AppleVis Extra 106: Chatting with The Icon Factory, helping you weave your social media feeds and more together with Tapestry

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…