Tapestry by Iconfactory
27 comments
·February 4, 2025jimkleiber
There was an app called Tapestry by Betaworks, inspired by Robin Sloan's idea of a tap essay, that I absolutely loved and wish it would come back.
> "I saw it, and I loved it so much,” Borthwick said. “It felt like an intimate and immersive form of reading on the phone. I thought, could you not make a platform to publish more of these?”
Still haven't found anything close to it and social media stories don't seem to match up.
https://allthingsd.com/20121106/when-an-app-is-an-essay-is-a...
markx2
The initial install lets me add two in-built choices
USGS Earthquakes being one, and that fills every slot.
I am unable to add any feeds I choose. I don't want a lot, maybe 3, just to see the UI and options I then have.
This feels pre-alpha.
Edit:
I have many RSS feeds (ty NetNewsWire). I have Bluesky, I have Mastodon, I have podcasts I follow ........ and Tapestry tempts me how?
microflash
A typical playbook of many iOS and macOS apps: crippled free version as a vehicle for subscriptions, with an extremely expensive lifetime offering that takes a decade to break even (very few apps make over a decade, a lot many just change the TOS to pretend lifetime plan did not exist in the first place after a few years of offering them).
On the first blush, there’s a hint of promise. I like that I can add both plain RSS and podcasts (have yet to find an RSS reader that handles podcast feeds seamlessly). Many other players (Reeder [1] and Surf [2]) are attempting to tackle similar usecase.
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/reeder/id6475002485
[2]: https://surf.social
DavideNL
Well... you can just subscribe for a month, cancel it immediately, and try it for month
The thing that annoys me more is the Apple dependency/tax ; i'd rather pay the Developer directly, in cases where they offer this on their own website (i always check.)
theshrike79
For developers the "Apple tax" is easier. They don't need to deal with refunds or customer complaints about payments not working.
IHLayman
“Even are ads are private…”
I don’t think that’s possible. Modern advertisers require those sweet sweet metrics, which can never be truly anonymized, and in most cases attempts to anonymize are half-hearted at best.
tuananh
The color scheme looks just like Twitterrific back in the day https://twitterrific.com/beyond
xnx
The same people made both.
TiredOfLife
TIL universal app means it runs only on iOS
soapdog
Universal in Apple terms means the binaries run on both Apple Silicon (ARM) and x64. It is mostly something that macOS users need to know.
woleium
It runs on _all_ types of mac! (except the ones marked as obsolete by king Tim)
n3storm
No twiXtter icon on frontpage XD
pfoof
Well, there is a ban on 3rd party apps using X. What surprises me is that Reddit is there?
troupo
One thing all these "all in one apps" get wrong is this: while I do want to consume multiple services in one app, I definitely do not want to consume them in a single unified timeline.
Mail clients have run into the same issue several years ago and still doggedly try to make "unified inbox" happen.
pavlov
Windows Phone 7 had a genuinely unique twist on the unified inbox.
The operating system deprioritized apps with their own feeds, and instead provided a number of "hubs" that were like topical inboxes that collected data from multiple APIs.
There was a People hub that showed your contacts aggregated across phone contact book, Windows Live, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter... Notifications about people you know would show up in this screen regardless of the service. And there was a Photos hub that similarly showed photos from everywhere: local, Facebook, etc.
It was a truly original idea for a social media oriented phone. But companies like Facebook and Twitter were not too happy about the idea of being API pipes with little or no control over the user interface on the user's phone. Of course they had some good reasons not to trust Microsoft on this, given Microsoft's past behavior. I think FB shut down the necessary APIs completely a few years later and replaced them with more limited options.
tuananh
exactly. having an unified inbox makes me feel like losing context. i dont want to keep checking which message is this, where is this coming from, how should i reply, etc....
TeMPOraL
Are there any "all in one apps" like this? That's the first one I ever saw. I've been wondering for years now, why ain't anyone trying it.
The unified timeline is the whole point. However, for me, this app gets two things wrong:
1) I'd also want IM feeds on the same timeline. Like, Messenger, Teams, WhatsApp, etc. I know it's probably impossible due to how obstructionist and anti-user the chat vendors are, but I keep dreaming about it. Most chat conversations are, in my mind, in the same general category as HN links or incoming e-mail: "thing that I need to pay a minute of attention up front, and then possibly 15+ minutes dealing with".
2) It's iOS only.
milen
We created the most popular (at the time) “all in one” app for macOS back in 2008 called EventBox [1].
It aggregated RSS, Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Reddit.
So it’s a very old idea that’s just coming back - like a lot of things, it goes in cycles.
We ended up selling the software to another company. My personal advice - never build your business on top of other companies data/APIs, they can cut you off at any point.
94b45eb4
Does the new Reeder app count?
troupo
> I'd also want IM feeds on the same timeline. Like, Messenger, Teams, WhatsApp, etc.
Chats: yes. Because each separate chat is a separate room, and ultimately, for a personal use, there are not that many of them.
Feeds from social media though? A hard pass. Especially now, when so many people cross-post the same content to multiple networks.
doix
> Feeds from social media though? A hard pass. Especially now, when so many people cross-post the same content to multiple networks.
Feels like a solvable problem. Do a string comparison and then just put multiple icons next to the post.
Valodim
I mean... the unified timeline is literally the number one feature this app advertises. If you find that doesn't work for you, their product vision just doesn't align with your preferences. What's the point of even engaging if you know they don't build what you want on such a fundamental level?
esafak
The source could simply be another attribute to filter and organize by.
Would only be interesting with Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc. support. ToS prevent that, so no business would attempt that integration. However, that doesn't mean it can't be done. I look forward to (and might write my own) agent to "read" Twitter, Instagram, etc. and put them into a user friendly and ad-free format.