Hi there! A few weeks ago I posted about Dianara-dev being usable again.

Now that some of the rough edges have been polished, it's time for a beta.

The main change since v1.2.5 has been the refactoring of the way the timelines are handled, which makes updates much faster. Also, the annoying "timeline goes to top on update" effect is mostly gone, though the timeline still moves around when updates are received, this needs fixing. The number of unread posts is not reset on each update anymore. If you get more new posts than what you have configured to show in one page, you'll be notified of how many more posts are pending to be received in the next update. The posts opened from the Meanwhile feed via the "+" button will now be able to load the comments much more often.

Other smaller enhancements are a few new options in the Configuration dialog, such as the options to highlight comments made by you, or comments made by the author of a post and to choose the size of avatars, or more obvious "frames" for shared posts.

There's also an option to hide duplicated posts; that is, posts which were already visible in the timeline will not be shown again when someone shares them.

One new feature that is not visible is nickname completion, a.k.a. "mentioning". If you type '@' while composing a post, you'll get a list of the people you follow. You can then type the first characters of a name and use the arrows and enter keys to select the contact you wish to mention. When creating a note, this will add that contact to the "To" list, which means they'll get your post in their "direct messages" inbox. This was possible before, using the "To" and "Cc" menus, but now it's simpler =)

Check the current CHANGELOG for a more detailed list of changes.

If you didn't already use the development version of Dianara and wish to try it out, you can find it here: https://gitorious.org/dianara 

If you prefer, here's a source code tarball of this beta release:

http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/dianara/dianara-v1.3.0beta1.tar.gz 

The INSTALL file has instructions on how to build it and dependencies.

Feedback is welcome!

Cheers! o/