Well, I don’t know why am I surprised about this, but The Iconfactory did it again! The recently release Tapestry app has proven to be the best new app for Internet consumers in recent memory. And especially after yesterday’s update V1.1, it has truly cemented its place on my homescreen!
As you can see from the screenshot above, cementing a place on my homescreen is no easy feat. Since we got the option to place icons wherever we want, I’ve drastically reduced what makes the cut, in favour of search for anything else.
I’ve always been a great consumer of the internet via RSS, and my main social media of choice was Twitter. With those two mediums, I had a very good hold on news of interest: tech, sport, major events. But since the implosion of Twitter and the rise of the fediverse, I think many of us consumers of the internet got thrown in the same predicament: where do you go? which app do you download?
Thanks to various mirror accounts, I managed to move fairly easily to Mastodon, bridging the sports accounts (which are still going strong on Twitter). RSS never really changed, but some of the apps got “complacent”, not being engaging to use anymore. Then throw Reddit into the mix. I’ve always been a lurker (only recently starting to contribute more) and I was one of the many users that was left stranded by the demise of Apollo, being forced to use the ungodly official Reddit app.
So in essence, my homescreen and app usage was a mess. Multiple apps, not really happy with the mix overall, making it a chore rather than a pleasure the staying on top of news.
Enter Tapestry! The clever people of The Iconfactory managed to find, in my opinion, the perfect recipe for media consumption: a unified stream of all the sources you can possibly think and imagine, ordered chronologically, with no algorithm in sight!
Being a self confessed “internet completionist”, the main requirement for any app I’ve ever used was to have a robust sync and memory, allowing me to consistently pick up where I left and continue perusing the news. To compensate for this, over the years I ended up having duplicate news sources across different medias, as a way to make sure I wasn’t going to miss anything – the downside of course was seeing the same thing over and over across different timelines.
This was the first great benefit of Tapestry: by putting everything together in the same stream, it immediately highlighted where the duplicates were and helped me rationalise my sources, streamlining my consumption.
And now thanks to the latest update, that enables custom feeds, I have 3 social media apps in 1: one custom timeline with RSS, one for Mastodon and the last one for a few subreddits I like (HomeAssistant & 3d printing!).
Can’t wait to see where the app will go next, but you’ve got a super fan already!!