Tapestry by Iconfactory
This is in no way a sponsored post (I don’t know if they even do that kind of thing), but I wanted to highlight a fascinating new app from a fantastic group of developers. They have made countless high quality apps that offer pure functionality without sacrificing form.
Iconfactory, the makers of Wallaroo, xScope, Linea Sketch, Tot and now Tapestry.
Iconfactory’s blog post explains it better than I can, but I’m gonna write about it anyway! Tapestry provides a new way to aggregate various data sources in one chronological stream. It also provides powerful tools for content filtering and blocking, though a premium subscription is required to enable those features. It is compatible with a wide variety of data sources right out of the box, but they have also built in tools for expansion through third party extensions called Connectors. Adding a Connector is as simple as importing from a local file, though there are not many examples of this available for testing at the time of writing. There is, however, fantastic documentation provided by the team at Iconfactory that walks you through building your own connector. Be sure to check out their official docs to get started!
There are other apps that have attempted this, such as feeeed, which is an RSS reader with some other functions built in that make it easier to discover new data sources from across the web. Feeeed also supports “web-snippets” allowing you to get information from a website which does not provide any sort of RSS.
RSS readers can also handle much of the same content, (YouTube videos, Mastodon, Reddit, etc.), but do not do well outside of those categories. There are some tools that will convert non-RSS-friendly feeds into something that an RSS reader can process, but that takes extra setup and overhead. I mostly use my preferred RSS reader, NetNewsWire for long form blog post reading, while I have used Feeeed to handle all the other “more-social” content, like videos, reddit posts, mastodon accounts, and so on.
Tapestry makes it easy to get started and recommends a few excellent sources the first time you open the app. I was happy to see some of my favorite authors and content creators pop up as recommended (though this has nothing to do with algorithms, they are just really cool people that make great content). It also allows you to sign in to the Mastodon connector, using your Mastodon account. I think there are some restrictions on which servers this will work with, but my account is at mastodon.social so it works just fine. Signing-in gives you the option to automatically add all the accounts that you follow on Mastodon to your Tapestry timeline, and manages them as all being under one feed, so it is easy to remove all of them at the same time, if you had to, rather than hunting down each individual account that is added. You can also just follow an individual mastodon account without needing to sign in at all.
Tapestry does not yet allow you to get information from Instagram or Facebook due to the closed nature of those platforms.
Tapestry is available as a free download, with features like app customization, and content filtering rules available with a premium subscription or lifetime purchase.