Plus: The Steam Controller, The Devil Wears Prada 2, and John Oliver on AI chatbots.
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 126, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. Happy Ruthless Self-Promotion Week! We’re dedicating almost all of this issue to the stuff we’ve been making recently.
Personally, I’ve been reading about the Tesla diner and Dwarkesh Patel and The Rest Is History, starting a Ted Lasso rewatch to get ready for season 4, watching a robot injure Joanna Stern, continuing down the rabbit hole of gorgeous Japanese stationery, wondering if those cool shoes would also help me run a sub-two-hour marathon, following lots and lots of folks from Chris Plante’s great list of games media, and hunting for the perfect recipe for Rice Krispies Treats. I know it’s out there somewhere.
I also have for you a new gaming controller, a bunch of fun stuff to watch this weekend, a couple of interesting AI-y things, and a lot of feelings about how we use technology. Let’s get to it. The Drop * The Steam Controller. I really respect the way Valve just understands what its users want.
In this case, users want a super comfortable, outrageously customizable $99 controller that can be used in basically whatever bonkers way you can imagine. Sounds like we all would tweak the joysticks a little, but that Valve basically nailed this. * The Devil Wears Prada 2. I swear, this and Hokum have all the makings of a Barbenheimer-style doubleheader.
And if you don’t get to a theater this weekend for what is evidently a pretty solid sequel, at least watch the original Devil Wears Prada this weekend. Holds up. * Widow’s Bay. All my TV-nerd friends have been waiting with bated breath for this new Apple TV show, and apparently it delivers.
Funny and scary in equal measure is very hard to pull off, and I’m thrilled Matthew Rhys and co. are going straight on my watchlist. * Zed. I’ve been hearing good things about this super-fast code editor for a while, and it finally officially launched. Some interesting AI integrations in here, but really its job is to work everywhere and never ever slow down.
On that front, it seems to be a hit. * Talkie. Such a cool idea: a large language model exclusively trained on text from before 1931, with all the trappings of modern AI interaction but no knowledge of the modern world. These “vintage models” are starting to become a thing, and they’re a fascinating way to interact with history.
* “I’m done renting my digital life. ” Really great video in which Iskren gets fed up with all the subscriptions in his life, and tries to go hard into physical media, self-hosting, and more. It’s fascinating! And hard!
And expensive! * John Oliver on AI chatbots. I know, I know, more John Oliver, surprise. But I feel like I’ve been screaming into a void that AI chatbots are not your friends, should not be your friends, dear lord stop treating them like friends, and Oliver does that and more in an extremely fun and thoughtful way.
* Saros. A brutally difficult game in which you try to stop a bad tech company from taking over a planet to strip it of its resources — a little too on the nose for our present times, maybe? Still, it’s a solid follow-up to Returnal that I suspect will make a lot of people happy. * Cursor Camp.
A new John Oliver thing and a new Neal.fun thing? What a week! I don’t even really know how to explain this one. It’s a little Club Penguin-y, in the most delightful way.
I played this way longer than I planned. * Lovable’s mobile app. A lot of y’all out in the Installerverse have told me you’re using Lovable for vibe-coding projects. Now there’s an app for Android and iOS, so you can make mobile apps with your mobile apps.
Screen share For the last several weeks, I’ve spent a lot of my free time messing around in Claude Code to build myself a productivity tool. For a while, I thought I’d build a whole to-do list system from the ground up; that fell apart by about the third feature. Ditto the Google Keep-meets-Obsidian thing I was trying to build.
But then I had an epiphany: What if I treated all these tools like infrastructure, let them handle all the hard technical work, and built myself a UI I loved? I could handle that. And more importantly, $20 a month of Claude Code could handle it. I call it Daily, because it doesn’t need a better name, because it’s just for me.
Here’s what it looks like: I use it on the web on my computer, and through an iOS app I just managed to get functional the other day. Basically the way it works is this: I connect the app to Google Calendar and Todoist, and it shows me everything I have to do today.
Another tab is synced to Raindrop, which shows a simple list of everything I’ve bookmarked in reverse chronological order, plus buttons to quickly delete a link or move it to a specific folder. Just being able to see all this stuff in one place, in a way I find visually pleasing, was kind of the whole ballgame.
The other thing it does is input: This app has a single window through which I can create a task , an event , or a note . After years of fiddling with apps like Drafts and Raycast to build this kind of universal capture system, I finally have one that works exactly the way I wanted it to.
I’m still “using” all the same apps as before, and paying for most of them, it’s just that now I have a way to see them all at once, and interact with them all the same way. It has gone a long way toward taming the chaos of my day-to-day planning.
And all it took was approximately 450,000 hours of copying and pasting error logs into Claude Code — I didn’t create this thing so much as bugfix it into existence. But it works, mostly, and it’s working great for me. Crowdsourced For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been asking you to share the things you’ve been making recently. Apps, games, albums, crochet projects, anything and everything.
This newsletter only works because you share the things you’re into, so I figure every once in a while we should just turn this place into a bit of Installerverse show and tell. Thank you to everyone who wrote in! There’s no space here to feature nearly all the cool ideas I’ve seen this week, so we’re going to have to do this again. Here’s a whole bunch of my favorites so far.
“I’m a lawyer, and I had an important order due to be released sometime on a Friday afternoon — I figured there must be a way to automate checking for that order.
And from that little python script grew SCOTUSWatch . The iOS , Windows , and Android apps all receive push notifications of new opinions and orders from an AWS Lambda instance that scrapes the Supreme Court’s website on a calendar-aware schedule. The iOS and Windows apps also get optional brief AI summaries .
The AWS code also writes to a Bluesky bot . ” — Scott “I host Business of Tech, a daily podcast covering the business side of the technology industry — not the consumer stuff, but the companies and people who actually run the tech that keeps businesses alive. Think managed service providers, IT service companies, the vendors who build for them. ” — Dave “Just a few months ago I launched my app Cross.
Cross is a to-do app that syncs to Notion. And makes it so much easier and faster to create a task in Notion. ” — Luis “One of my favourite things is grab & go food, in particular Itsu and its fresh sushi. As a youthful spendthrift artiste, I particularly enjoyed their ‘everything is half price 30 minutes before we close’ policy.
But since all the outlets have different opening hours, it was always a bit of a crapshoot as to whether you were near one that was closing when you’re hungry fo sweet sweet soosh. My Dragon’s Den dream was an app that could tell me where and when the 50% bargs were available. And then Claude Code was born and made my dumb little dream come true! ” — Simon “I made Buena Vida Run Club.
It’s Strava + MyFitnessPal + Runna + more in one app. This is no weekend vibe code... I’ve spent the past 16 months researching, designing & building. No AI hallucinations, just lots of detailed math & science.
” — Cole “I made a short film in 2023 about our current ever creeping descent into AI madness called Eating 38 Cheeseburgers. In a time when so many of us already feel isolated from one another, I saw this technology as something that could super charge that disconnection. This film was my way of unpacking those ideas. ” – Andrew “I built a macOS app to automatically organize your files: Rulebook.
You can set up rules, and it quietly sorts, renames, converts, beeps, moves, copies, archives, and tags your files in the background — like a personal assistant for your folders. ” — Lucas “I’ve built GamePal as a way to catalogue my ever growing game collection and track my play in a journal. As a designer it’s always been my dream to build my own iPhone app and October 2024 was the moment.
I’ve been chipping away at it for the past year or so and I’m not stopping anytime soon. ” — Jeremy “I’ve started vibe coding an app that transcribes, summarizes, and takes notes of my lectures using only the horsepower in my computer thanks to open models that are very efficient at understanding human language. This means that I don’t even have to bring a notebook anymore!
I just need to take a voice recording on my phone, plug it into the app and 10 minutes later I have a transcription that I can later summarize with Gemma 4 on my computer or plug into Claude so that it adds the notes into my Notion. No Otter or Memo AI or other unnecessary subscription needed. ” — Franklin “I built Newslog.
It bundles your newsletters, RSS feeds, and articles into a single daily digest with an index and summaries. It’s designed specifically for calm, distraction-free reading on Kindle and deep-work archiving in Obsidian. ” — Lucas “Daymark is an iOS app that allows you to send virtual postcards to your future self. I struggle with perfectionism and noticing my progress, so I use this app to remind my future self of how things were in the weeks/months before.
Other people use it in different ways, like as a personal diary, as reminders of quotes they heard, and much more. All data is stored on-device and it is 100% free. ” — Antonio “I’ve been working on a project that retrofitted an Arduino Uno into an old touchtone landline phone. The idea is that you can ‘dial’ in to a couple of numbers that I programmed and you’d get a song or a Fallout style audio log.
This project was for a class in my grad school program, and calling myself a ‘creative engineer’ has been a really rewarding experience as I transition out of ad agency life. ” — Andrew “I first released QuakeInfo in November of 2007, and it began as a way for me to learn iPhone development. QuakeInfo helped me stay informed about earthquakes around the world and near me .
My goal is to make it the best-looking, most usable, and most informative earthquake app on iOS. And lately, I’ve been trying Claude Code as a way to increase my velocity and ship more features. ” — Adam “It’s called ChangeLock and it’s simply shoving in your face how much you use your phone.
Then at the end of each month asks you to donate a cent for each unlock. Donation is voluntary of course, but the little bit of pain on each unlock actually helps make this work psychologically. It’s only on Android because iOS doesn’t give you the same kind of data access, unfortunately. ” — Pascal “I made a filter that hides Generative AI features on websites: Google’s AI summaries, Copilot buttons, Reddit Answers, and more.
I created it because of the numerous AI features popping up everywhere, and I was surprised something like this didn’t exist already. ” — Steven “I made Tuesday Night Movie Night — the newsletter where readers get one good movie recommendation, every Tuesday. Our picks are 100 percent algorithm-free. We watch every movie we pick and write up the recommendation ourselves.
” — Blake “I’ve been writing fiction for about 10 years and trying to find agents of publishers in a changing, confusing writer’s market. I decided to make an old-skool static website to publish my three-part speculative fiction novel as a serial, week by week. I’ve finished the first two books and book three starts next week. On each page is the text of a chapter, and an audio reading .
” — David “I built WedSearch entirely in Claude with zero coding knowledge. I’m now selling this to wedding suppliers and supplementing my wedding filmmaking income! Insane. ” — Arranv “Two years ago, you featured my app Play for saving and organizing videos.
Since then, it’s grown a lot: better video player, support for transcripts and new AI features like summaries and Q&A. You can also filter subscription videos to hide YouTube shorts, and much more. ” — Marcos “Did It, a daily wins journal I built, works on the opposite principle to a todo list. It only lets you record what you already did. No tasks waiting for tomorrow, just a quiet record of your day, however small or ordinary.
Some days the win is shipping something. Some days it’s getting out of bed. Both count. ” — Pascal “I built a working Cyberpunk 2077 Radio.
Hugely ambitious project . I started by extracting the 3D model file from the PC version of the game, designing a 1:1 scale shell in CAD, printing it, then sourcing the LED matrix display, audio amplifier, and a few other power components, wiring it all together, then writing the Python code to make it all work.
Took a few months. ” — David “I make OpenCase , the patented iPhone case with the open space for MagSafe accessories. It’s crazy how many advantages we have been alerted to by our customers due to the uniqueness of the design.
” — John “I got into home espresso two years ago and despite watching hundreds of YouTube videos, I felt like I was missing the right advice to pull better shots. I tried a few tracking apps and they all looked rough, so I built my own, called Dial. It’s Bauhaus-inspired , and it tells you what you need to change for your next shot based on what you tasted.
” — Christophe “I’m an author, and last year my debut novel The Phoenix Pencil Company was published . While on the surface it’s historical fantasy about a pencil company in 1940s Shanghai, really at its core it’s a book all about data privacy.
I think this book featuring a young software engineer and her relationship with her grandmother, and about the stories we choose to pass on or keep hidden, is very Verge-y :)” — Allison Signing off I do my best work while listening to movie soundtracks. I don’t know why — maybe it just makes life in a Google Doc feel more epic? I know I’m not the only one, either.
My personal Mount Rushmore of the genre is probably: * Pirates of the Caribbean * Halt and Catch Fire * The Dark Knight * Billions I finally saw Project Hail Mary the other day, and knew halfway through the movie that its score was going to go in my rotation. It’s a little pluckier than some of the others I like, but it’s a perfect mood-setter.
It also got me listening to Daniel Pemberton’s other scores, including Steve Jobs and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, both of which are also fabulous. If my writing suddenly gets vastly more thrilling, dramatic, and dare I say world-saving, you’ll know why. See you next week!
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