I’ve just released another new beta version of Ambientweet.

You can now switch between the main tweet stream and a view which only includes your mentions - so that you can catch up on what people have been saying about you. Ambientweet also bounces the dock icon and shows a badge when it spots new, unread mentions.

In addition, you can now set Ambientweet’s window to auto-size. If you do this, it will keep the width that you gave it, but change height automatically so that the full text of the current tweet is always visible.

I’ve submitted Neu 1.0.2 to the Mac application store… here’s hoping that the review process for updates is a little bit quicker than it was for the first version…

I’ve just released a new beta version of Ambientweet.

For those who don’t know, Ambientweet is a minimalist twitter client that I’m working on.

Unlike most clients, Ambientweet shows just one tweet at a time. This is a deliberate design decision, as it is intended to just be left running in the background, as a way of watching your twitter stream pass by. Showing just one tweet allows for a minimal user interface. This, in turn, means that the text can be bigger and there’s no need for extraneous clutter like toolbars or buttons whilst you watch the twitter world go by.

You can use Ambientweet to post, reply and re-tweet, so it’s perfectly adequate for adding to your stream and responding to what you read. What it doesn’t include is lots of complicated functionality for viewing profiles, following people, managing lists and accounts, and so on. The Twitter website is great at that stuff, so why try to replicate it?

I’m pleased to announce that after a rather lengthy review, Neu is now available on the Mac Application store. Unfortunately, due to the time lag involved in the approval process, the current version there is 1.0.1, whereas the version available for download here is 1.0.2.

Apple does not provide a way for developers to allow existing users of an application to “cross-grade” over to the Apple store version. So if you have paid for Neu via the Elegant Chaos store, please continue to download new versions through the built-in update mechanism. If, for some reason, you want a Mac application store of Neu, you will need to purchase it again. However, there’s no need to do that - your existing version will stay up to date (in fact, at the moment, it’s more up to date!).

If you bought Neu via the Apple store, please do not download the newer version from this website. Applications bought in the Apple store should only be updated via the store. The 1.0.2 update of Neu will be in the store just as soon as I can get it through the submission process.

I realise that this situation is a bit confusing and I apologise, but I had no way of knowing if/when Neu would be approved for the Apple store, so it wasn’t possible (and wouldn’t have been fair) to hold back the update for customers who had already paid for it.

In future I will try to synchronise releases in both places, to avoid confusion.

One day I may also choose to only sell through one or the other store, but that decision will wait until the developer community as a whole gets a bit more experience of the Apple store and how it’s doing.

Once again I’m planning on attending NSConference 2011, which is happening in March this year.

It’s a great conference, and I’d highly recommend it if you are a Mac OS X or iOS developer.

You can find out more information here.