Originally published at: VidBITS: Matt Sephton’s Wall of Tiny Apps - TidBITS
A month ago, I received an interesting private message from Matt Sephton, a longtime contributor to TidBITS Talk. He was gearing up to release 18 (now 21) apps on the same day, and he was curious if I had any feedback. He had built the apps for his own use over the past 8 years, nearly all for the Mac. Friends had encouraged him to release them to the public, and he thought it would be amusing to release them all at once. (Spoiler: it wasn’t, which is why it took this long for him to get enough App Store approvals.)
I took a look and immediately realized that the title of Matt’s message to me, “Wall of Apps,” was extremely apt, given his website’s grid of app tiles. The apps address highly specific problems that he has faced over the years, such as Ditto, which lets you copy text twice to translate it, and Tabulator, which offers independent tab management for Safari. Some will primarily interest developers, such as Octoping, which provides a notification menu for GitHub, and others are for geeky admins, like Seeports, which puts a port inspector in your menu bar. The app that will likely appeal to the largest audience is one of the few iOS apps: PaperTrail, an iPhone client for the TaskPaper plain-text to-do list app for macOS made by Jesse Grosjean of Hog Bay Software.
Most of the apps felt too specific and quirky to review on their own—and there were too many of them—but they were so distinctive that I couldn’t resist the temptation to learn more. So instead of starting an article, I asked Matt if he’d like to talk about them on VidBITS. He was game, and our two-hour conversation far exceeded my expectations. Beyond the apps themselves, we covered his time as an Apple technology evangelist, his project cataloging 500+ Japanese Mac magazine cover discs, and an AI coding experiment in which Claude built two apps in 8 minutes that Matt then spent 8 hours refining. I think you’ll enjoy our discussion, and if any of his apps solve problems you have, I encourage you to check them out.
One of the most striking aspects of Matt’s apps is that they’re tiny in an era when even simple apps regularly run to hundreds of megabytes. He has written a Fits on a Floppy manifesto arguing that smaller apps download faster, launch instantly, use less memory, and run better on older systems. Nearly all of his apps would fit on a 1.44 MB floppy disk. Matt even whipped up a free Fits on a Floppy screensaver—which is exactly 1.44 MB!—similar to After Dark’s Flying Toasters but featuring floppy disks bearing labels of actual classic Mac apps. (Look, there’s HyperCard! And StuffIt! And Speed Doubler! Must stop watching…)
Those who rail against software subscriptions will also be pleased to hear that all of Matt’s apps are either free or sold for a one-time price of $4.99, $9.99, or $14.99. All are in the App Store.
Finally, I wasn’t expecting to talk about digital art, but Matt thinks deeply—though not prescriptively—about technology and creation, and after our talk, I was intrigued to read his blog post about Barbara Nessim, a still-active artist who pioneered the use of computers in art in the early 1980s. Similarly, after we finished recording, Matt asked about “The Wave of the Future” poster on the wall behind me—Hokusai’s famous wave morphing into a digital representation. I’ve had it for decades but never knew its origin. Matt, who turns out to be a Hokusai aficionado, later sent me a link to the story of how the poster came to be. Ironically, this image evoking the analog-to-digital transition was created entirely by hand in 1981 because digital imaging was prohibitively expensive.
