- Hey guys, welcome to another episode of "Double Tap" on YouTube. I am Steven Scott, and today I'm zooming back to an interview we did on "Double Tap" all about the subject of social media and getting access to news. Now, of course, as blind people, keeping up to date with all these different social media platforms, all of these news feeds can be a real challenge. Of course, there's RSS readers and now there's Mastodon, and now there's X and there's Facebook and all of that. How do you bring it all into one place? Could it be possible to bring everything into one single application so that we can follow along? Well, that is coming soon thanks to Project Tapestry from Iconfactory. Now, you might remember Iconfactory. They were behind the amazing Twitterrific app, which sadly, let's just say lost its way through no fault of Iconfactory. I got the chance to sit down with Gedeon Mayheux from the company to learn about their new product and find out how they've gone on since the end of Twitterrific. - Thanks for having me again. - And under slightly happier circumstances this time because we're talking about something new and exciting. I'm not even, well, I was gonna say, I was not gonna ask you your thoughts on what's happening over at, is it X these days? - X, yes. Yes. Yeah. - I'm just leaving that open for you just to go if you want. - We'll just let it go because best forgotten and not remembered as far as I'm concerned, so. - But it is interesting because this new app that you are working on at the moment kind of ties in social media, but also ties in other forms of media as well. So tell us about Project Tapestry. - Yeah, so after, you know, Twitter kicked us off and all third parties from Twitter, we kind of watched our friends and people we followed online split up and go their separate ways. And of course, soon after that, a whole bunch of other social media services cropped up in the wake to kind of fill the vacuum. You know, we have, Mastodon has always been there, but it became popular once again. And then there's Threads and Bluesky, and so, it's become very fragmented and we're not sure, people jump from service to service. And if you want to track a particular person's posts, it can be tricky. And we started to try to think of ways, well, how can we help this? How can we solve this problem or try to solve this problem. Anyway. And that was the brainchild behind Tapestry, which seeks to create a unified timeline of most, you can't, obviously we can't pull in posts from Twitter or Facebook because those are walled gardens now, but services like Mastodon, Bluesky, blogs, your favorite blogs, your favorite news sites, earthquake data, satellite data, anything that has a public IP address, really, where you can get at the source for those things, can be, in theory, woven into Tapestry. And hopefully, eventually Threads will be available for that too. I mean, they're going to federate, that's the plan behind it. So we're confident or at least optimistic that Threads will be included in that as well. - I mean, the great thing here is, you're obviously developing this as a mainstream app, but you know, we know you and we know the apps you've created in the past. We all remember Twitterrific and how terrific that was. That was a, almost attempt a pun, but it didn't quite go as I intended. But you know, the thing here is you're developing apps that are great and really useful, but I have to say from our point of view as a blind, you know, audience here who are interested in new apps, the first thought we always have is, well, how accessible is it gonna be for us? - Right. - You've already said in your website, I was reading on the Kickstarter, you know, it's right in there. You've got full support for voiceover, so that is just like ticked off right away, right? You're gonna continue to support blind people. - Yeah, that's very, very important. It always has been for all of our apps. And even more so with the social type, you know, in that field, where it's completely accessible and easy to navigate and easy to, you know, pull in the sources and browse what you're looking for and filter what you don't want out. You know, that's one of the main things that we want to be able to try to do with Tapestry as well, to get rid of some of the noise or the spoilers or the politics or whatever you want. But to still be aware of those sources from multiple places in the internet, but filter them to down to just what you wanna focus on and what what you're concerned with the most. - Yeah, I mean, in the blind world, especially RSS is still very popular and it's something that we always try and seek out RSS feeds and we try and seek out apps that are cross platform that allow us to be able to, you know, navigate all these different sources on our devices. I mean, at the minute, a lot of blind people are using an app called Lire, L-I-R-E, which is a really good app for, because it goes across both iOS and Mac OS, not quite in Windows, but you know, there are options there as well. A lot of these apps are often fragmented themselves and, you know, you have to still go off to another app to get your content and what you're trying to build, I guess, is something that can bring all that together. - Correct. I mean, as much as we can, it's not possible, obviously, to do everything that we would like to do in the app, nor do we really want to. I mean, everyone has their own favorite Mastodon app or you know, their own favorite web browser. And so, you know, ultimately the goal is to be able to specify those apps within Tapestry, so that when you do want to interact with a post, you could easily click a button and tap something and it will take you out to that particular app, so that you can interact, you can reply, favorite it, join a conversation, whatever you want to do. But Tapestry becomes the reading position, the bookmark, the I've read this, I'm aware of this app, so that you can keep track of these multiple things in a single place, and you don't have to launch five, 10 apps every day constantly, and you're switching around and looking for all these different things. It can get really overwhelming and that's really the goal so. - Now normally an app like this, I would imagine would appear on the Apple App store, it might have a fee attached to it, it may have in app purchases. Why is it being talked about in Kickstarter? What's the reason for that? - Yeah, I mean, it really is economics. You know, we did this with Twitterrific for Mac OS. We did a Kickstarter back in 2017 for Twitterrific for the Mac, and it worked out really great. People were really willing to support the project and remove some of the risk for us. We're a small company. We don't have venture capital. We don't have angel funding to support and bolster these software development efforts from us. So it's really a risk to spend a good part of a year, maybe a year developing a piece of software, get it in the app store, and then only then find out if it's going to make money. And if it doesn't, it could bankrupt us, you know? So we have to try to remove that risk from the process and Kickstarter is a great way to do that. It worked with Twitterrific, and if I'm, knock on wood, I'm optimistic to say that it's working with Tapestry. People are really willing to contribute and it's an app that they seem to like the idea for and they're latching onto. They're helping spread the word and hopefully we will get it funded. And then beyond that we'll get to some stretch goals, so that we can add more features that we really wanna work on. - Yeah, and it's interesting you say that because you know, I'm already seeing articles popping up in places like 9to5mac.com, and I'm seeing a lot of blind people talking about it as well. As soon as the word is out there, it does spread very quickly, of course, through social media, which is great. And, you know, the articles, news articles pick up, because it's an interesting app from a mainstream perspective as well. And in terms of that voiceover support, what are you doing to ensure that it's fully accessible? Are you testing it with some blind people you've got in mind already? - We will, when when we get to that point. Up to now, we've only developed a really, really rough prototype to do a proof of concept of the app. We didn't want to launch the Kickstarter without knowing for sure that it wasn't going to work. And of course, when we had to do all the technical hard homework to make sure that that was the case, but it's not in a form where it can be consumed or used by the general public. Not on test flight, yet, but once we get past the funding portion of it and we move into active development, then yes, we're gonna to need active people to test voiceover and the accessibility and all of that. I encourage anyone who wants to join the project and who would be willing to do that, to do so, because we need all the help we can get. That was the case with Twitterrific. We had a great bevy of blind testers who helped us to stay honest and give us great feedback when it came to Twitterrific. And I'm really hoping that that will be the case again for Tapestry. - You're always listening to the community and it just shows through the apps you develop. I do have a question though. Will it be a Mac OS version? - That's one of the stretch goals we would really like to make. - Oh, fantastic. - Make a Mac version and if we get reach this appropriate stretch goal, we'll definitely make it. It's totally doable. There's no technical limitation there and we want it ourselves, so hopefully we'll get to get a chance to make it. Everyone keeps also asking about Vision Pro. - I was gonna say, yeah, you did it for Vision Pro as well. - Yeah. - Beat Netflix to it. - The new hotness is Vision Pro and everything, but we're not gonna go there right now. We're a long way, a long way from even talking about that, so it would be great. - What's your thoughts, maybe not from Tapestry's perspective, but what's your thoughts on Vision Pro from a developer perspective? Is it just a, because I see a lot of people saying this is almost like an aspirational project from Apple. This is not really a product. They are expecting millions to sell. They're kind of just trying to put an idea out there. I mean, if you could in the meantime. - It's a really double-edged sword as far as I am concerned. Virtual reality, virtual spaces is nothing new. It has been around for 40 some odd years. Can Apple make it mainstream? If anyone can do it, Apple can do it. They have the talent and the money and the drive in order to do that. So I'm not saying that it's impossible. It's a big hill to climb, even for Apple. To be able to convince someone that they should put on this headset and wear this with a battery pack instead of simply pulling their phone out of their pocket and doing what they need to do, almost instantly, is a big ask. It's friction there for the user and the experience needs to be extremely compelling in order for people to be willing to do that. Is it enough? I don't know. I can't speak from real absolute authority 'cause I have not tried one. I have not had the opportunity to wear one, to experience it, to use it. So I am kind of talking off the side of my mouth on this. But from a just of a general perspective, I'm not sold on it myself, not on the price, and not on the use cases of it. You have to give me a use case for where I would be saying, oh, that's a great reason why I should put on this headset. Watching movies is one of those, watching TV, and experiencing virtual entertainment is a great use case for it. And I could totally see that becoming Vision Pro's main focus, just like on the Apple Watch health apps and the health tracking became the watch's primary focus. Initially when the Apple Watch first came out, it was all third party apps and you can do everything on your watch. You don't need your phone anymore. That's not what happened. Over time, developers stopped developing apps for the watch because one, it wasn't profitable. You couldn't sell those apps to the average person. But also it's just as easy to pull that phone out from your pocket and do what you need to do, as it is to look at it on your watch and interact with your watch. And even more so for Vision Pro, I would say. So it's tough. I don't pretend to know what's going to happen. I don't know if Apple's gonna be successful. We'll have to wait and see. There certainly is a lot of hype. - Well, I'm gonna predict that Tapestry will be more popular than Vision Pro in the next few months. I'm almost certain of that. - Bless your heart. - I just want to, you know, thank you for what you do for the community as well because, you know, developers who take the time to listen to us and make sure we're included, is a rare thing unfortunately. It's becoming less rare. - That's good. - That's why I just think sometimes you just gotta say, look, thanks ,thank you for what you do. It's been brilliant. - Yeah, well, I appreciate that. - And good luck with it. - Thank you very much. We'll keep our fingers crossed and hopefully we'll be talking about this again eventually another time. - Once that app is in the app store, come back on, tell us all about it, tell us the next steps. Look forward to it. - We will indeed. - Thanks Gedeon, take care. - Okay, have a good day. - So there you go, interesting conversation. We'll get Gedeon back on soon. The Kickstarter has now been completed and is on its way, so we're hoping to see that app as Gedeon says, in the next six months. We will look forward to getting an update on that, on "Double Tap." For now though, keep in touch. Tell us your thoughts on all of this. Feedback at doubletaponair.com or you can leave us a comment below. Catch you next time.