I’ve been working on some improvements to Ambientweet, for the next version, which I’m currently calling 1.1.2 (although it’s getting to the point where there are enough changes to warrant calling it 1.2).
Internally, the code that manages the communication with Twitter has been modified a fair bit. This was partly a case of tidying up some old code, and partly improving the design to make it easier to support multiple Twitter accounts at once.
I’ve not quite got as far as multiple Twitter accounts in this revision, but I have added support for multiple windows. This means that you can set up more than one Ambientweet window if you wish, and have them track different timelines. One could track your normal timeline, one could focus on tweets from a single user, and one could show the results of a search for some text or a hashtag.
Because you can now have different windows, I’ve removed the window related settings from the preferences, and instead added a “Window Options” menu to the “View” menu, so that you can set them individually for each window.
The other major change that has happened relates to the automatic update mechanism. Unfortunately this got broken in version 1.1.1, and as a result automatic updating may not work, particularly if you are running Mountain Lion. These problems should now be fixed, but if you’re running one of the versions where updating was broken, then unfortunately you’ll have to manually get yourself past this version by downloading the latest beta.
Other than that, there are a couple of minor fixes:
- The preview display which says what tweets are being downloaded (before there are any to display) should now make a bit more sense, and shouldn’t show an ugly looking internal description for a user any more.
- The preference for centring the window when it shows some sort of sheet (eg when you’re asked to enter the text to search for) now actually does something.
If you are feeling brave, you can download the latest version here.