Ice Cubes

As I posted yesterday, if you love indie apps, this is a great time to be on Mastodon. Free of the limitations and concerns of the Twitter API, developers are experimenting again with different takes on displaying a home timeline and the whole scene gives me 2009-2012 Twitter vibes when innovation in third-party clients was all over the place. Ice Cubes, created by Thomas Ricouard, is one of the latest entries in this space and it’s got a feature I particularly like: the ability to pin other instances’ local timelines and quickly access them with a tap from the app’s main title bar. The idea behind this feature is that if you find all posts from people on a different instance (their “local” timeline) interesting and would like a fast way to read those posts, this pinning feature of Ice Cubes lets you do just that. Other clients implemented this functionality before Ice Cubes, but I like how Ricouard’s app lets you switch between timelines from the title bar on iPhone. This is a great system to read all posts from the MacStories local instance, for example.