Panic Blog

(Here’s a special guest post from Noby of Panic Japan. -Cabel.)

We love 塊魂！We love のびのびBOY！という訳で、僕らの大好きなゲームクリエータである高橋慶太さんが Panic の本社を訪れてくれました！！

We love Katamari! We love Noby Noby Boy! Well, Mr. Keita Takahashi, our favorite game creator, finally visited the Panic office, officially!!

高橋さんはかねてからの Mac ユーザで、以前より我々の FTP クライアントである Transmit のユーザでいらっしゃいます。また独特のプレゼンテーションを Desktastic で行い、近年はサイトの制作に Coda を使用していただいています。

2004年末（そんな前！）私たちは、塊魂（そしてその後、のびのびBOYも）の公式 Tシャツ制作依頼という無謀なオファーをしました。高橋さんはそれを快諾し、ご自身によって新たにデザインされた Tシャツは現在も人気です。

He is a Mac guy. And he was originally using Transmit. He also uses Desktastic in his unique presentations, and Coda to make his website in recent years.

At the end of 2004 (time is fast, surprise!), we rashly demanded the right to produce official Katamari (and Noby Noby Boy also) t-shirts. Takahashi consented it willingly. Recently, the shirts designed by him have been super popular.

日ごろの感謝をこめて、私たちは高橋さんをオレゴン州ポートランドの本社に招きました。

一方、時を同じくして Floating World Comics では、塊魂とのびのびBOYにインスパイアされた作品を集めたローカルな展覧会が開かれていました。それらの収益はチャリティとして関連団体に寄付されます。

So, as thanks for his hard work, we invited him to our office in Portland.

At time same time, there was a local art show of Katamari and Noby Noby Boy inspired artwork in the bookstore Floating World Comics! The profits were contributed to a charity.

展覧会は素晴らしいものでした！そして何より 6年前にリリースされたゲームが現在も多くの人々に影響を与えていることに驚かされます。すべての作品はこちらから見ることができます。

This art show was amazing. Floating World did an amazing job!! It must be a crazy feeling to know your game can still inspire artists 6 years later. Here are some sample pieces — all of the artwork can be seen here.

サプライズゲストとして高橋さんも参加！さらに、ツイートを見て集まったラッキーなファンとの交流を楽しみました。

Keita visited the show! And, he really enjoyed the exchange with lucky people who saw our tweet immediately before his visit.

これまでの数々の記事やインタビューで、しばしば高橋さんの極端な意見が紹介されています。ある人は彼を Keita ではなく Hater （嫌う人）Takahashi と呼ぶかも知れません。気難しいと思っているかもしれません。

100％ノーです！彼は本当に気さくで、ピュアで、ユニークで、動物好きな、すんばらしいガイです！

So, in a lot of articles and interviews, Keita’s opinion is often extreme. A certain person might even call him Hater (Hey-tah, instead of Kay-tah) Takahashi. Or, some internet guy says that he is hard to please. No!

This is 100% wrong. He is really candid, pure, unique, and an animal lover — so awesome guy.

高橋さんは現在フリーランサーとして活動されています。今後の活躍に私たちは胸を踊らせています。

今度はぜひ、ご家族でポートランドにお越しください！

Anyway, now that Keita is a freelancer, we are really excited for his activity in the future.

Keita, please visit Portland again with your family!

(I also highly recommend you check out Keita’s awesome new blog. -Cabel)

Some big holiday news over at Panic Goods:

All of our t-shirts are now on sale for $10. All of them. No jokes.

The Transmit “Roosevelt” shirt now has a limited quantity of women’s, XXXL, and XS sizes.

This is your last chance for a Katamari/Noby Noby shirt, as re-orders have ended.

To ensure holiday delivery, we’re only selling what’s on the shelf, no backorders. Order quickly.

Now hopefully I can post this to the blog without spending a thousand hours on a design or slogan.

Hi there. We’re Panic. I’d like to try being more transparent. So here’s what going on, right now.

Let’s start with Unison. Earlier this year we released Unison 2, a dramatic update that totally modernized our Usenet newsreader. Since release, we’ve been actively fixing bugs and adding the occasional feature — here’s the full list — and now we’re up to to 2.1.2, just released. Even though Unison 2 work is complete, Dave continues to look at incoming crash logs and exceptions daily, fixing them in a continuous cycle. Now, will there be a Unison 3? It’s hard to say, for two reasons: with a few exceptions, we can’t think of many major features to add (without diving into minutiae — our design goal is to keep Unison general-purpose), and the future of Usenet itself always feels a little uncertain. We’ll play it by ear, but we believe Unison 2 is one of the best newsreaders on any platform — period — and we’ll continue to make it shine into the future.

After a huge development cycle, Transmit 4 has been a huge success, personally and publicly. If you’ve got files to transfer, we’ve got your truckback. We just released version 4.1.3, which fixes our most-encountered known issues — here’s the list of changes. Looking forward, Will is always checking out incoming bugs and crashers and we’ll keep fixing. We’ll also be integrating updates from Amit — the original creator of MacFUSE — who is steadily adding improvements to our massive new (and now 64-bit) Transmit Disk feature. Transmit 4 is exactly where we want it to be right now — smooth, easy-to-use, powerful file transfer. But hang on — that doesn’t mean we’re done, or don’t have long list of bigger ideas and improvements to make in the future. (We read you, Rackspace Cloud Files fans, and heavy-duty Places users.) It’s a matter of timing and we’re swamped — once we can take a breather from the next item in this list, we’ll keep working to make Transmit even better than it is now.

For the most part, though, it’s all hands on the next Coda. That’s what we’re living and breathing. Wade, Will and Ian are doing the heavy lifting, Steve’s also spending a lot of time in this world, and we’ve brought in The Coding Monkeys — Dom and Martin — to work directly with us on some lower-level engine changes. Last year’s plan for the future of Coda was to keep things simple, not touch the UI, and only focus on highly-requested editor features. Something about that didn’t feel quite right to us, though — it wasn’t a “true” Panic 2.0? — so after two fateful days locked in front of a whiteboard, we’re now looking at more substantial improvements and changes, while trying our best to stay balanced (keeping in mind the supreme court case of Baby v. Bathwater). We really see the next major Coda update as a massive, unmissable opportunity to fix and clarify a lot of Coda behavior that’s been nagging us from day one. We won’t do a half-hearted job — we want to rise to the challenge and make something special for you. This excitement comes, of course, with deflating expectation-setting: the next Coda is going to take some time still. But we’re working hard. And instead of guessing at a release date right now — guaranteeing disaster — how about I make the following promise: when we hit private beta, I’ll let you know via this blog within seconds. Then you’ll know things are close.

One last little exclusive Coda tidbit: we’re wrapping up Coda 1.7 for release in the next couple of weeks, which adds much-requested HTML5 goodness to our completion dictionaries! This includes all HTML5 elements (with appropriate attributes, values, and hints) and additional CSS attributes (including -moz and -webkit extensions). JavaScript also gets a massive completion update in 1.7, including HTML5 event handlers, core language keywords, and tons of missing DOM objects and properties. It’s quite nice.  We were originally planning to roll this work into a more major Coda update, but that didn’t seem fair. We hope it helps you out while you wait for the future!

Finally, software-wise, Wade has a few bug fixes in the hopper on CandyBar, and has a few new ideas on how to improve its reliability, but it’ll take a little downtime for us to wrap up a release. Next year we hope to talk to our friends at The Iconfactory about where we go next!

What else is going on? We’re also got some very interesting iOS experiments. Dave and the recently-hired Garrett are doing some exciting proof-of-concept work on… things. It’s far too early to discuss. But rest assured that, not counting 2009’s Pantscast, we’re not ignoring this incredibly, critically important platform. You can quote me on that.

Finally, something interesting but similarly oblique: we’ve hired Greg (formerly of Apple, pinball documentaries and more) to tackle what we call “Special Projects“. What? Well, every now and then we’re approached with a job for an outside organization, where we make cool apps and creative things that we’ll likely never be able to tell you about. 99.9% of the time we say “no”, since I’m not super fond of agency-style work, but every now and then it’s fun, satisfying, and something we’re actually interested in, like right now. Greg’s doing code and art for this world, while in the future possibly becoming more of a “project manager” for all of our apps. (Welcome to Portland, Greg.)

While all of this is happening, something incredibly important but little-discussed is going on in the back of the room: the formative rumblings of a formal QA department. We recently hired James (formerly of Omni and bicycles) to work with our existing crack support team, also known as Les and Tim. They’re devising processes and methods to improve our regression testing, release checklists, bug triaging, and more. With any luck, this hard work will take a little pressure off the engineers, and improve the release quality of our software.

Speaking of Support, our queues are lower than they’ve been in months thanks to the ultra hard work of these very guys, also including Noby’s work in Japan and Mike’s handling of the non-technical stuff while establishing our ironic-or-earnest? sales department. If any of these guys have helped you lately, let them know. For me. My ultimate dream goal is getting Panic to a 24-hour turnaround time for all e-mail requests — can we pull it off before 2011? Stay tuned! Also, mysteriously, Neven and I continue to deeply enjoy handling support via Twitter. 140 character tech support is the greatest, most refreshing thing in the world. If you have a company and don’t do it, do it.

Last but not least, the Art Department — myself, Neven, and Kenichi — work daily to support every single thing you’ve just read, with a steady stream of mockups, icons, and more. And while a sharp increase of art department work has meant a sharp reduction in blogging, we also hope to keep posting fun things here, including the infamous “Panic Office Tour” post, as the Quicktime VR’s are finally done. The big albatross that looms over us? A redesign of the Panic main page, with (possibly) a refresh of our company logo. It continues to terrify, but we’ll get there in 2011, I swear. (This website redesign ties directly into minor updates of Stattoo and Desktastic, which we should have released long ago. My apologies — if I did it again, I wouldn’t make those dependent on each other.)

And, well, that’s us in a nutshell.

As always, thanks for your support, thanks for your purchases, thanks for your great ideas and suggestions, and thanks for your word-of-mouth advertising that has become the foundation of our company. You are the reason we do what we do.

We’ll always keep working to make even more cool things.

TL;DR: we are busy.