Croissant’s authoring view makes heavy use of floating cards in its UI design.
When Apple redesigned the App Store with iOS 11 in 2017, the company boasted about new features at the time, including the editor-curated Today tab. This includes detailed feature articles and interviews with developers. It’s been seven years, and I have to admit that I don’t visit the App Store very often. Admittedly, it’s hardly visited as often as it was during the marketplace’s heyday around 2008-2009. It’s like a beta test. I’m not a big fan of just going to the App Store and skimming the “Today” tab, except on special days like Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
I made a rare exception to this rule when I heard about croissants recently. Written by Ben McCarthy and Aaron Vegh, the app is described in the App Store as “[solving] Well, it’s the 2024 problem of wanting to post on all the great new social networks of Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon. Essentially, Croissant is a “write once, post everywhere” app, and in an allusion to the French pastry from which it takes its name, McCarthy and Vegg say that Croissant has a buttery laminated finish. and boasts that cross-posting to the aforementioned social networks is all done in one tool. One unified space.
I wasn’t part of TestFlight’s beta testing group, so when Croissant launched earlier this month, I immediately downloaded it to my iPhone. When I sign in to two of the three networks I use (Threads and Mastodon), I get a blank text input field that displays the programmer’s favorite “Hello World” or the popular “Spill the Tea!” ” etc. The first thing that struck me about Croissant’s user interface was how big and bold it was. The typography and iconography are large and highly contrasting. These attributes make everything easier for me to see as I have low vision. But the truth is, most of the time I copy and paste from X to Croissant to share the stories I’ve written and the waves of enlightenment I’ve experienced. Croissants are not very functional, but they are intentionally very practical. But what it does is done with grace and style. In fact, it’s so much fun that it resides on my iPhone’s home screen in a folder alongside the other social media apps I use most often.
Most of the coverage of this app focuses on its usability, but in reality, accessibility itself is a killer feature. Before I started Croissant, I was frustrated by having to post important announcements multiple times. Because, beyond convenience, writing the same prose three times was literally a pain. Even using the copy and paste feature in iOS, it was relatively difficult to access as it required repeated swipes and taps. These are “micro-aggressors,” small frictions in the computing experience that people without disabilities don’t understand. As I’ve written many times in this column, accessibility and convenience may be similar, but they are not the same thing. Broadly speaking, Croissant focuses on the computer’s greatest strength: automation. Write once and press a button to instantly send your message to multiple locations. That’s certainly convenient, but more importantly for disabled nerds like me is whether you can tolerate the pitfalls of eye strain and fatigue, as well as cognitive load and fine motor fatigue. These factors are by no means trivial, and prove that the croissant, although imperfect in many ways, has immense potential as an essential tool for social media accessibility.
Still, McCarthy and Vegg didn’t necessarily create the app for accessibility. In a recent interview with me via email, McCarthy explained that building Croissant for accessibility was “not an immediate goal” initially. Initially, they said their biggest goal was to “make something simple and rational.” Accessibility is a byproduct of that goal, and McCarthy said it would be “great” if Croissant played a role in making posting to multiple networks more accessible. Even though the app doesn’t exist for For accessibility, Mr. McCarthy emphasized accessibility. do It’s important to them. One user experience they were particularly excited about was an alternative text editor for images. Most social media apps support alt text, McCarthy said, but it requires multiple taps. In contrast, they say Croissant’s alt text field exists inline with the image, making adding descriptors more accessible (and convenient). Having the editor there serves as a symbolic prompt for users to “write alternative text for images.”
“I like inventing new interactions that make apps more fun and smoother to use,” McCarthy says. “I think there are definitely some things that could be improved because a lot of times it can come at the expense of accessibility.”
As for Croissant’s design, McCarthy said one of his favorite apps is Up Ahead, which has “really great interactions and animations.” They took inspiration from indie countdown apps and borrowed elements such as the floating card metaphor. Additionally, McCarthy looks to see what other developers are doing and perhaps learn lessons from their work, including the design of apps such as Ivory for the Mastodon client, and the configuration view for X and Threaded apps. He said he had considered it. Regarding individual accessibility features, McCarthy said VoiceOver “definitely needs a thorough audit to see what’s not working.” On the positive side, Dynamic Type seems to be working “pretty well,” though McCarthy admitted that it requires some tweaking to properly display text set to maximum size. McCarthy admitted that he is wary of spending too much time addressing these issues, simply because “the work we’ve created in terms of layout and navigation before launch is unusable.” Because there may be some assumptions that are not made. They added that they would like to resolve these issues “before achieving 100% accessibility coverage.” As always, accessibility is always an important initiative.
Asked about the state of emerging social networking platforms, McCarthy said, “I feel like the social media landscape is still very fluid,” adding, “If there’s a winner, it’s going to take quite a while. Dew,” he added. ” Vegg believes that “the days of a single social network as a cultural phenomenon are over.” Vegh told me that he fell in love with Mastodon primarily because of its open-source ethos, “making the ability to distribute small amounts of content widely available to more people.” The downside, he added, is that Mastodon’s learning curve is significantly steeper. Because of its technological trends, Vegh worries it will “never become a large-scale network.” More broadly, Vegh said it’s “unfortunate” that public institutions like governments should take steps to start their own Mastodon servers instead of struggling with X forever.
“It seems crazy to me that the government would take advantage of it.” [Elon Musk-owned X] As in 2017 as a primary communication channel. ” he said.
When it comes to feedback on Croissant, McCarthy and Vegg were enthusiastic about the app’s overwhelmingly positive reception. Mr McCarthy said the response had been “better than I could have imagined” and Mr Vegg was delighted to hear people say they loved the croissants. Mr Vegh said he “couldn’t be happier” about croissants as a tool to improve mental health. This is because croissants reduce people’s burden.[sharing] You can access these networks without being obligated to read other people’s posts at the same time. ”
In my own feedback, the biggest wishlist items I hear people say are an iPad version and a Mac version. Currently, I have X and Ivory together on their own stage in Stage Manager, so I can copy and paste posts between networks, go to Safari, and use websites to post to Threads. It definitely works, but it makes things even worse and boring. I would like to someday use a native macOS client for Croissant. The same applies to iPadOS. Especially considering the M4 13-inch iPad Pro I received as a belated birthday present shortly before the new iPad mini arrived. When it comes to alt text, I would love to see Croissant pick up on what Ice Cubes, another Mastodon client, used AI to automatically generate text. Creating good alternative text can be a significant cognitive load, not to mention a task that requires input, so it definitely improves accessibility.
Along with the Apple Sports app and Mac Audio Hijack, Croissant is definitely one of my favorite new apps I discovered this year.
Looking to the future, McCarthy and Vegg said they intend to make Croissant even better than it is today. McCarthy acknowledged that “there are significant challenges in supporting the different features and limitations of each service at the same time,” adding that this is an area of focus right now. Additionally, they said there is the usual long list of features and enhancements that should be reached at some stage.
Vegh agreed, saying that users have provided many great suggestions for future improvements. He said the duo is still “finding the edge cases” where problems arise, but noted that the proverbial wheels are turning when it comes to enhancements such as post-composer.
“We look forward to continuing to listen to our users and deliver the best version of the app so that it becomes their first choice when posting to multiple social networks,” said Vegh of Croissant. We talked about the future.
