Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Ivory 1.0

Tapbots:

Ivory is a brand new app that brings 10 years of experience building the award-winning Twitter app, Tweetbot, over to Mastodon.

[…]

Ivory is currently in Early Access, which means there are features missing and we are actively building them while you get to use the app.

As a big fan of Tweetbot, I’m really excited to see this, though I have little use for it at present since there’s no Mac version. (The iOS version isn’t allowed to run on Apple Silicon Macs.)

Oddly, the app has been available for much of the day but still doesn’t show up in the App Store when I search for it. Lots of other Mastodon clients fill the search results, along with various games and shopping apps. I had to click the direct link.

Federico Viticci:

Elephant aside, what stands out in Ivory is the iconography. For Ivory, Jardine has drawn an entirely new set of icons for the tab bar, compose window, action drawer, and other areas of the app. These icons are lovely: they have a unique line style I haven’t seen anywhere else in iOS; they’re fresh, instantly recognizable, and legible in both light and dark mode. It’s funny how a simple icon set can make Ivory feel so different from Tweetbot, but that’s exactly what I noticed in this first version of the app.

[…]

Ivory is, by far, the smoothest, most responsive Mastodon client I’ve tried on my iPhone and iPad yet. The app’s animations are incredibly fluid on ProMotion displays, and the timeline scrolls quickly with no stutters or other glitches, which I’ve seen in other clients.

[…]

Ivory, like Tweetbot, supports syncing your timeline position via a custom iCloud integration. This has been working very well for me, but as I posted recently, I hope Tapbots will consider implementing Mastodon’s native sync marker API as well.

[…]

The hidden power of filters, however, lies in the ability to create your own with a surprisingly advanced interface. When creating a custom filter, you can include or exclude keywords, then choose to match any or all filters from a selection of the following criteria[…]

[…]

if you hold down the boost icon (boosts are the Mastodon equivalent of retweets), you’ll get the option to boost a post from a different account than the one currently viewing the timeline.

Dan Moren:

While Ivory has been free during the beta period, it will be a paid product within the App Store: you can pay $1.99 per month or $14.99 per year.

See also: Juli Clover.

Previously:

Update (2023-01-25): See also: Rui Carmo.

2 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon

Only skimmed the article, but I agree with Federico, the icons are beautiful. That alone makes me want to join a Mastodon instance. This is the level of design I want to see in Appleā€™s software.

Old Unix Geek

+ It has a nice elephant.

- It's subscriptionware

+ Good timing

- It requires iOS 15.6.

- I do wonder whether Apple won't ban it because of Mastodon's child porn problem.

I wish them the best of luck.

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