Everything you need to track your movies, music, books, and more

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 10, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, hooray! I’m so happy you’re here, and also, you can catch up on all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) We made it through 10 weeks! It’s been so fun to make this every week and to talk to you all about the cool stuff you’re into. Thanks for being part of the Installerverse (we’re gonna make that a thing, it’s gonna happen), and as always, tell me everything you think we can do to make it better!

This week, I’ve been reading about Marvel’s plan to fix its TV shows and all the wild testimony from the Sam Bankman-Fried trial, making lots of deranged art in the improved Bing Chat, watching the David Beckham documentary and debating many new hairstyles, asking all the teens if they actually love LinkedIn, and blocking out my weekend to see the Eras Tour movie as many times as possible. 

This week, I also have for you a new flip phone, a big Roblox release, a new messaging app, some sneaky browser hacks, and oh so many ways to keep track of all your media. And a deal on some truly rad Verge merch!

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: installer@theverge.com. And if you want to get every edition in your inbox a day early, you can subscribe here.

This week’s a really fun one. Let’s get into it.

The Drop

Group project

Last week, I thought I’d try something I’ve been wanting to do for a while: see if we, as the whole Installerverse (it’s HAPPENING), could all work together to figure out the same thing. So I asked, what do you use to track all the stuff you want to read, watch, and listen to?

Oh, boy, did you all come through. Thanks so much to everyone who emailed and texted and DMed! I got a lot of great app recommendations, a bunch of truly wild hacky systems, some seriously elaborate spreadsheeting, and much more. So here, as best as I can summarize it all in one place, is how the whole Installer community does its media tracking.

A few other specific apps that people really liked: Mela for tracking recipes; Copilot for tracking finances; Discogs for managing physical music; Habitica for tracking habits.

And a special shoutout to the most impressive system I heard about this week, from someone who asked to be identified only as Stealth1248, which I’m just going to quote in its entirety:

“I’ve looked into some of the collector apps, but they are expensive and seem like a lot of work. The joy of an Excel spreadsheet is that it’s super easy to modify to contain whatever kind of information I want. I can sort things, categorize them, keep track of if I already own them or not, etc.

“I also set up a couple Microsoft Forms to add things to them. The reason for that is 2-fold. 1: Excel on mobile (while possible) is really hard to work with. Forms adjust far better to a small vertical screen. You can set up free fill answers, multi select questions, fields that require dates/times/numbers, and make certain questions mandatory (so I don’t forget to fill out a certain field of data) 2: You can export the results from Forms as rows in an Excel document, so this makes it easy to add them to the main spreadsheet when I have time to sit down on a real (aka large with a horizontal screen) computer. Each question becomes a column of the spreadsheet and each complete survey response becomes a row.”

Here’s what the resulting spreadsheet looks like:

I love it. I’d never manage to keep it up to date, but I love it. Thanks again to everyone who wrote in with recommendations and ideas, we’ll do something like this again really soon!

Screen share

Every once in a while, I like to text Casey Newton just to see which note-taking app he’s using — because he seems to change his mind almost as often as I do and is just as willing to throw his life and hopes and dreams into anything that might help him do a little more a little more easily. And honestly, same. Casey gets it.

But on the other hand, Casey is also one of the most thoughtful internet users I know. If you’ve read his excellent Platformer newsletter or heard the delightful Hard Fork podcast, you know he’s deeply knowledgeable about how and why tech influences us. So I was curious to see what apps he uses, where they live, and how he thinks about his phone’s job in his life.

Here’s Casey’s homescreen (two of them, actually!), plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: iPhone 15 Pro.

The wallpaper: “The system wallpaper that shows you where on earth you are. I don’t think it has a name.”

The apps: Todoist, Barry’s (lets you book Barry’s classes on the go, or even more importantly, cancel them when you’re hungover), Clock, Cron (actually the more I look at Cron, the more I miss Fantastical. What am I doing to myself here?), Stripe, Pocket, Messenger, Google, Google Maps, App Store, Settings, Overcast, Spotify, Phone, 1Password, Threads (Threads has felt much more lively over the past week, and I basically think it’s three or four big releases away from achieving escape velocity), ChatGPT, Messages, Gmail, Bear, Safari, Chrome, Dark Sky (I will never delete this app icon because it reminds me of what we lost. Valar morghulis), Day One, Holedown (it’s 400 years old, is never updated, and can fill absolutely any amount of time between 10 seconds and 90 minutes), Grindr, Mem, Ivory, Artifact, Poe, Bluesky, Lutron, Amie, Capacities (my new favorite note-taking app, and if you’re in the market for a place to do your personal knowledge management, you should absolutely check it out), Epik, and Bonk.

I also asked Casey to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he said:

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 with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. And for way more great recommendations than I could include here, check out this Threads thread.

“Dex. It’s a ‘personal rolodex’ app: it lets you take notes about people in your life, set reminders to follow up, keep track of birthdays, and sync with Gmail / LinkedIn. For a freelancer, my memory skills leave much to be desired. It helps me remember details about conversations with people the next time we talk — both professionally and socially.” – Ryan

“Two recent excellent series, both on Apple TV Plus: Silo and Foundation.” – Dennis

“I use multiple browsers for different things, then I use BrowserFairy to automatically route apps and sites to specific browsers. For my newsletters and related things to read, I have BrowserFairy open Microsoft Edge. In Edge, I sync between devices, group tabs, and all the normal built-in-browser things Edge brings, especially vertical tabs (which is like Safari reader, just so much better).” – Brent

“Making a smart lamp using a Shelly RGBW and a custom firmware mod to get it to work with Apple Home. Probably a huge home network security risk, but it works. Also, too much Stardew Valley on Apple Arcade.” – Timothy

“After years of trying to warm up to GTD apps, with little success, I finally tried Agenda, and it really works for me. I’m not using it for note-taking (I have Apple Notes, Google Keep, and Obsidian for that). But the way it handles triaging to-dos and integrates with your calendar and Apple Reminders is really slick. It is loaded with features, looks beautiful, is constantly being updated, and has a unique paid tier that you can get via subscription or a one-time payment. But the free version is so good, most people will never need to pay. Finally, I’m GTD!” – David

“Just got Patrick Stewart’s new memoir, and I’m super excited to read it! I also got to see him during his book tour, which was amazing.” – Aaron

“Oh my god, I just got a Nitro Deck from CKRD, and it is absolutely my new favorite video game gadget. It’s a deck for the Switch, with Hall-effect joysticks, programmable rear bumpers, and a nice wide grip for big-handed folks like me that find the Joy-Cons cramped. I ordered the unit in GameCube purple and can confirm it is as righteous in person as it looks on the store.” – Nick

“The coolest thing I’ve seen recently, I don’t know how to share with anyone. It’s a movie called Hello Dankness that seamlessly cuts together everything from Napoleon Dynamite and Wayne’s World to Pen15 and RoboCop to create bizarre cross-world interactions and make a satirical commentary on the absurdity of the post-Trump political landscape. But because it’s basically a pirated work, I think you can only see it at film festivals and special screenings. Oh, and it has a bonkers trailer.” – Thomas

“I used iTunes exclusively until about 2018, and though it was bad software by the end, it did offer a music nerd a lot of things that Spotify and some of the others do not. There is an iOS app called Marvis, which has a pro version that offers many of those features. The rub is that it only works with Apple Music, but I’ve found that, for old iTunes holdouts, this isn’t much of a problem.” – John

Signing off

A few days ago, on The Vergecast, I mentioned that one of the best phone accessories I’ve ever bought is a really long — mine is 10 feet — charging cable. I have one next to my couch and another next to my bed, and y’all, the freedom that comes from not having to lean over to be closer to my outlets!

But then, I got an email from Eric telling me how wrong I was. Here’s what Eric said: “I used to work at Apple retail, and when people would come in looking for longer charging cables, they would balk at the price — longer Lightning (at the time) cables were (are?) expensive! — and I would always recommend going to Target and looking at regular extension cables. Way more options (colors, lengths, thicknesses, cord styles, etc...) and often way cheaper. Can’t tell you how many folks came back in just to say thanks for the idea, just saved them $25. All this to say: David! Don’t buy a 10-foot Apple USB cable, buy an awesome 12-foot extension cable instead.”

I’ve done some looking, and Eric’s not wrong. There are some lovely, inexpensive extension cables out there (I searched “braided extension cable” and found lots of good ones), and they’re way more multifaceted than just having one long USB charger. Apparently, I’m going to redo all my charging stations again. 

See you next week!