Croissant has won MacStories’ Best New App award for 2024.
Tech news publication MacStories announced on Monday it named Croissant as its Best New App for its annual MacStores Selects awards.
Croissant, with apps on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, enables users to simultaneously post across popular Twitter alternatives in Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. As MacStories’ managing editor John Voorhees writes, Croissant was released in October exclusively on iPhone, with iPad and Mac versions coming in recent weeks. The app is unapologetically utilitarian but does its one job extremely well.
“The app’s design is excellent,” Voorhees said in the announcement of what’s arguably Croissant’s best attribute. “The primary focus is on the compose view, which lets you craft the perfect hot take before launching it into the world. Then when you do, the app displays progress bars to confirm you’ve successfully posted to each service.”
I interviewed Croissant developers Ben McCarthy and Aaron Vegh in late October shortly after the app’s debut. As I wrote then in explaining my own usage, Croissant doesn’t do very much—but what it does do, it goes about it with grace and style. From an accessibility point of view, the app appeals because it’s a one-stop shop for posting to my myriad presences on social media. Instead of writing a draft, copying the text, and pasting it piecemeal to Bluesky and others, I can use Croissant to sign in to those individual networks and post to them simultaneously. Having to post individually is taxing in terms of cognitive/visual/motor abilities; Croissant makes the tasks more accessible because it consolidates them.
“At a high level, Croissant leans into the computer’s greatest strength: automation,” I wrote of Croissant’s appeal in terms of accessibility for disabled people. “Write once, push a button, and the message is instantly sent to multiple places. That’s expedient, sure, but more importantly to a disabled nerd like me is how it saves me from enduring the pitfalls of eye strain and fatigue, as well as cognitive load and fine-motor fatigue.”
In building Croissant, McCarthy told me they and Vegh sought to make something “simple and streamlined” for posting to social media, with accessibility being the resulting “byproduct” of said goal. Still, proper accessibility does matter to the duo. McCarthy pointed to the alt-text editor living inline with imagery was done intentionally so as to nudge users to “write alt text for their images.” By having the editor close to the image(s), it makes the task much more accessible for people to do so.
“I like coming up with novel interactions that make an app more fun and fluid to use,” McCarthy said. “They can often come at the expense of accessibility, so I think there’s definitely some areas to improve.”
I still believe it would be cool for Croissant to use AI to generate alt-text, which has accessibility benefits unto itself. In my story, I mentioned AI-for-alt-text is a standout feature of popular Mastodon client Ice Cubes.
Croissant is available on the App Store.
Speaking of MacStories, I’ve been a contributor there for several years.
