. I want a half dozen of ‘em.” — Daniel
“I’m playing Crimson Desert, the amazing open-world RPG with characters who have no personality and a main plot with no diegetic quest delivery. But it’s gorgeous and huge, combat is fun, and it lets you pick grasshoppers out of a field. Truly feels like a next-gen Bethesda RPG, albeit with the writing of a bowl of stale crackers.” — Jordan
“One of my favorite YouTube channels that I keep coming back to over and over is Ryan’s Edits. He takes Star Trek blooper reels, mainly from TNG, and re-edits them back into the episodes, usually with the appropriate music and sound effects. The results are absolutely hilarious and I’d love to watch an entire episode done this way.” — Nicholas
“We just watched this unexpected banger documentary about extreme birdwatching called Listers that deserves more attention.” — Mal
“Indie Game Works. Excellent new book release from ROM on the greatest indie games of the 21st century.” — Andy
“Recently I have been mostly in Google and Claude, searching ‘how to use an old phone as a media server,’ and Reddit has suggested that I should try Emby. It is a little slow — maybe I should connect ethernet to my TV — but it is kinda awesome!” — Aftab
“I’m an avid audiobook fan, and thought these recommendations might be of interest. The Demon Cycle series by Peter V. Brett is an epic world of magic, demons and fantasy. A dark and fascinating cultural delight! Also, The Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson – the epitome of large scale fantasy. Waring realms, gods and evil. What’s not to like!” — Brian
“I recently gave Wanderlog a try for planning my family’s summer road trip. It made it a breeze to co-plan this with my husband. It also saved us from accidentally making a 12 hr driving day. Such a great tool!” — Naomi
Guinness World Records is my new favorite thing on TikTok. I don’t know how I didn’t find it until this week, but it’s perfect: just an endless feed of remarkable accomplishments, whether it’s clapping a billion times a minute, driving a truck through an impossibly tiny opening, or just being a very large snake. Why are most of these records, or even things people try? Dunno! But this whole concept is perfectly suited to endlessly scrolling short-form video, and boy did I binge that account this week. Zero regrets.
