A better way to manage all your screenshots

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 132, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy soccer, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been preparing for a month of getting absolutely nothing done during the World Cup. I’ve also been reading about Steven Spielberg and wearables and the Boeing 747, overloading on computer nostalgia thanks to The Virtual OS Museum, watching that Knicks game winner over and over and over, listening to the fabulous new This Was SportsCenter podcast and the fabulous old The Renner Files podcast, and trying to tame my increasingly disastrous inbox with Avec. It’s going… medium.

I also have for you an early candidate for movie of the summer, a new way to watch an old classic show, a portable camera and mouse worth a look, and much more. Let’s do this? Let’s do this.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / downloading / playing / listening to / slathering with sunscreen this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)

The big news of this week was WWDC, Apple’s annual developer conference. That’s where Apple announces all the most important software it has coming this year. This edition was pretty much all about AI: the new Siri that seems to be very good so far, a lot of generative image editing stuff that seems simultaneously cool and creepy and bad, and Apple Intelligence stuff all over the place. I have a lot of testing to do, and developers have a lot of updating to do, before we know exactly how that’s going to go.

But there’s one feature that’s already changing how I use my phone: widgets. Specifically, the monster, whole-page homepage widgets Apple now supports. Almost as soon as I started playing with them, I wound up completely redesigning my homescreen setup, so I have a page of apps and then what amounts to a side-scrolling set of giant widgets. I love it, and figured I’d share:

I’ve spent forever trying to build or find a great way to see everything I have going on — my calendar, my tasks, the weather, all that stuff — at a glance. Something about these big widgets feels uncluttered in a way I just love. I’m definitely going to end up with 100 pages of them.

On the off chance giant widgets excite you as much as they excite me, a couple of quick caveats. One, you probably shouldn’t install developer betas on your primary device; so far I’ve found iOS 27 to be pretty stable, but definitely bad for my battery life. Also, most apps don’t offer these huge widgets and won’t for a few months while developers figure out the new tools. Lastly, these widgets are big, but they still don’t quite take up the whole screen, and that might aesthetically irritate you too.

Still, while widgets may not be the most important feature of iOS 27, or even the one that most changes the way you use your phone (that’d be Siri in both cases), I am firmly in favor of any feature that gives me more information without making me open apps. Big-ass widgets do just that.

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.

“My kids and I *love* the new Bluey game, Bluey’s Quest for the Gold Pen. The story is fun for them, but it’s also a very good introduction to platform mechanics for kiddos. And there is basically no way to ‘die’ or lose items, so the stress level is very low (unlike when they watch me trying to figure things out in Breath of the Wild...)” — Craig

“​​Animal Kingdom on Netflix. Can’t believe I waited so long to watch it.” — Justin

“Might be too late, but I just downloaded Mosaic a few weeks back and absolutely love it. Might be the perfect app for baseball scores/news/info. Still in beta but so so good.“

“The indie web is alive and thriving. Bubbles is another attempt to highlight blogs you can follow. Built on top of the fediverse, and RSS, and web mentions.” — Renganathan

“I’m obsessed with the Mood.camera app. It recreates film photography, and I basically don’t use the built-in camera app on my iPhone anymore. There’s a lot of fun to be had creating your own presets or scouring the Mood subreddit to try out those put together by others.” — Tom

“Playing the final update to Destiny 2, it’s been the end of a 12-year era! Bittersweet, but it’s a good sendoff for a game that could have been so much more.” — Nikki

“I’ve been obsessed with the Teenage Engineering x Kanye West collab — a tiny stem player for ‘Jesus is King’ called SP-1 that I guess was largely unreleased. A few enterprising folks on Reddit and a group called Solderless ended up figuring out a way to let you wipe the Kanye album and load up new audio tracks. Huzzah! You can find it for under $50 and it’s super fun.” — Spencer

“The new Skrillex album, Soma, is so damn good. It might be his best work. Just dance banger after banger, I don’t get tired of it!” — Óli

“I recently started my summer college semester and I wanted to branch off from lugging a laptop around constantly, but also I enjoy taking notes, so I decided to move my iPad mini from the shelf to my desk again for like the millionth time. I found a neat little device called the Nillkin Cube Pocket Foldable, and truly it has been one of the best things I’ve purchased in a while. It folds up into a pocket-size square and it’s extremely light but also feels nice to type on when I wanna put a note into Obsidian. Also, gesture swipes work on it, so that’s another plus when I’m swiping through apps I refuse to close even though they aren’t being used.” — Brandon

I have included Widow’s Bay in this newsletter a few times already, but the wildest thing keeps happening: Every time I ask you all for recommendations, week in and week out the most popular thing in my inbox is Widow’s Bay. I should probably stop talking about it at some point, but as it happens I agree with you. It’s handily my favorite show of the year so far, a show with a premise and a shtick that absolutely should not work and instead somehow just keeps getting better.

The season finale is this week, and the show was just renewed for its second season. I’m preaching to the choir here, but I cannot say this strongly enough: GO WATCH WIDOW’S BAY. It is special. And we all need to talk about the finale when it drops.