Tweetbot for Mac alpha updated with notifications, keyboard shortcuts, performance improvements

Tapbots appears to be making significant progress on its upcoming Tweetbot for Mac Twitter client. The development team issued an initial alpha version of Tweetbot for Mac less than two weeks ago, and late yesterday, the company released a much improved version of the alpha. The new update, notably, includes support for OS X Mountain Lion Notification Center, keyboard shortcuts, and the new build also contains many performance improvements. The full change-log:

• Notifications for mentions, follows, retweets, favorites (10.8 only)
• Go to User (command-u)
• Option to open links in background (see preferences)
• Less intrusive tweet action overlay icons
• Double-click tweets in timeline now takes you to status detail
• Fixed some contextual menu issues in direct message conversations
• Fixed pull-to-refresh and scrolling to top issue when loading new results
• Tweetmarker will now set your timeline position on app startup always
• Fixed bugs and crashers related to composing tweets.
• Made large and huge fonts bigger
• Can swipe the empty space in a conversation to go back to previous view
• Can close image window with command-w (also space and esc)
• Menu shortcuts added to profile view: Command-d (direct message) and command-r (reply)

It appears that the alpha notification support is a local type of notifications, rather than push notifications. Push notifications will likely require the final version of Tweetbot for Mac via the Mac App Store. The local notifications in this build will only appear when the application is open. iCloud sync between the iOS and Mac variants of Tweetbot will also likely require a Mac App Store-ready version.

The update to the original alpha is available via the “check for updates” option on the current build. It can also be grabbed from the Tweetbot official website.