Tweeter

Tweeter UI

Inspiration

A coworker of mine was really into following the NBA Draft. He'd been on Twitter all day following the live news updates. The time came when we were done working and we had to go home. He lives pretty far away from our job so he was pretty bummed out he wouldn't be able to follow Twitter as he drove. So I came up with the idea for an app that grabs a users feed, and allows the user to specify certain hashtags they're intered in. Once they specify hashtags the app will read any tweet with that hashtag out loud to them via headphones or speakers. Thus, Tweeter was born.

What it does

Allows a user to specify a list of Twitter hashtags. Any tweet with a specified hashtag will then be read aloud via speech synthesis software.

How we built it

We used ASP.NET to create a web app that couples with TweetInvi to grab a users tweets and allow sus to read them.

Challenges we ran into

It took us a long time to figure out how to even get tweets from our own account's timeline, which we already have authorization for. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to authenticate other users to no avail. Another big challenge of ours was trying to get Tweeter to update live as tweets were posted.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In general we're just proud of the idea. We're also proud of how much we got done in a short amount of time. This project was actually our plan b, and we started working on it after spending a good amount of time on another project we later found out wasn't feasible.

What we learned

We learned how to use speech synthesis in .NET. We also learned a lot about the Twitter API.

What's next for Tweeter

Tweeter might be on the bench for some time, but the end goal is to turn it into a phone app to make it more portable. We also plan to perfect all aspects of it like authenticating other users, live updating, and not repeating tweets.