Really happy to finally get this one out there. It's an idea that I'd had buzzing around for a while, but only became possible when Apple added MapKit to tvOS in the latest version.
Created this a few months ago with two other great iOS devs @thecolourfool & @kabukivision for both the "ProductHunt Hackathon" and the AppLovin AppleTV App Challenge where it came in third behind two other great projects.
Anyway, we're really excited to hear your thoughts & questions Avian!
@siburb@thecolourfool@kabukivision@bentossell Simon was kind enough to let me test Avian : Twitter Map early on my AppleTV. I love the way you zoom around the world finding relevant discussions. It brings a new perspective to Twitter. What's next Simon? Maybe a standalone periscope version?
@paul_s_kemp@thecolourfool@kabukivision@bentossell That's another really interesting idea and I'll definitely look into it. This is why it is so exciting to finally get our product out there - we've been so close to it for so long, that the new perspectives are wonderful to hear!
Hello! Great idea, can't wait to try it out.
One question, where are the information taken from? I was curious if there's a service out there that can aggregate tweets and hashtags based on location of them.
Hi @alexstrafalogea. It's a very good question, and was a real headache during development. All of the information comes straight from Twitter's APIs, however it is more complicated than that.
1. The main complication is that only a small percentage of Tweets have location information in the first place.
2. The second, is that the location information comes in two forms - exact coordinates, and "Places". A place could be something small like the coordinates of the rectangle around restaurant. A place could also be the coordinates of the rectangle around California! Fortunately, they're mostly at the smaller end of the scale.
3. Some of the endpoints allow us to filter by search terms, and also by location. Other endpoints allow us to only filter by search terms OR location.
So, the combination of all the complications means that we need to carefully capture as much relevant information as possible and process it in such a way that we get a nice queue where we're not jumping all over the world all the time. I think the current version does all that pretty well, but there's always going to be room for improvement.
Anyway, I really look forward to hearing what you think once you've had a play with it.
Report
@siburb thank you very much for the explanation.
Will try it and come back with other question/feedback considering what you told us about the approach you tried.
@apr214 Thanks! We use a combination of polling the various REST APIs, and also the streaming APIs depending on the options that the user has chosen. Ideally, this means the streaming API for most of the content, and the relevant REST API for filling in the gaps - but there are certain combinations of settings that make this more difficult e.g specific location + search terms. Both types of API of course have their limits, but we carefully check how many requests we have remaining and ration our polling accordingly.
Howdy, I'm James - designer on the Avian team. Like Simon said, it's so good to have this out there, and be hearing what people are saying about it. The best thing about the early reviews is that people seem to think it's a really good approach to Twitter on the TV. Not just bunging a timeline up there, or expecting people to do all the normal Twitter stuff with their remote control. But instead, a nice, visual approach that works on the TV. Cool to hear that, because that's exactly what we had in mind.
Anyway, thanks for the upvotes and suggestions. 👍
@gabriel__lewis It definitely is available in the US. I think you must have gone to the iTunes link on your phone - in which case, yes, this is how broken app discovery on the AppleTV really is. To download Avian, just go to the App Store on your AppleTV and search for it - unfortunately, that's the only way to find it.
Moleskine Studio
Velapp
Moleskine Studio
Vaunt
Moleskine Studio
Avian: Twitter Map
Moleskine Studio
Moleskine Studio
Rally
Moleskine Studio
Forward
Moleskine Studio
Avian: Twitter Map
Imgur Melee
Moleskine Studio