Posts tagged with "tapbots"

Ivory 2.2 Adds New Navigation Design and More→

Ivory, the Mastodon app by Tapbots, was updated on iOS and iPadOS yesterday with a new navigation design.

The app’s new tab bar can accommodate up to six of its many views and adds a ‘More’ button on the far right for ones that don’t fit. From the ‘More’ button, there’s also a shortcut to configure the order in which Ivory’s tabs appear. I’ve been using the new design in beta for a while and love having the added level of control over my Mastodon experience.

Tapbots has also added the ability to translate hashtags by long-pressing on them and now displays media, cards, and quotes when a post is truncated with a ‘Read More’ button. Posts that quote an account you’ve blocked are no longer visible either. Finally, there’s an all-new Blueprint app icon.

The Ivory update is available on the App Store.

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Tapbots Releases Ivory 2.0 with Hashtag Lists and a Redesigned Share Sheet Extension

Today, Tapbots released version 2.0 of Ivory, the company’s Mastodon client for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. The update brings a notable list of improvements, one exciting new feature that should make it easier to follow and curate specific topics on the fediverse, and a fully redesigned share sheet extension.

On Mastodon, it is possible to follow hashtags in addition to accounts. This feature is particularly useful for tracking discussions about a specific topic across the wider fediverse. However, following hashtags is currently limited. Followed hashtags appear in your main chronological timeline among your followed accounts, and it isn’t possible to curate together multiple hashtags into a separate, easily accessible view. Ivory 2.0 aims to solve this with Hashtag Lists. Now, in the app’s redesigned Hashtags tab, you can create a list that contains up to four hashtags, and you can even exclude specific hashtags if you’re looking to fine-tune the resulting timeline.

Creating a hashtag list for cat pics in Ivory 2.0.

Creating a hashtag list for cat pics in Ivory 2.0.

Hashtag lists can be accessed from Ivory's dedicated Hashtags tab, or directly from the Home tab by tapping on the title bar.

Hashtag lists can be accessed from Ivory’s dedicated Hashtags tab, or directly from the Home tab by tapping on the title bar.

The other big improvement in Ivory 2.0 is its redesigned share sheet extension for creating posts. It is now fully-featured, with the ability to set the post’s visibility and language, as well as an option to add alternative text descriptions to shared images and videos. When sharing a URL, the share sheet will now show a preview of the link card that will appear as part of your post. To get started, tap the Share button from the Photos app, Safari, or any app that supports the native iOS and iPadOS share sheet, then choose the Ivory icon.

Sharing a link, a cat pic, and multiple images via Ivory's redesigned share sheet extension.

Sharing a link, a cat pic, and multiple images via Ivory’s redesigned share sheet extension.

Ivory's new share sheet extension is also available on the Mac.

Ivory’s new share sheet extension is also available on the Mac.

In addition, Ivory 2.0 comes with small visual refinements to the way images and videos are displayed in a post’s detail view and the ability to set a fixed order for context menu items throughout the app.

Tapbots continues to update and refine Ivory at a steady pace. As a result, it is still my favorite way to use Mastodon on a daily basis. With a new major version of Mastodon on the horizon, I’m excited to see Tapbots add support for new features in Ivory without necessarily waiting for improvements to the default Mastodon experience.

If you want to create your own cat hashtag list today, Ivory 2.0 is now available on the App Store for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. The app comes with a seven-day free trial for new users, after which a monthly or annual subscription is required to use most of its features.

Tapbots Releases Ivory 1.9 with Quote Posts

Today, Tapbots released version 1.9 of their award-winning Mastodon client Ivory for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. The update brings the long-awaited ability to quote posts, and to view quoted posts inline in the timeline.

Quote posts have been on the team’s roadmap ever since the app was first released early last year, while the feature was already supported by other Mastodon clients, including Mona for Mastodon. As expected, quoting a post in Ivory simply works by pasting a post link in the compose view, or by tapping the ‘Boost’ button on any public post, which now features an additional ‘Quote’ option.

Although quote posts currently aren’t supported directly by Mastodon, Tapbots says Ivory isn’t changing anything fundamental to the way Mastodon posts work:

“All we are doing is showing the post you are linking to visually vs just having a link to a Mastodon post which anyone has been able to do since the beginning of the service. That and making the process of copying a link to a post and pasting it in the compose view more automated.”

Following Tapbots’ announcement, Mastodon CTO and core team member Renaud Chaput reiterated in a thread that the Mastodon team is currently working on bringing quote posts to all Mastodon users:

“We are working on implementing Quote Posts. This is a much more complex feature than showing a preview for a link to a post, which is done at the moment by multiple clients.”

Renaud Chaput most notably detailed the team’s desire to build the feature with user safety in mind, to be able to prevent harassment behaviors, and to allow Mastodon users to control who can quote their posts.

Quote posts are currently listed as “planned” on the official Mastodon roadmap, but if you want to start quoting posts on Mastodon today, Ivory 1.9 is now available on the App Store for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

Ivory for Mac Review: Tapbots’ Superb Mastodon Client Comes to Apple Desktops and Laptops

Ivory, Tapbots’ Mastodon client, is now available on the Mac, and like its iOS and iPadOS counterparts that Federico reviewed in January, Ivory for Mac is every bit as polished.

A lot has changed since Ivory was released on the iPhone and iPad. At the time, there were hardly any native Mastodon apps for the Mac, so I was using Elk in a pinned Safari tab. That’s changed. There are several excellent native apps now, including Mona, which I reviewed earlier this month. What Ivory brings to the growing field of native apps is what we saw with iOS and iPadOS: impeccable taste and snappy performance that few other apps can match.

By now, most MacStories readers are probably familiar with the table stakes features for Mastodon clients. Ivory ticks all of those boxes. Also, if you’ve already tried Ivory for iOS or iPadOS, you’ve got a big head start on the Mac app because they’re very similar. However, if you’re new to Ivory, I encourage you to check out Federico’s review of Ivory for the iPhone and iPad because I’m not going to cover that same ground again. Instead, I want to focus on the Mac version’s unique features and the details that make it such a compelling choice for Mac users.

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Ivory for Mastodon Review: Tapbots Reborn

Ivory for Mastodon.

Ivory for Mastodon.

There’s an intangible, permeating quality about Tapbots apps that transcends features and specs: craftsmanship. With Ivory, launching today on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, you can instantly appreciate that level of care and refinement that the Texas-based duo is well known for after more than a decade on the App Store. But there’s something else, too: for the first time in a few years, it feels like Mark and Paul are having fun again.

Ivory is a Mastodon client, and it’s tricky to evaluate it right now because its version 1.0 is launching under extraordinary circumstances.

As we’ve documented on MacStories, Twitter’s idiotic new “leadership” recently decided to unceremoniously and crassly put an end to third-party clients such as Tweetbot with no warning, which forced Tapbots to scramble and figure out a solution on how to discontinue Tweetbot while dealing with subscription renewals while also accelerating the timeline for the launch of Ivory, which they’d been working on for months. I’ve been following the development of Ivory very closely (I’ve been using the app as my main Mastodon client since its first alpha in late November), and I know that the Ivory 1.0 launching today isn’t the debut version Mark and Paul were envisioning. By Tapbots’ own admission, there’s still a lot of work to do on Ivory, but given how the Twitter situation evolved, they had to ship something. There is already a roadmap on Tapbots’ website for Ivory, if you’re curious to know what the developers are planning for the foreseeable future.

As I was saying above, however, there’s something else about Ivory that, in many ways, makes today’s release an important milestone in our community worth documenting and celebrating. Ever since we at MacStories decided to abandon Twitter, we’ve gone all-in on Mastodon and, broadly speaking, we want to embrace the idea of decentralized and federated social media. Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen hundreds of other people I used to follow on Twitter do the same. I believe we’re witnessing the beginning of a new social networking era, and even though Mastodon has been around for a few years, many of us (myself included) are only realizing now that we should have paid attention to this kind of technology years ago.

For the second time since I started MacStories in 2009, I can observe developers imagining what interfaces for reading and posting status updates on the web should look like. New conventions are being created as we speak, and we are, once again, witnessing the rise of a vibrant ecosystem of third-party apps designed for different needs, platforms, and people. Only, this time, there is no single company that controls the fate of all this.

So that’s the something that makes the release of Ivory a special one in the Apple community. More than a reactionary “what if Tweetbot, but for Mastodon” move, Ivory marks a new beginning for Tapbots in a way that Netbot never was. (If you know, you know.) We’re living in new and exciting times for indie apps, and I think that you can feel it when the creator of an app feels the same way. Ivory exudes enthusiasm. Even though it’s not the most feature-rich client I’m testing right now, it’s the one I’m constantly drawn towards. Ivory is going to establish a baseline for quality and polish on iOS and iPadOS; it’s the app future Mastodon clients for iPhone and iPad (and, hopefully soon, Mac) will have to measure up against.

Ivory is the start of a new chapter for one of the most beloved indie studios in our community. So let’s take a look.

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Tweetbot 7.1 Adds Background Notifications for Follows, Quotes, and User Tweets→

A tweet notification from Tweetbot. This one took about four minutes to arrive – not too bad considering they're not based on push notifications.

A tweet notification from Tweetbot. This one took about four minutes to arrive – not too bad considering they’re not based on push notifications.

We’ve been keeping an eye on Tapbots’ rapid development pace for Tweetbot on iPhone and iPad over the past few months (we gave Tweetbot 6 a MacStories Selects award in December), and I continue to be impressed by how Tweetbot is growing and adding new features thanks to its new business model and Twitter’s new API.

In today’s 7.1 update, Tweetbot has gained support for background notifications. These notifications, unlike push notifications, are managed by iOS/iPadOS’ background app refresh system, which comes with some benefits and limitations that Tapbots has outlined here. In terms of why this matters for users, background notifications alllow Tweetbot to support notifications for more types of activities: you can now enable notifications for new followers, people who quote one of your tweets, and – my favorite – new tweets from a specific user. The latter can be enabled on a user’s profile page (pictured below) or by long-pressing someone’s profile picture in the timeline.

Enabling notifications for specific users.

Enabling notifications for specific users.

Being notified when a specific user tweets was one of the features I was missing from the official Twitter app, so I’m glad Tapbots figured out a way to add it to Tweetbot. Since Tapbots’ system is based on Apple’s background app refresh technology and they can’t control the timing of notifications, Tweetbot’s version of these alerts won’t likely be as immediate as the Twitter app, but that’s fine as long as I get a list of new tweets from specific users.

I look forward to testing these notifications over the next few days. Tweetbot 7.1 is available on the App Store for iPhone and iPad; hopefully, we won’t have to wait much longer for Tweetbot 7 to arrive on macOS too.

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Pastebot Reborn as a Powerful Mac Clipboard Manager

You may remember Pastebot as an early iOS clipboard manager. That app is no longer available, but Tapbots has brought Pastebot back in the form of a macOS app. Pastebot for Mac can store up to 500 of your most recently copied items, including text, URLs, images, and files. The clips are stored chronologically with the most recent ones on top. That makes finding recent clips easy, but even older clips that are buried under recent items aren’t hard to find thanks to Pastebot’s smart search functionality. In addition, you can save frequently used clips to custom pasteboards and manipulate clips with filters.

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Tapbots Announces Pastebot for Mac Public Beta→

Pastebot by Tapbots was an early iOS clipboard manager that facilitated copying text, links, images and more. Today, Tapbots announced that it is bringing Pastebot to the Mac. As Tapbots did with Tweetbot for Mac, Pastebot is available as a public beta. As Tapbots explains:

We have been wanting to do a full blown Pastebot for Mac long before we first released it on the iPhone. Paul wrote a fantastic little utility app called PTH Pasteboard Pro on the Mac which I had always wanted to rewrite as a Tapbots app, but we were just too busy with iOS. After the release of Tweetbot 2 for Mac, it only made sense to have Todd start on Pastebot for his next big project. So we are very excited to release Pastebot for Mac…as a public beta.

I have been testing Pastebot for Mac for several weeks and it’s got some great features like the ability to create custom filters that allow you to transform clipped text in various ways.

If you are interested in joining the public beta, head on over to tapbots.com/pastebot.

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Tweetbot 4.3 Introduces ‘Topics’ for Easier Tweetstorm Creation

A topic in the new Tweetbot 4.3.

A topic in the new Tweetbot 4.3.

Picture this: it’s WWDC keynote day and you’re following the event. You want to live tweet as the event unfolds. What do you do?

The answer is that, so far, Twitter the company has mostly failed to provide users with ways to rapidly tweet commentary and have tweets intelligently grouped together once an event is over. Sure, you could append the same hashtag to every tweet, “tagging it” for context, but that wouldn’t fix the underlying problem of a bunch of messages related to the same event and yet treated as atomic units with no relationship between them.

Thus Twitter the community came up with the idea of the tweetstorm, a clever workaround based on how Twitter threads work. If you want to post multiple tweets in a row and establish a thread between them from start to finish, reply to your own tweet, removing your username at the beginning of the message, and you’ll “fake” a series of topical tweets which Twitter sees as part of a conversation…with yourself. It’s not the most elegant solution, and it doesn’t work well for rapid fire live tweeting, but it sort of works and a lot of people use it by now.

Tweetbot, the excellent Twitter client developed by Tapbots which relaunched with version 4.0 in October, is introducing an update today that fully embraces the concept of tweetstorms with a feature called “topics”.

Topics simplify the process of chaining tweets together with an intuitive interface that makes it look like Twitter rolled out support for topics. Under the hood, Tapbots is still leveraging the aforementioned @reply workaround, but they’ve been clever enough to completely abstract that from the UI, building what is, quite possibly, one of the most ingenious Tweetbot features to date.

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