It's been just a tad over a month since our last release, and that's why beta 4 is unleashed upon the world - the changes in this version are huge.

This is just a highlight list - far from the complete list of features and bug fixes in this version.

I sine, you sine, we all sine for Haversine

MahTweets now uses the Haversine Forumla to figure out where you are in relation to others. This allows us to tell you exactly how far somebody is away from you, if they're also geotagging their updates.

Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'

MahTweets now has another social account join in on the fun - Tumblr! In this release its read only of your Tumblr Dashboard (you can reblog or like) instead of composing new posts for your Tumblr. If you are an avid Tumblr user, using MahTweets, we'd love to hear your feature suggestion for the next release!

There are a few things to note about this - Tumblr's API isn't what I'd consider all that stable, it often times out, returns null data, error codes that don't make sense or is just plain down. Sadly this means forcing refreshes of Tumblr won't really help.

Minimise to tray is back

Blackhelicopters might be real, but HoverWindows do exist

Leave your mouse hovering over a contact or a Mosaic - and up will pop a HoverWindow. This will remain on screen, showing updates from that contact until you mouse-out.

Clicking on the pin icon at the top of the window, the HoverWindow remains hovering. Click on the megaphone icon, and the HoverWindow will disappear: until there is an update from that contact - then it pops up. This is sort of like contextual notifications.

Scripting. If MahTweets can't do it, Script it.

MahTweets has integrated scripting since the previous beta. In this beta, we've added documentation and more hidden nice things.

Using IronPython and IronRuby, you can now open up your text editor and script new features into your social media application. For more indepth details, start reading from here: MahTweets 3.0 Scripting: Introduction

The Curious Case of Favourites, FourSquare and other Buttons

While sending messages and non-network-specific actions for each network has been a strong point of MahTweets, specific features of individual networks has never really presented itself - sure, we've got List support for Twitter, but where are favourites? Saved Searches? What if we introduced FourSquare and wanted a Checkin option?

Well, we've now introduced a means for plugins to provide buttons on the sidebar! For Twitter we've got both favourites and saved searches

Oh, and we added FourSquare too, with its own checkin button (this requires a Windows 7 Location sensor such as Geosense installed)

I see you

Search columns now persist between opening/closing MahTweets, and you can load up Saved Searches from Twitter. We don't have saving to twitter saved searches yet, as for MahTweets, it can be a bit more complicated.

Progress report

How far are we along to a 'final' release? Well, beta 4 makes huge strides to catch up to all we had in 2.7, certainly surpassing it in many areas.

Don't worry, we're not just aiming on all green for the final release, but to shame 2.7 by making it have a huge number of 'red' features.