The things we’re building now

Hi, mates! Welcome to Installer No. 126, your information to the very best and Verge-iest stuff on this planet. (If you’re new right here, welcome, I would like 10 or 15 skirts from Calvin Klein, and likewise you’ll be able to learn all of the outdated editions on the Installer homepage.)

Happy Ruthless Self-Promotion Week! We’re dedicating virtually all of this difficulty to the stuff we’ve been making lately. Personally, I’ve been studying about the Tesla diner and Dwarkesh Patel and The Rest Is History, beginning a Ted Lasso rewatch to prepare for season 4, watching a robotic injure Joanna Stern, persevering with down the rabbit gap of beautiful Japanese stationery, questioning if these cool sneakers would additionally assist me run a sub-two-hour marathon, following heaps and many of us from Chris Plante’s nice checklist of video games media, and looking for the right recipe for Rice Krispies Treats. I do know it’s on the market someplace.

I even have for you a brand new gaming controller, a bunch of enjoyable stuff to look at this weekend, a few attention-grabbing AI-y things, and loads of emotions about how we use expertise. Let’s get to it.

(As all the time, the very best a part of Installer is your concepts and suggestions. What are you watching / studying / taking part in / listening to / scouring property gross sales for this week? Tell me all the things: installer@theverge.com. And if you realize another person who would possibly take pleasure in Installer, ahead it to them and inform them to subscribe right here.)

For the final a number of weeks, I’ve spent loads of my free time (and loads of my work time, let’s be trustworthy) messing round in Claude Code to construct myself a productiveness software. For some time, I assumed I’d construct a complete to-do checklist system from the bottom up; that fell aside by in regards to the third characteristic. Ditto the Google Keep-meets-Obsidian factor I used to be attempting to construct. But then I had an epiphany: What if I handled all these instruments like infrastructure, allow them to deal with all of the arduous technical work, and constructed myself a UI I beloved? I may deal with that. And extra importantly, $20 a month of Claude Code may deal with it.

I name it Daily, as a result of it doesn’t want a greater title, as a result of it’s only for me. Here’s what it appears like:

I apply it to the online on my laptop, and thru an iOS app I simply managed to get purposeful the opposite day. Basically the best way it really works is that this: I join the app to Google Calendar and Todoist, and it exhibits me all the things I’ve to do immediately. Another tab is synced to Raindrop, which exhibits a easy checklist of all the things I’ve bookmarked in reverse chronological order, plus buttons to rapidly delete a hyperlink or transfer it to a particular folder. Just with the ability to see all these items in a single place, in a manner I discover visually pleasing, was type of the entire ballgame.

The different factor it does is enter: This app has a single window via which I can create a process (which syncs to Todoist), an occasion (to Google Calendar), or a notice (which creates a textual content file that instantly will get picked up in Obsidian). After years of twiddling with apps like Drafts and Raycast to construct this sort of common seize system, I lastly have one which works precisely the best way I wished it to.

I’m nonetheless “using” all the identical apps as earlier than, and paying for many of them, it’s simply that now I’ve a technique to see them suddenly, and work together with all of them the identical manner. It has gone a great distance towards taming the chaos of my day-to-day planning. And all it took was roughly 450,000 hours of copying and pasting error logs into Claude Code — I didn’t create this factor a lot as bugfix it into existence. But it really works, largely, and it’s working nice for me.

For the final couple of weeks, I’ve been asking you to share the things you’ve been making lately. Apps, video games, albums, crochet initiatives, something and all the things. This e-newsletter solely works since you share the things you’re into, so I determine each occasionally we must always simply flip this place right into a little bit of Installerverse present and inform.

Thank you to everybody who wrote in! There’s no house right here to characteristic practically all of the cool concepts I’ve seen this week, so we’re going to have to do that once more. Here’s a complete bunch of my favorites up to now. (I’ve carried out my greatest to vet these, however as all the time, and particularly on this vibe-coded second wherein we discover ourselves, you need to click on and use and take a look at all the things on the web with warning.)

“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 (thank you Kagi AI) grew SCOTUSWatch (with Claude Code’s help). The iOS (App Store), Windows (Microsoft Store), and Android (sideload) 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 Android app is currently notification-only). The AWS code also writes to a Bluesky bot (just because it can).” — 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 (almost 50) 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 (Shark Tank) 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 (and soon iPad/Mac!) 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 (I live in the San Francisco Bay Area). 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 (i.e. unlock) 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 (it’s also going out through podcast networks).” — 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 (the FFT code to make the real-time spectrum display was a challenge, but authentic to how the radio works in the game). 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 (well, my wife and I are the entire company), 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 (because I love it), 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 (and picked as part of Reese’s Book Club!). 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

I do my greatest work whereas listening to film soundtracks. I don’t know why — perhaps it simply makes life in a Google Doc really feel extra epic? I do know I’m not the one one, both. My private Mount Rushmore of the style might be:

I lastly noticed Project Hail Mary the opposite day, and knew midway via the film that its rating was going to go in my rotation. It’s a little bit pluckier than a few of the others I like, but it surely’s an ideal mood-setter. It additionally bought me listening to Daniel Pemberton’s different scores, together with Steve Jobs and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, each of that are additionally fabulous. If my writing instantly will get vastly extra thrilling, dramatic, and dare I say world-saving, you’ll know why.