Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 46, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you like silly gadgets, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
I also have for you a couple of great iOS apps that are finally available on Android, a new way to play some classic Nintendo games, an expensive new camera, and stuff to watch this weekend both at home and in theaters.
This week’s a little heftier than usual, both because there’s a lot going on and because I’m getting ready to go on vacation. Installer will come as usual next week and then off for two weeks before we’re back on August 17th ready to rumble. So, just in case you’d otherwise run out of stuff to do, I figured I’d leave you with some extras. Let’s get into it.
(As
always,
the
best
part
of
Installer
is
your
ideas
and
tips.
What
do
you
want
to
know
more
about?
What
awesome
tricks
do
you
know
that
everyone
else
should?
What
app
should
everyone
be
using?
Tell
me
everything:
The Drop
Screen share
Ryan Gilbert runs one of the newsletters I read every single week. It’s called Workspaces, and every week, it features some interesting person talking about how they work and how they’ve set up their desk to work for them. I am, uh, forever obsessed with desk setups and never tire of seeing how other people think about their spaces.
Homescreens are kinda like desk setups, I think, in that they reveal a lot about the person who created them. So, I asked Ryan to share his homescreen to see what I might learn from him — and what he’s learned from all those interviews.
Here’s Ryan’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: iPhone 14 Pro.
The wallpaper: My wife and I during our engagement pictures. I like how subtle and distraction-free it is as a background with it mostly just being a light shade (light mode > dark mode for everything btw).
The apps: X, Slack, Camera, Clock, Overcast, Weather, Google Maps, ESPN, Spotify, Notion, Peloton, USGA GHIN, Campsite, LinkedIn, Apple Sports, Messages, Gmail, Safari, Phone.
So, as you can tell, my homescreen is a bit unorganized. I actually like it that way. You’ll notice that Twitter is top left in prime real estate and outside of the “Social” cluster of apps in the bottom right. Fortunately or unfortunately (I’ll let you decide), Twitter is a big part of my day-to-day work, so I treat that as more of a work app vs. social. All of the apps in the “Social” cluster are the apps I use with friends — things like Snapchat or Instagram. You will also see random apps like Product Hunt and ESPN Fantasy Football being tossed in there. Not everything has to make sense.
I also have both ESPN and the new Apple Sports app on the homescreen. I’d love to move away from ESPN, as their app has become extremely bloated and slow, so I’ve been trying to force the Sports habit more and more.
I love Overcast. It’s where I listen to all of my podcasts. I like to keep this separate from where I listen to music (Spotify).
Gmail... I am not an inbox zero kind of guy.
I also asked Ryan to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:
Crowdsourced
Here’s
what
the
Installer
community
is
into
this
week.
I
want
to
know
what
you’re
into
right
now
as
well!
Email
“Terrifying Questions is a great philosophy podcast by Futurama writer Eric Kaplan and professor Taylor Carman. Each week, they discuss a philosophical question. It’s smart, funny, and interesting but without being inaccessible. The first episode from a year ago about ChatGPT is a great place to start.” — Jonathan
“Fable! It has been great for me and got me into reading again!” — Ataya
“I feel a little late to the party but watching Scavengers Reign, which is on Netflix outside the US. Honestly one of the best shows I’ve seen in a long time. Rarely does sci-fi feel this alien or unknown. Even if you don’t like sci-fi, watch it for the incredible music alone!” — Alex
“Star Trek Prodigy season two on Netflix has blown me away. Season one was good, but season two is one of the best seasons of Star Trek (so far).” — J
“I’m trying out Company of Heroes 3 on the PS5. Consoles get a bad rap for RTS games, but it’s only because porting playable controls takes more effort. Haven’t played enough to have an opinion on CoH3 yet, but EndWar and Halo Wars on the 360 were both great to control.” — Ian
“I can’t get over Omnivore’s text-to-speech article reader! I had started off using ElevenLabs’ Reader app to read articles to me, and though their voices are more realistic, I just looove the way Omnivore switches voices for a quoted passage. No idea when Omnivore made this update, but I’m obsessed!” — Roxxy
“Been really enjoying what AEW has been up to recently, definitely coming out of some creative doldrums. They have a storyline where Toni Storm is the champ playing a black-and-white movie star (literally her intro and promos are B&W). They’ve been doing an All About Eve thing with her protege Mariah May who just turned on her. And they just had a 59-minute match with Will Ospreay and MJF that was an amazing piece of storytelling. I’ll watch wrestling even when it’s mid, but this has been great!” — Richard
“Recently upgraded an old iPod Classic gifted to me by my GF’s dad! I put in a new backplate, faceplate, touch wheel, battery, and SD card expansion module for it. Joining the ‘single-purpose’ tech trend we’re on.” — Stefan
“Reading The Battle of the Beams, the story of the development of radar during WW2 and the countermeasures to it. Some incredible tales, really eye-opening.” — Peter
“Ordered a pair of Dayton Audio B40 speakers. They sound like $50, but like… a really good $50. Dayton’s B452 and 652 speakers were long-reigning champs of the ‘beginner audiophile,’ and it’s cool to see this update.” — Emmet
“I’ve been playing around with the Flow Minimalist Launcher. So far, it has led to me reading before bed instead of scrolling and, at least for now, prevented me from buying a Boox Palma.” — Zachary
Signing off
A while back, when I was working on a story about a woodworking computer maker, I learned about the designer Tom Sachs’ concept of “Always Be Knolling.” Knolling is a really specific system that involves laying all your stuff out at specific angles, but I take the broader idea as: don’t make cleaning and organizing into A Thing, just always be doing it. I’ve been trying to adopt this recently, and it is awesome. When I’m on a phone call, I tidy up my desk. When I’m waiting for something to export, I tidy up my desk. A few seconds at a time, I barely even notice, and my workspace is cleaner than ever. Now I just have to figure out how to Always Be Knolling with, like, laundry and dishes. Then I’ll be unstoppable.
See you next week!