The apps, gadgets, and tools every reader needs

The Verge's Installer newsletter highlights a new AI gadget, the Flipper Busy Bar, and recommends apps like Bear 2.9 and Aphera, alongside Christopher Nolan's film The Odyssey and the World Cup final.

Hi, friends Welcome to Installer No. 136, your guide to the best and Verge -iest stuff in the world. If you’re new here, welcome, hope your neighborhood isn’t as smoky as mine, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage /installer-newsletter . The apps, gadgets, and tools every reader needs Plus, in this week’s Installer: Nolan did it again, a silly new AI gadget, a great update to a great notes app, and more. Plus, in this week’s Installer: Nolan did it again, a silly new AI gadget, a great update to a great notes app, and more. This week, I’ve been recording the next season of Version History https://pod.link/1840983742 this season’s finale is out on Sunday , reading about and https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/12/magazine/data-center-heist.html data center heists and https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/13/style/backyard-baseball-video-game-teacher.html?partner=slack&smid=sl-share& readwiseLocation= Backyard Baseball , canceling my October plans to see https://therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/calvin-and-hobbes-and-the-price-of? readwiseLocation= the creator of Calvin and Hobbes 30 or 40 times, taking on the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qORTe1wW3Wg Digger new Knockout Tour routes https://go.skimresources.com/?id=1025X1701640&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nintendo.com%2Fau%2Fnews-and-articles%2Fmario-kart-world-update-adds-two-new-routes-to-knockout-tour-and-more%2F%3Fsrsltid%3DAfmBOorzvCLewxvYX4v9Vzght0LGU7akZC1DpTgmarrRX79wmvGkAsAy in , learning more than I ever intended about Staten Island thanks to https://go.skimresources.com/?id=1025X1701640&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nintendo.com%2Fus%2Fstore%2Fproducts%2Fmario-kart-world-switch-2%2F%3Fsrsltid%3DAfmBOooYlHpV6SL5bZlSuyHL3kTL8SvgvUOrm11bmSclYqc86oxYL2r5 Mario Kart World , reading up on the history of https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/the-staten-island-problem-part-1-the-mayor-vs-the-borough-president Revisionist History , and setting up my https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/6171/Inventing-ELIZAHow-the-First-Chatbot-Shaped-the the very first chatbot . I love the thing, and have no idea what to use it for. https://busy.app/ Flipper Busy Bar I also have for you the movie of the summer, a great update to a great note-taking app, a new app for organizing your photos, and much more. Let’s go. As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you reading / watching / playing / listening to / soldering together this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com mailto:installer@theverge.com . And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer , forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here /subscribe . The Drop The Odyssey . I’ll be honest: I expected this movie to not be great. Hot director bites off too big a story, not even Christopher Nolan can hit every time, right? WRONG. The reviews are amazing, the whole thing actually feels very current, and I absolutely cannot wait to plant myself in an IMAX theater and soak in the epic-ness of this one. Several dozen times. Bear 2.9 . Bear’s tag-based system has always felt a little too limiting to me, but expanding the idea into Workspaces makes it way more powerful without being any more complex. So clever, so useful, still one of the best apps to write in across Apple devices. The World Cup final . By just about any measure, Sunday’s game will be the biggest thing on TV… until we do this again in four years. This year’s tournament has been spectacular, and whether you like soccer or not, the final tends to be good TV. Treat it like the Super Bowl Have a party “ How Microtransactions Almost Ruined Gaming, with Dan Soder .” Really good episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out that makes an imperfect but very compelling argument that we have almost completely lost the plot when it comes to gaming. But the fight is not yet entirely lost. Aphera . I’ve been hearing good things about this new Mac-based photo editor, which is fast and powerful and aimed directly at replacing the ever-rising price of Adobe’s tools. Ditching Lightroom is a lot to ask, but I’m excited to give this a real shot. Parchment . Chris Lawley, friend of Installer , shipped his notes-and-tasks app for Apple devices this week, and it’s really well done It goes hard on just showing you what matters right now and hiding everything else, and I kind of appreciate that. The Loading Museum . What a fun idea: a repository of all the things that have made us wait on our computers. Watch a photo load like it’s 1997, remember what it felt like to wait for the internet to connect, and learn what designers have always known about how to make slow things feel faster. The Codex Micro . I love a shortcut button, and while I think $230 is an absurd price to pay for a bunch of buttons you could re-create with a Stream Deck or any number of other things, I do think these agent-controlling keys are pretty delightful. Work Louder stuff just tends to feel good. Group project Tiny housekeeping note: From now on, when we do a special section like this, it’ll be in place of Screen Share for that week. I’ve heard from a bunch of folks that some issues are actually too much, and this feels like a good trade that also makes my life easier. Win-win They say reading is dead https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/ . They are, in fact, incorrect. A couple of weeks ago, I asked you all to share your reading setups — the gadgets, the apps, the bookstores, the bookmark brands, the highlighter colors, everything. As always, you delivered Since a bunch of you asked, before we get into all your great gear and advice, here’s my current setup: - I read mostly on one of three devices: a , an Kindle Paperwhite , or a iPad Mini . The iPad is for when I need to take lots of notes and highlights, the Palma goes everywhere with me, and the Paperwhite lives next to my bed. Almost all of my ebooks are in the Kindle universe; I wish that weren’t the case, and should probably switch to something more open, but it’s a hard change to make. Boox Palma 2 - As a result, I mostly read books in the , but all of the rest of my digital reading happens in Kindle app . I frequently dabble with both Readwise Reader and Instapaper , but Reader’s search, organization tools, and ability to parse and convert PDFs into a nice reading experience are just unmatched. Matter - I use for RSS reading. On my computer, I use Feedbin’s website; on mobile I mostly use Feedbin . Unread - When I buy physical books, which I’m trying to do a lot more now that I have a toddler who sees me looking at screens all the time, I try to buy them from . Or from my local library / bookstore. My book collection is growing for the first time in forever, and it’s a delight. Bookshop.org But enough about me Here are the things I heard the most about from you: - The library Yay libraries So many of us are using and Libby and Hoopla and MyLibro and so many other tools to make the most of our library cards. Absolutely love to see it. Sora - The and the Kindle are the big winners among reading devices. No big surprise there, really. But I also heard from Kobo fans both iPad Mini and Clara , more than one devoted iPod Touch fan, and lots of believers in the Libra . Oh, and of course, the Xteink X4 remains a winner. Boox Palma - The most popular reading apps were, also unsurprisingly, and Kindle . But there are some devoted Apple Books fans out there, too, and BookFusion ’s app appears to be catching on. Bookshop.org - We love a way to track our collection, and our progress. Both and The StoryGraph have a lot of fans, and practically everyone either quit or is looking to quit Goodreads. Book Tracker - Lots of us like to listen to books, which of course means came up a few times. But a lot of us are also making good use of the 15 hours of audio that come with Audible . Spotify Premium , a great site for finding ebook sales, came up a bunch. So did BookBub , its sister site for audiobooks. Chirp - Saving and syncing highlights is an ongoing project for a lot of us. Lots of users out there, syncing stuff to Readwise and Notion and Craft , but also a lot of folks building their own apps to make this easier. Obsidian - I heard about, conservatively, 50 different RSS readers. and Unread were the RSS favorites, and Reeder , Instapaper , and Readwise Reader are the go-tos for saving stuff for later. Wallabag One last note: I heard from a lot of people that keeping up with newsletters is a hard and unsolved problem. Do you send everything to a reading app? An RSS feed? Try to manage it in Gmail? Who knows As you may have guessed, I also have a lot of newsletters I don’t know how to manage. If you have tips, I’m all ears. And thanks to everyone who shared their reading setups Crowdsourced Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well Email installer@theverge.com 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 . “I’m moving from Google Gmail to a fantastic European alternative: Cirrux https://cirrux.co/ . With a sync service you can untie yourself from Big Tech, without losing your emails.” — Olaf “ The Ghost in the Shell https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/255358 anime on Amazon is the best looking thing on TV. It’s as lore-dense as a concrete brick, but if you can look past that, it’s absolutely worth the watch.” — B Carzo “ Gravity https://www.gravitynotes.app/ is the best / simplest note-taking app. Most note apps, as you take notes, they get lost as you add more, losing their relevance; with Gravity you can snap any note to the top of the page. The simplicity is brilliant.” — Andrew “Thanks to Rohit for the 4x3 https://www.hankgreen.com/fourbythree/ suggestion in last week’s Installer . The other game on the site, , is also fantastic. Both are wonderful fresh takes on games from the New York Times.” — Kurt https://www.hankgreen.com/smush/ Smush “I ordered the Pebble Index 01 https://repebble.com/index ring. I desperately want to dictate little notes to myself and opening an app on my phone is a lot of friction.” — Anna “I just finished the book Seek Immediate Shelter https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250410122/seekimmediateshelter/ by Vincent Yu. It follows a bunch of people in a small town as they get an emergency ‘incoming missile’ text, then the ‘false alert’ message about 20 minutes later, and how each person reacts during and after the alert. It was fantastic.” — Matt “Recently stumbled upon Joon Lee’s YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@iamjoonlee . Fantastic deep dives on current sports/culture from an independent perspective. Spoiler - Most things have been ruined by gambling & private equity. In an age of hot takes and clickbait, he’s the breath of fresh air sports media fans need.” — Brett “I’ve been playing around with Hypertexting https://hypertexting.com/ , a new app that treats RSS and your personal blog like an open social network. It’s really interesting and has a lot of potential.” — Chris “This week I’ve been reading The Interface Series, which was a sci-fi/horror web serial from about 10 years ago. Each chapter is posted as a comment in a random, unrelated Reddit thread, but it’s all been collated at /r/9M9H9E9 https://www.reddit.com/r/9M9H9E9/ . Fascinating speculative fiction that makes the most of its medium.” — Andie Signing off I’ve always appreciated the size and power of an IMAX screen, but until I heard Matt Damon recently explain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfOkaa2a iA how strange it is to act into an IMAX camera, I don’t think I really understood how remarkable and complicated the technology really is. So of course I loved on how IMAX is projected, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S geBV5bLQ this Tested video on how he thinks about formats, this dive into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhAFHWc93nY this Christopher Nolan interview , and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTp2IwYNQGE the dying art of 70mm on the overall technology. Fine, Chris, I’ll drive halfway across the state to see this movie properly. You win. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFVwqi8sElI this excellent explainer See you next week Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.