Panic Blog

Archive for 2012

VTAC: Enhanced Online Security

Monday, November 12th, 2012

A while back, I became obsessed with getting an “Extended Validation” certificate for our website, just so that we can have a little green “Panic Inc” sitting in the address bar.

You know exactly what I’m talking about:

Getting that green rectangle was, put simply, Le Pain Royale. I suppose that’s the point. It also wasn’t cheap.

After hearing me repeatedly complain about the frustrations of getting our Extended Validation certificate, our own Mike Merrill made me a compelling offer.

For the same amount of money I’d spend on an Extended Validation certificate, Mike could provide our customers with a significantly more secure and immutable validation seal, one that would provide true “trust beyond pixels”.

With this idea, VTAC was born.

Art project? Groundbreaking new level of web security? Prank? Your call.

Should you have any doubts about panic.com security, please visit our office and ask to see Mike’s arm.

VTAC seals are now available for qualified third parties. Click here to learn more or request a quote.

Music courtesy 8-Bit Operators. Thanks!

Posted in General | 15 Comments »

Coda 2.0.5 Beta Ready to Test

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012

For early-access, cutting-edge Coda users: we’re wrapping up another Coda update which eliminates a few possible crashes and hangs, fixes aggressive Preview caching, and improves performance.

If you’re interested, ~~grab Coda 2.0.5b1 here (51MB).~~

UPDATE 11/5: Beta complete! Coda 2.0.5 has been released.

Then, please use it, and promptly report any issues found in Hive!

Posted in Note | 18 Comments »

Waritsuki Drive Icons

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012

You can finally read Panic’s blog in Japanese! I was unsure what to write for the longest time, but since I’m not good at talking like Cabel, I decided to make and show off some icons. Today, I’m revealing a disk icon with a Japanese pattern design.

The pattern is from a book on “Japanese Patterns” I found in the library purely by accident about half a year ago. The book was interesting, so I decided I wanted to make an icon using one of these patterns.

Download iContainer

Waritsuki Drives iContainer.zip (34 MB)

Download .icns

Waritsuki Drives.zip (32 MB)

This collection contains 20 icons with beautiful Retina Display for Mac OS X. I’d be really happy if this icon could spark just a little bit of interest for our culture. Enjoy! :)

Posted in Art Department | 31 Comments »

Burnside: our Tweet-to-Email Gateway

Thursday, September 27th, 2012

We get a lot of support questions via Twitter which, believe it or not, we love. It forces people to ask questions succinctly, and it forces us to answer succinctly. We think it’s a pretty great way to answer questions.

But the part we don’t love is trying to use the Twitter website, or a third-party web service like “ExactTarget SocialEngage”, ugh that name, to answer these questions. There’s just something inherently slow and inefficient about using the web for rapid-fire, high-volume tasks like answering support questions.

662741386-1 So, we built Burnside, a Tweet-to-Email Gateway.

Tweets go into a regular mailbox. When we reply, they go back out as tweets. Since multiple people can work out of the same IMAP box, it’s fast and efficient. And as an added bonus, as we archive tweets one by one, we’re building our own searchable index of tweets in Mail. Try searching for anything older than a week on the Twitter website!

(And what about the 140 character limit? We also wrote a plugin for Apple Mail that displays a character count in the Mac OS X Mail window.)

Burnside is notable for another reason: it’s a unique Panic foray into open source. Usually we keep these things to ourselves, but why?

We’ve just put Burnside up on GitHub for anyone to tweak and install.

FAIR WARNING: Burnside is for system administrators only. This is not a consumer app, and it requires significant configuration and understanding of your mail server.