Project Tapestry – A Brilliant Idea from Iconfactory
A Universal Timeline for Public Feeds and More.
I think I first discovered Iconfactory when I discovered and used a tiled tapestry background as a background for a webpage sometime around 1998. At that time, the full-scale internet was breaking out of the shackles of AOL, CompuServe, and UseNet; at least enough that a small advertising agency in Asheville, NC could spend the time and effort training me to set up web servers, learn HTML, and translate designs into webpages and emailed newsletters.
I was stoked to know that Iconfactory was also in NC and the company has been a fixture of my creative life ever since. Particularly when I moved to a Titanium G4 Powerbook around 2001, because the first application I installed on that system was Panic’s Transmit FTP client, which used a logo designed by Iconfactory. As time went by, many a fresh Mac got its first personalization with wallpaper and icons created by these talented people.
The team at Iconfactory is not only still around, but they are still making useful tools for creative workers like xScope® which allows measurement of on-screen layout and pages, or a simple webserver for web developers. (We won’t talk about the much mourned Twitteriffic, killed off by Twitter/X along with much of our desire to be on Twitter/X)
Now they have a new project that has me really interested: Project Tapestry, which I just saw while doing my weekly check-in on Jason Kottke’s site.
Project Tapestry is a universal timeline for blogs instead of tweets; but not just blogs.
Project Tapestry is a universal timeline for blogs instead of tweets; but not just blogs. The goal is to add a single browsable timeline with publicly-available content including blogs, Mastodon accounts, RSS feeds, local Raspberry Pi IoT projects, whatever. Sounds great. I’m in. Because Facebook, Threads, Instagram, and Twitter won’t work because they are locked in —just like CompuServe, AOL, and the other rusting hulks of the internet’s initial boom—and that suits me fine.
Join me in supporting the IconFactory Tapestry project on Kickstarter. Can’t wait to see it in action.
