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Indigo Keeps Getting Great Feature Updates

By: Nick Heer

Aaron Vegh and Ben Rice McCarthy have been steadily updating Indigo since they launched it in May. In the latest version, you can now swipe between different filtered timelines, the scroll position is synced between devices, and there is a new lower price point if you use it exclusively for a single network.

As for me, the one big thing I wanted at launch was the ability to easily switch between multiple accounts, and this was added some time ago. It works exactly as you might expect: you can group sets of your own accounts β€” my personal Bluesky and personal Mastodon are one set, while my Pixel Envy accounts are in another β€” and just toggle the two sets.

This is one of my very favourite iOS apps. Just a great piece of software made by some great people.

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Iris, a Photo History Explorer

By: Nick Heer

Tyler Hall (finally) released Iris, and it is excellent:

And somewhere along the way the whole emotional center of the thing shifted. I set out to build an anti-Photos utility β€” a search engine for a hard drive. What I actually ended up with is a memory keeper. Open a photo today and Iris tells you the date, surfaces β€œ16 items on this day,” drops a pin on the map, and lists the people in the frame with their ages quietly calculated from their birthdays. That is not a utility. That is the opposite of anti-anything.

I have been testing Iris for a couple of months and I think it is delightful. It reads all the photo libraries you point it at β€” your system library, whether that is in iCloud or local, and any folders you want like the one that contains your Lightroom edits, for example β€” and makes them accessible in a single, giant view.

But that is not the coolest part. No, that is that it lets you explore your tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of photos in a way that treats each of them as little memory boxes. So often, it is not just a picture of your kid, or your dog, or your dinner; it is a time you would like to remember. There are a bunch of things in each file that can bring you back to that moment. Photos does a poor job of that; Iris, on the other hand, is made for exactly that, something Hall takes seriously. How many apps are there with a manifesto?

Iris is great, old-school, indie Mac software.

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An App Named Alan

By: Nick Heer

Tyler Hall:

Maybe it’s because my eyes are getting old or maybe it’s because the contrast between windows on macOS keeps getting worse. Either way, I built a tiny Mac app last night that draws a border around the active window. I named it β€œAlan”.

A good, cheeky name. The results are not what I would call beautiful, but that is not the point, is it? It works well. I wish it did not feel understandable for there to be an app that draws a big border around the currently active window. That should be something made sufficiently obvious by the system.

Unfortunately, this is a problem plaguing the latest versions of MacOS and Windows alike, which is baffling to me. The bar for what constitutes acceptable user interface design seems to have fallen low enough that it is tripping everyone at the two major desktop operating system vendors.

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