In this edition of the AppleVis Extra, David Nason and Thomas Domville speak to Ged Maheux from The Icon Factory, the developers behind innovative new universal timeline app, Tapestry. Long time iPhone users will be very familiar with the company, previously responsible for the highly popular and highly accessible app Twitterrific. Download Tapestry from the App Store.
Transcript
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by Aiko, an AI-powered transcription app. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.
Hello there and welcome to the AppleViz extra podcast episode number 106.
My name is David Nason and I'm delighted to be joined by AppleViz colleague and well-known voice Thomas Domville to talk today and talk to the developer of Tapestry a brand new app for iOS or pretty new.
How are you Thomas?
I'm doing great Dave.
This is gonna be amazing interview.
Tapestry is something just so revolutionary and something so unique and that's what's gonna make this so special.
Definitely it's it's a really cool app Tapestry.
It's from the icon factory who you may remember from Twitterific.
So social media has changed so much Twitterific was one of those victims and our users with us when Twitter cut off third party apps.
So Tapestry is part of the new the Fediverse that's the open social web call it what you will and hopefully a big part of the future of social media.
So without further ado we can jump into our chat with Ged.
Ged thanks for joining us it's great to meet you.
Yeah me nice to meet you too thanks for having me it's yeah it's really we were we're delighted to get in touch with you and there was a lot of I guess excitement and a lot of talk on I guess mastodon specifically for me but I guess in in the blind community and on AppleViz.com of course when we saw that icon factory had released a new app so do you want to first of all tell us a little bit about Tapestry but we might also go back and talk about some of the stuff icon factory have done in the past as well.
Yeah boy we've been in the home for so long it's hard to know where to start we've been doing this the 2026 will be our 30th year in business so we've been making apps for quite a while and some of your listeners may know us from Twitterific we made one of the first third-party Twitter clients back in the day and that of course has gone the way of the dodo but we've put our attention towards the open web and the Fediverse and created a new app called Tapestry which aims to be a unified personal timeline for all of your social or online needs it can pull in RSS feeds YouTube channels podcasts blue sky accounts mastodon accounts microblog and then a whole host of others to present them in a chronological unified timeline that you can control yourself how you read you decide what you see and what you don't see not some algorithm not some billionaire dictating what good doesn't doesn't go into your feed and we launched at the beginning of February and it's going pretty well I'm pleased with how it's been going so that's great there's a lot to dig into there I suppose question one is why did you think this was the way to go or why did you want to create an app that does this well after Twitter closed itself off to third-party developers we knew we wanted to do something and we turned our attention personally to Mastodon because it was open and people a lot of our friends jumped on there at the time that was before blue sky came out getting around and we really found we really like Mastodon it offered a lot of opportunities and and no algorithm and and all of that and so we put our efforts in we we thought about making a Mastodon specific client but Craig Hockenberry our lead developer he had the the notion to make something that was more open than just Mastodon and a way to read content from across the open web if it's not behind a walled garden if that it's available on the open web then you can probably add it to tapestry and that was the impetus behind it and he created a proof of concept we created a Kickstarter and got it funded and more than funded we met some stretch goals and beyond and I spent the last year working on it that's amazing I think Thomas you'll agree that and it's interesting we coincidentally I guess as a community when Twitter went away and actually even before you know really when Twitter stopped supporting third-party apps was a huge closing of the gates for us we kind of felt as a community or a lot of us anyway we didn't like the Twitter app itself I didn't even like the concept maybe so a lot of us went to Mastodon I guess fair to say as well isn't it Thomas oh yeah I totally agree I mean well you know it wasn't just a blow to us but it was also a massive blow to icon factory as Jeb was saying is that you know Twitterific was their bread and butter and they've been around for eons and just to see that that disappear was just it was just a heartbreaker for all of us and we lost something that was so dearly to us and we use on a daily basis and but you know soon after that and I think that you guys made a excellent decision and not pigeonhole yourself into a particular platform like Mastodon because I think that was a lesson learned with Twitter and making it such a open web concept was just beautiful I know you guys won multiple awards with Apple this community for the golden Apple's award for Twitterific and I just probably say that's gonna be easily done for you guys with tapestry so we were excited yeah you guys have been working on tapestry for a long time when did you guys start on tapestry yeah well Craig really started on it over a year ago probably a year and a half ago well and creating the the the prototype it was really really rough and it was just a concept at that time and we tabled it for a long time because we had other priorities we have other you know we have a whole host of apps that we work on and there's only so many of us there's a we only have two engineers and at the moment we have three designers so we can only work on so many internal projects at a time we also do client work and we have to divide up our our resources between that as well so it took a while to get from the prototype stage to the Kickstarter and but once that happened and once it got funded we dedicated ourselves to working on tapestry full-time and we've been working on it in earnest since last March so it will be a year this March it's well developed I mean I think David could probably say the same I mean the concept is just gorgeous I if this is probably the best app I've ever played with just simply because it saved me so much time from opening up three four or five different apps to do what tapestry does right right right it just puts it all in one place and the timeline it's just it's just gorgeous I'm able to use as you state one of my favorite things is I can check my podcast I can check my YouTube I can check Macedon it was like it just was endless it was just like oh my gosh this is so enlightening I love that YouTube is in there as well I think that's radiant because I wouldn't even expect right you know that was that was huge for us it it really be I when we first started working on it I will be honest I myself wasn't totally sold on the concept of it because I'm I'm the type of person that opens Macedon and obsessively reads it and that's what I do and then in my spare time I'll go and check YouTube or I'll look for a blog post or something like that but I didn't I wasn't convinced of how much I would like it until it really started to come together and and now I've really do see some of the advantages of it especially when it comes to things like YouTube's and podcasts that they're just right there they're presented along with everything else and when one comes along if you don't have time to read it or listen to it or watch it now you can mark it for later and come back to it at another time and just continue reading scrolling and reading and I so it does save time I think because you can you know great different timelines and I suppose I would have some things that like I find more unmatched it on I get more kind of tech news and tech discussion on maston but I get more of my sport and things like that on blue sky and the fact that I can kind of mix these things in into one app I guess is is one of the strengths as well and right the different timelines they can create as well if you want to explain a little bit about that yeah you can if you if you subscribe to the app there's you can use the app for free it comes for as a free download and you can use it perfectly fine in the single unified all feeds timeline and you can go down and read through and scroll that but if you want to create custom timelines and kind of create a granular experience for your likes and interests then you'll need to subscribe and subscribing gets you a couple things removes there is advertising but there's a special personal ad network that we created in the in the app of only the things that we want ourselves to be advertised and we don't do any tracking or any any of that that those garbage ad network Google and all of those guys do so even the ads are designed with privacy in mind and tapestry but if you subscribe you can remove those ads you can also create custom timelines you can create what we call muffle and mute filters that'll let you filter terms phrases people and other things from the timeline that you do not want to see which I personally have found quite helpful in these days and times and you can customize the appearance of the timeline the color of the feeds and things like that so if you create custom timelines you can group them according to your your likes and preferences or even to the type of media if there's you just want a podcast timeline you can create that or just a videos timeline you can create that and which is really helpful one of the terms people will come across maybe when they first download the app is connectors can do do you want to talk about what those are and how because that I think for me the terms I have to kind of get my head around a little bit yeah tapestry does what it does by it has these these plugins basically they're called connectors and each one is specifically tailored for a source on the web one is for RSS or XML blog feeds websites and so on another is YouTube another is audio podcasts and so on so there's these all of these plugins within the app called connectors that let you input a URL or a destination on the web and that connector feeds that content through the app and to your timeline and one of the best parts about tapestry and the part that Craig was Craig's brainchild was opening up the connectors to third-party developers so we created a an API where developers can come and get documentation and tools so that they can like their own connectors for tapestry so if there's a special type of content on the web that you want to get at but it's not a standard web page or something maybe have a smart appliance in your home and that appliance puts the information on the web somewhere but it's not easy to get at you could in theory write a connector for it and have the fridge put that information into your tapestry timeline that's a really obscure geeky example but it's just you know one thing that you could you could do with connectors to make tapestry more extensible more open to to really niche kinds of things someone has already written a connector for pixel fed which is the Fediverse version of Instagram to get photography into your timeline which is awesome another person has written a connector for the App Store so you can see what apps are featured every day on the App Store right in your tapestry timeline there's lots of examples we're working on getting these connectors up onto the tapestry website so that people can browse them and download them and install them and make use of them that was gonna be my next question but it is it is real sign that you know the open web is very much your commitment then you know what I mean that you're you're welcoming people in to make tapestry better it's really important to us really after what happened with Twitter we we really learned a lesson there and I hate to say it but it really opened our eyes and pushed us in this direction and I think it's a good thing I think there's a resurgence of people discovering RSS feeds and and blogging and and all of these things and it's more important than ever yeah these connectors are just simply amazing I think that's the the most powerful thing apart about tapestry is that not only you're allowing other consumers to create their own connectors but that's this beautiful plug-in you can tell it's really well thought out and designed to be able to grow and add things to it you know ironically we probably laugh about this but I found a roundabout way to get Twitter on to the tapestry there's a service out there that allows you to tap into that you just put in what feed that Twitter does and it pulls it on to their server and then you just pull from tapestry so I had to laugh about that but this timeline I like to talk about because you that is like the gold part of this really because what this does it eliminate the noise for me yeah I'm like you I used to open up Macedon but it's just so noisy there was just so much to absorb and sometimes there's just too much for me mentally and there's overwhelming right so this timeline you kind of hit on it that allows you to create timelines based what you want so I have one this noise free just focus area right right and then you can create these other profiles that allows you to put more noise in and you can import OPMLs which is kind of huge right yeah that's a great example I actually know someone who did it's really clever what they've done they take all of their feeds all of their their blog feeds their mastodon feeds everything else and then they've created a special rule and if the if the the feed contains cute cats it puts it into this particular timeline so he has a timeline that is just kitties and just you know it's it's his like his moment of Zen timeline where he can go and just not have to worry about anything he just scrolls and everything he see is there is just cute cats and and that's brilliant and that those are the kinds of things that it's so gratifying when you make an app and you see how people use it that you never anticipated how they were going to do that that you I would never have thought of that people are are so creative and they're so and ingenious sometimes and it's it's very very gratifying when stuff like that happens I just thought it was great mmm I tell you what's really gratifying and I think David or agree is that this is a really accessible for voiceover users on the iOS and I can't help to say thank you so much I mean you guys did a great job during the Twitterrific days how accessible was and that's why it was so successful in the blind community and that you guys kept that up with tapestry and do you have are there people on staff that helps you with that or is that something that you kind of done over time you learned on your own and you just get inputs from blind users to when something doesn't work right yeah we we've really relied on the community for this aspect of of our development thankfully we we collected a fantastic group of beta testers during Twitterrific and they provided the the feedback and direction and suggestions that we use to improve Twitterrific when it was popular and when it was at the height of its popularity and so when it came time to do tapestry we called on a bunch of those people again and asked them if they would wanted to test to beta test tapestry and thankfully they did they they came right along and they gave us their feedback and told us how we could improve it's tough you know for us we don't we don't use the app with voiceover we of course we we just scan it visually and and so we rely on that kind of of feedback in order to know what we are doing right and what we could be doing a lot better and like anything else it can always be better there's things that can always be improved in any application the thing that we're dedicated to is we would definitely want to improve it we want to make it as accessible as possible over time there's again where our resources are limited we have to determine what is the next thing we're going to work on what is the next part of the app that's going to improve and 1.0 out of the gate wasn't as as friendly to navigate in the voiceover as possible but we got we made positive steps to combine those those rotor actions and and make it a whole lot less verbose and the point updates have increased that a great great deal and received a lot of great feedback from the blind community about that there's more work to do there for sure so I was to say I think it took you all of about two days to get the first major update to voiceover out so I think that was that was pretty good I feel like it's story I mean the reason why it only took two days is because when we submitted the first update I fully expected the app to not get through app review I fully expected it to be rejected multiple times that's just the way of the world on the App Store and so we had built in like two weeks into the schedule to get through app review and then it didn't we submitted it and it was approved it was approved within a day it just went right through and so we had this two weeks we told the press and everything we were going to be released on this day and so we had two weeks in between when it was approved and when it was supposed to be released and we've been working we worked all those two weeks on the first point update so by the time that 1.0 came out 1.0.1 was ready to go like nothing that's really cool and I was gonna ask actually like a lot of companies will say the right things about accessibility but often you find accessibility is quote on the roadmap but you're waiting and waiting whereas you guys it's it genuinely seems to be a priority like where does that go back to is it back to the Twitter if it days is it before that how did accessibility for icon Factory become a priority that's that's a really good question and I don't know exactly when it became a priority but Twitter I think was definitely one of the catalysts for it because when you have an app that people rely on every day to do their daily consumption of news of social interaction with other people it becomes part of their workflow becomes part of their lifestyle and so you're going to hear about it from people who want to be able to use it but can't those people who need it to be accessible for one reason or another whether they're blind or they have color blind or they're they have some kind of stigmatism so they're they can see but not as well as other people and and so they start to ask for these things and it really starts to hit home about how important it is because if I was in their position I would want to be able to use it too and it's just it's just doing the right thing it's it's I don't know why I mean I kind of understand why some developers in some companies don't think that it's important to make their apps or their products as accessible as possible it's and it's an afterthought for some of them or they don't want to spend the money on it but it has really shown us especially with when Twitter if it came along that how important it is to to make your what you work on and what you care about as available and as accessible to a wide the widest possible audiences as there is and just it's now it's firmly ingrained in us we we when we started out designing tapestry and everything we knew we wanted it to be completely accessible I designed the timeline with certain things in mind so that they would be readable under different circumstances I had learned all of those lessons from Twitter effect and I put them to use when I design a lot of the aspects of tapestry so you can really see it we can really see it and you know I like to talk about another option in there that I think it deserve mentioning is that not just but the connectors but I've also noticed that there's possibility in the end this going to be mind-blowing if this takes off but I noticed that for each feed you add in there on to tapestry can be customized and configured separately and the reason I say that is the biggest thing is that if you do not want to have tapestry open it through in a browsers or whatever yeah I noticed that you have a component in there that will allow third parties to take advantage of the API so for example I will say the podcast for example I think some people may have some issues with that because yes you can play it but it's very limited but it would be ideal if I would be able to open that in overcast or Castro and that is there right so I've wonder if you can explain a little more about that to us and how that idea is supposed to work yeah the one of the limiting things about tapestry is that you can't actually post in tapestry if you are looking at a mastodon post for instance and you want to reply to it you cannot simply just tap a button and reply directly inside of tapestry you have to use what we call our open in the open in icon and then it sends that mastodon post out to your app of choice it whether it's the browser is one ivory from tap bots is another Mona is another so you can set tapestry to open certain feeds in the in the application of your choice the one that you if you like to use the most and then act on it and then when you're done you simply jump right back into tapestry we did that for a bunch of different reasons but one to include posting and replying it would have been a huge technical hurdle for 1.0 and we already it already took a year to get into the app store without posting and replying and all of this so we've built into this we built into the app the concept of open in and if the application has a URL scheme that we can make use of in tapestry like ivory does or Mona does then we can send the feed out to these third-party apps and you can act in them podcasts are problematic they are not like other kinds of feeds I'm I'm not a programmer I'm not I'm a designer so I don't know the technical aspects of why exactly that is but it is something that is on the list to improve in tapestry we would love to be able for you to go into your feed preferences and say open all podcasts and overcast or open all podcasts in Apple podcasts and hopefully we'll be able to do that so for some reason the URLs that are hosted by Apple or on the podcasts are not the same and they think they're not understood by the code the same way as other things and then I wish Craig was here he could speak to this but I can't specifically so but that's the short of it is we know we want to be able to do that and hopefully we'll be able to eventually and you guys support subreddit is that what I saw on there is a connector that you can use yes you can you can load in reddit feeds and this we just put out an update today 1.0.3 that will even let you specify the not only the subreddit but the type of feeds there's hot new there's a couple other different flares I think they're called with with subreddits that you can you can follow those flares with the feed so if you want to filter out the non new stuff you can do that now in tapestry pretty cool that's what you check that out Dave now you can add subreddits absolutely and especially since cuz reddit sort of seemed last year or a year to go to follow the Twitter shut down third parties route so it's great that we actually have that option in tapestry I think that as a whole this has just been brilliant everything you guys done with it and I'm so glad you guys were able to come out with it and what a splash it was and I really love the aspect that it is very accessible for those that want to use the free tier it is very wonderful to use and I love that your ads choices that you mentioned that's not so intrusive and they're actually good ads I mean they're talk about right other apps that might be relevant to you iOS or Mac users which is kind of cool I'm sure a lot of people gonna ask this too is tapestry does this work under the Mac and is there a Mac version coming yeah you can use it on the Mac currently it's in emulation from the iPad version so it's not currently a native Mac app but we just announced yesterday on the icon Factory blog that a native version is coming we're going to be starting to work on a native version of tapestry thanks in part from a grant that we receive from tumblr and yeah they they have been amazing they just while we were in the Kickstarter while we were developing it they came out of the blue and said they love tapestry they like the concept of it and they wanted to help it along how they could and they they decided to help us monetarily with it and that money is is what we're going to be using to fund the native Mac version for the desktop and we were thrilled about it and we can't say thanks enough but then but also to the people of course who have subscribed and purchased and Kickstarter the all the Kickstarter backers they're the ones that got us to where we are today we wouldn't be here without them and we're grateful to all of them for their support and their patience while we have worked on this app and we know it's taken some time to get from point A to point B but we they've really been wonderful as has all our sponsors so we're excited about that no idea how long the Mac version will take we don't know but one thing at a time right yeah and does it because he mentioned iPad as well so does it support timeline syncing that kind of thing across devices yes it's your reading position via iCloud from iPhone to iPad and even to the Mac then the later version will do it now but there are some caveats there so it's not as robust and everything on the Mac of course because it's emulated so people have asked us about support for vision OS but we've just not gonna go there so wait and find out if there's a product there yeah first right yeah it's a cool name as well actually that was one completely random question because it is obviously if it makes sense as a name but where did it come from or who came up with this can you take the credit I I can take partial credit for it we naming things is always the hardest of anything it really is whenever we go to name our apps or our products we have long brainstorming sessions and we just throw everything out there and then we narrow it down over time to things that we think are are more they're gonna stick or people they're gonna resonate with people or whatever and also to what of course what URLs are available and all these things and tapestry was one of the frontliners early on we weren't sure if we were going to be able to use it and when we consulted with our lawyers and everything and they advised us to call it icon factory tapestry because there are already tapestry products and all of those in that exists and so but in the app store yes icon factory tapestry so it's it seemed like a natural fit it's a it's a weaving together of threads of different kinds of content content into a patchwork or a fabric or a quilt of stuff that you get to use and enjoy it seemed like a natural fit yeah I think it's a great choice Thomas did you have anything else on your mind no I think what we have discussed really shows the highlight of what tapestry is and I think the magic begins when you start to put your puzzle together what you like about a timeline and that's what's so beautiful about it is that it was so unique and designed so well that it's no longer tied to a timeline that a app wants you to have or what they think you need to have tapestry does something totally different it allows you to create your own timeline and this is something that will remove a lot of the noises and you can make it as noisy as you want and that's the beautiful part about it I think that people knowing that you can import OPMLs that can open up a lot of doors that you already have and exist and and you guys created something remarkable and this is one of those apps that I will say doesn't come along very often that is so impactful to everyone not just the blind community this just is it's just so well done and you guys made it to the point where the future of tapestry is rich because you have opened it up to so many different connectors and API's and allow third-party developers to interact as you mentioned with Mona and ivory with the mastodon and the possibility is endless so I think you guys got a huge hit on your hand and congratulations on this for doing such an awesome job of creating this I can't say thanks enough for that it it's it's tough you know being in the app store right now it really is to get seen and noticed and to have enough people discover and download your app and then buy it to even make it a viable product is really tough it is it's it's unless you're doing it as a hobby if you're doing it as a hobby then that's a totally different thing but doing it to make a living is challenging these days and so hearing this kind of feedback is really really great it helps us to know that what we've done is useful and and people will want to use it and people it improves people's lives it doesn't hurt people's lives or or you know stuff like that it it really means a lot to all of us who work on it to hear feedback like that so thank you from the bottom of our hearts thank you very much mm-hmm thank you to you know that's got to be hard that's got to be tough you guys had such a huge set of subscribers and followers when you had Twitterific and that just went into you know just it just went poof and that was just everything you ever put into that and your followers are gone and now you have to redevelop everything you were so hard for it and do it all over again that makes it hard but I notice a lot of mainstream articles really putting tapestry to the test and saying a lot of positive things about it but I think it's just gonna be the word of mouth hey they're back they're back and better than ever and that's what I want to reach out to the blind community is that if you guys like Twitterific get tapestry of love you will love it I know Dave and I I can't say enough just to have YouTube connectors I just it's hard to explain but that's just huge to me but to have that with my podcast with my Macedon with my bullies guy with my subreddit with tumblr it's just like wow this is so amazing is that the same experience you have felt when you first played played with it Dave yeah I think it is absolutely just that ability to get it once you you put that little bit of work in at the beginning to kind of make it the way you want it and then you just keep keep tweaking it and it's great and I think it's making a great case for the open web I suppose as well because like you said at the very start you know you're getting with there's a certainly an increasing community of people who want to get away from the the algorithms and that the billionaire deciding that who should see and into you know that open web and Fediverse kind of area and hopefully that's where the growth is you know that's what we'll see and top streaming that you've talked about so much about what it does and we're on it what does a v.1 v 1.03 so there's still so much ground as well I'm sure yeah we're starting on 1.1 now and there's gonna be a lot of great things in that so I'm really excited yeah I'm excited for your plugins I think that's gonna be a huge if we can get that going so so many creative ideas to add more things to it the better it be amazing yes this has been an awesome interview and was there anything you would like to talk to us about maybe any insight or something that you thought of or last minute things you would like to talk about I can't think of anything that you guys have covered a lot of of topics here and ask some really great questions and I always enjoy talking about app development in general and I I don't get to do it often I I'm not one that goes to Mac worlds or Expos and and does that kind of thing so I relish the opportunity to to talk shop as it were and especially about accessibility since if this isn't a topic that's near and dear to our hearts so I think you guys have done great I really wanted to say thank you for inviting me and again for your your awesome feedback of the app it's it's something to be still doing this after so long and we wouldn't be doing it without people like you who helped to support us and get the word out about our our our work so it means a lot to us and we appreciate it more and more than you know thank you very much you bet you know I I'm gonna give you credit to that's one thing I should mention too is that the design aspect is simplicity and that's what makes this even better is that there isn't much to it there's a settings area and then there's the area that you can select a different option for your timeline and that's it it's just simple it just works I'm a believer in simplicity is is the key things are way too complicated the older I get the more complicated things get and it's it's just I can't deal with it we all feel that way yeah yeah that's great well I think on that we can wrap up and just say a huge thank you to you get from icon factory for joining us and thanks to everyone for listening