Not too long ago, I wrote some feedback to Iconfactory’s latest app, Tapestry. I just got some great feedback on that, from them, so I wanted to provide a response.

Here’s what they wrote, on Mastodon:

There’s a lot in your post. Thx for such thoughtful feedback, it’s appreciated. Some things like the ability to turn off the service name is coming. The thing to keep in mind is this: just because a particular part of the design doesn’t work for you, doesn’t mean it wasn’t designed that way for a reason that you may have not considered.

The service name is a perfect example. Lots of people are colorblind or even unsighted. To them they cannot tell posts apart simply by color.

So while we are going to add the ability to turn off the service name, that’s why it’s there by default. Avatars are never going to move to the right side. Their placement was carefully considered as was how they appear with their transparency.

Everything you see is the result of over a full year of design, testing by over 1,500 TestFlight backers & then tweaking to adjust things that didn’t work as well as originally planned.

In the end Tapestry may not be for everyone & that’s fine

If Tapestry ends up looking & behaving like Reeder or Surf or… what’s the point? We designed the app the way we wanted it to look & behave using feedback from our testers as a guide. The design will continue to evolve based on feedback like yours (which is thoughtful) but it can never be all things to all people.

Many have told us they love Tapestry so it seems to be doing a lot of stuff right but it can always be better. We’re gratified but will continue to improve going forward. 👍

— Iconfacory

Here’s my response:

Thanks for reading my feedback, and getting back to me with such an interesting response! And looking back at my own feedback, I see that it was harsher than what was intended… Sorry!

And Some Very Early Feedback

Greg Morris is someone whose blog I’ve followed for a while, but I didn’t know was a developer. But now he has released a third-party iOS client for Micro.blog!

As he’s mentioned, it happened “quite accidentally”, and it’s very early days. So this post is just me letting people know it exist, and providing some very early feedback.

To Greg:

Oooh, I love that you’re making this! I’m 100% in the target demographic for Micro Social. (Someone who uses, but doesn’t like, the default Micro.blog app — and is willing to pay for something better.)

I’ll try to provide some more useful feedback later, as I’ve used the app more, that you can use if you’d like. 🙂

Here are some first-impressions:

(In general I like it! So these “negative” comments are meant to be constructive. 🫶🏻)

I’m currently running an iPhone 13 Mini — so the phone is probably both older and smaller than what you use. ☺️

I had several crashes two updates ago, but it’s fine now. But I’ve noticed that avatars load slowly when I scroll (even if I scroll slowly). Maybe you can have the lazy loading start “earlier”?

I really like that you have avatars and names on a separate line, so you can use full-width content. (Instead of having weirdly large left-margins, that far too many apps has. I have strangely strong feelings about this…)

I also really like the “card look”:

However, on my Mini phone, I wish you were a bit more stingy with the padding, as the content gets too narrow. Especially on the timeline, due to the extra arrow on the right side. Is this needed?

I recently wrote a review of Iconfactory’s great app, Tot.

I like it – but editing text in it does make me miss my favourite places to do this: Paper and Bike.

And this process made me realise that the Paper dev has all* the pieces in place to give their take on an app like this. And it makes sense from a business perspective!

The pieces

1. A best-in-class text engine, that can jump between Markdown (plain-text) and Preview (rich text) Modes.
   • This is also already great on both Mac, iOS, and iPadOS. (No Apple Watch, though.)
2. The UI is made to be minimalistic, mimicking just a piece of paper.
3. Paper ships with several beautiful accent colours, and great support for them in the UI.
4. It also provides good export features. (Including for copy/paste.)

Here’s what I would do:

My suggestion for a name (also to make it easier to discuss here) is Slate.

A slate is a thin piece of hard flat material, historically slate stone, which is used as a medium for writing.

— Wikipedia

The next question is how much it’s OK to copy from others. Let’s pretend it’s fine to take all …

The best parts from Tot:

Fixed number of notes

I really like that Tot only supports 7 notes, that are all “internal” to the app.¹ I also love how they’re distinguished from each other by colours.²

Having exactly 7 would a bit on-the-nose… But one of the reasons I liked the “Slate” name, is that you could one-up, rhyme, and go for 8!³

Perhaps the 8 notes could be regular, accessible Markdown files in the app’s iCloud folder, to simplify automation? But that you can’t create other notes with the app, and it can’t “find” other notes if you place them there.

The business model

The 1.0 of Iconfactory’s latest app, Tapestry, just landed. Like the new Reeder, it’s a “unified timeline app”, that collects feeds from many different sources, like RSS, Reddit, YouTube, Mastodon, and more.

Some really like this idea (for instance for collecting Bluesky, Mastodon and Micro.blog in one place), while others don’t. I’m not yet sure where I stand.

I backed the Tapestry kickstarter way-back-when, so I’ve been able to beta test it. I like a lot of the ideas – and the way it handles feeds/connectors and default apps seems fascinating and robust. But due to some issues with the visual design, I’ve never been able to get into it… This post is my feedback letter to the devs, which might also be interesting to others.

Great designers

I spent €40 on the Kickstarter – but even if I’ll never get into the app, I won’t call it a complete waste. Because Iconfactory is a cool company, that I don’t mind supporting.

And they are excellent designers! So when I disagree with things about their work, I’m, of course, a bit nervous, heh.

Mini Gang, unite ✊🏻

I’m still rocking my trusty ol' iPhone 13 Mini. And I think part of my issues stem from me using a phone that’s probably smaller than what they’ve optimised for. I also get that it’s a 1.0, and that much of the work has gone into some really cool tech on the backend. So I hope it’s possible to see that this feedback comes from a place of love, and hope for the future!

And I get that many might like the things I don’t. So I think the answer is more customisation – like this settings screen from Mona:

Messy and cramped

I like colourful designs. And Tapestry has this neat idea, where it gives timeline entries different colours depending on the type.

It might not come across perfectly in screenshots, but with my Mini phone in hand, I find a combination of things here unpleasant.