The Circus Comes to the Living Room

Fleawinder: Living Circus now runs on Apple TV. The same eight acts — Nova on the tightrope, Zing on the trapeze, Rex in the cannon, Pip at the weights, Dot on the unicycle, Fizz juggling, Blaze breathing fire, and Bugg on the motorcycle — all live on the big screen now, rendered at 60fps on a canvas that fills your television edge to edge.

The biggest challenge was input. The Siri Remote is a beautiful object but a completely different design contract than a keyboard or mouse. There's no hover state, no cursor, no modifier keys. What it does have is a touchpad for navigation and a dedicated Play/Pause button — a physical key that sits apart from everything else. That became the wind trigger. Swipe to navigate, press Play/Pause to wind. Clean separation, no conflicts.

The tvOS focus engine is fascinating and occasionally maddening. Every focusable element on screen participates in a spatial navigation graph. Swipes travel the graph. The key discovery: if only one focusable element exists on screen, the tvOS focus engine interprets swipes as presses on that element — which meant every navigation swipe was firing the wind button. The fix was making sure there are always at least two focusable targets so the focus engine has somewhere to travel.

The Colony tab lets you zoom into any individual flea for a full-screen spotlight. Each flea has their own accent color, a personal wind button ('Wind Nova', 'Wind Rex'), and five unique interactive options that cycle as you press. Give Fizz a chainsaw to juggle. Load Rex's cannon with a balloon. Offer Blaze a birthday cake. The flea reacts, the canvas flashes their color, and sometimes they get a small energy boost out of it.

There's also a Top Shelf extension. When you highlight Fleawinder: Living Circus on the Apple TV home screen, the full colony appears in the wide shelf above — all eight fleas as illustrated cards with their names and acts, each one a deep link back into the app. On device it also reads your current energy level from iCloud and surfaces it in the section header.

Apple TV is a first-class Fleawinder: Living Circus platform now. Same colony, same physics, same eight acts — just much bigger.