Author Archive

Introducing Prompt 3. Now on most of your devices.

Wednesday, January 24th, 2024

Yes, it’s time for an announcement!

The best SSH app for iOS now includes a Mac companion. Prompt 3 is here and ready to work.

Way back at the beginning of 2011, we introduced Prompt: a nice, clean SSH terminal client for the iPad and iPhone. People loved it. Then, four years later came Prompt 2, which became the premier terminal client for iOS and iPadOS. Prompt 2 was a stable, reliable workhorse for lots of people – an easy, fast, and nice looking way to connect to servers and do server things on them. Its 4.8-star rating across over 4,300 reviews was a shining testament to that.

Now after many years of work, we’re excited to finally announce Prompt’s next major update. It’s here!

Learn More about Prompt 3

We know it’s been a long (long) time coming, so we made sure to add all of your most-requested Prompt features, like support for Mosh and Eternal Terminal, jump hosts, port forwarding, proper iPadOS multitasking, YubiKey and Secure Enclave authentication, and so much more.

With lightning-fast terminal emulation (thanks to optional GPU acceleration) and customizable fonts and themes, Prompt 3 is speedier and more personal than ever. And yep, there’s even a dark icon.

Oh, and one more thing: Prompt 3 now includes a Mac version, for no additional cost.

And thanks to Panic Sync, your servers and clips are automatically at your fingertips on all the devices and platforms where you run Prompt.

It was important to us that Prompt 3 feel right on all your devices. Since Mac apps have always been a passion of ours here at Panic, these are two separate apps, each developed from the ground up to feel right at home on each platform. The Mac app is a Mac app. The iOS app is an iOS app.

Getting started is so easy. When you pay for one platform, the other version is automatically unlocked and ready for you to download from the App Store.

How much? Not much! Just $19.99 per year, cancel anytime. We’ve been very open about the challenges of making money on iOS utility software, and after evaluating the options available to us on the App Store, we feel this is the best way to support ongoing development of Prompt.

And an app like Prompt really needs full-time development! In addition to the new features and UI refinements required for every major OS update, we spend a lot of time updating and testing our products each year, and there are plenty of new features we want to bring to Prompt 3 in the future.

And remember: you get two separate apps for your subscription — both the Mac and iOS versions of Prompt 3. There’s even a free 7-day trial.

But if you really don’t like subscriptions, believe me, we totally understand. So, we’re also providing an option to buy Prompt 3 outright with a one-time purchase. It’s more expensive, yes, but it will be yours forever.

We believe Prompt 3 is an incredible, professional, and reliable terminal emulator for a fraction of the price of the others. With its lovely user interface, it’s easy and, dare we say, almost pleasant to do command line work on your various servers. We’re sure you’ll understand as soon as you try it yourself.

Prompt 3 is now available on the App Store with a free 7-day trial.

Prompt 3 was built by Michael Buckley, with help from Logan Collins and Heather Buletti, product management by Aaron Bell, design by Kenichi Yoshida and Neven Mrgan, and is currently supported by Jesus Diaz and Mike Freuden.

We hope you enjoy it!

PS: We’re on standby to fix bugs and make it even better! Send us your notes!

Help Wanted: Financial Controller (2022)

Friday, October 21st, 2022

Hello!!

Panic has a job opening for a Financial Controller (October 2022) with in-house business experience.

Panic does a lot of interesting things, from developing Mac and iOS software (like Nova, Transmit, and Prompt), to publishing video games (like Untitled Goose Game and Firewatch), to developing our own handheld gaming system from scratch with a full SDK (Playdate). Now at 30 employees, Panic has traditionally relied on outside firms to handle most of its accounting. But, as our business grows more interesting and more complex every year, we’re looking for someone, hopefully you, to bring some financial power in-house.

We are mostly located in Portland, Oregon, and would be happy to pay for your relocation here if interested. For this particular job, because of the collaboration and discussion it requires, we’d like someone willing to work at our headquarters.

What kind of work, exactly?

At the start, you will supervise the overall financial operations of the business, from general accounting, bill payments, reconciliation, etc., state use and sales tax compliance, potential oversight of international VAT tax regulations, and tracking the overall financial health of the company through periodic financial reports.

Beyond that, we’d love to find someone who could also feel comfortable helping make key financial or budgetary recommendations to various departments, providing options to management to scope our investments in various projects, but we worry that’s asking a lot, so it would also be great if you could spot areas of our business where we (and you) may need additional financial help, either by sourcing third-party companies that could work alongside you, or through hiring additional financial roles at your direction.

For more details, hit the link below.

One other thing

Also, a standard and important Panic note about our job postings. If you read our qualifications, and feel like you’re really really close to hitting them all, but you’re missing one — or maybe you aren’t super confident or are prone to imposter syndrome and a voice is telling you to walk away — please consider pushing through and applying. None of us here are perfect geniuses or have it together 100% — we’re all just doing the best job we can, and I’m confident you can do that too.

We really look forward to hearing from you.

Click here for full details, and to apply to our Financial Controller (October 2022) job. Applications close November 4th, 2022.

Help Wanted: Playdate Senior QA/Release Engineer

Thursday, March 17th, 2022

Hello!!

Panic has a job opening for a Playdate Senior QA/Release Engineer (March 2022) on our award-winning team.

Panic does a lot of interesting things, from developing Mac and iOS software (like Nova, Transmit, and Prompt), to publishing video games (like Untitled Goose Game and Firewatch), to developing our own handheld gaming system from scratch with a full SDK (Playdate). In this case, we need some help with the latter.

We’re looking for a Senior QA/Release Engineer that’s truly excited about the prospect of helping us make sure our critical Playdate software is as top-quality and bug-free as possible. You’ll be in charge of releases of Playdate OS (operating system) and the Playdate SDK (software development kit).

We are mostly located in Portland, Oregon, and would be happy to pay for your relocation here if interested. We’re also open to remote work for this position if you are based in the USA. (We hope in the future to expand our hiring and compliance to include international applicants, but we’re not there yet.) Due to Covid-19, our office is currently operating in a hybrid mode, with many employees choosing to only work from home, but while some of us hope to return to the office as soon as we can, others will continue to work remotely.

What kind of work, exactly?

In addition to thoroughly testing and qualifying builds of Playdate OS and the SDK, you’ll also be responsible for quality assurance for Playdate-related applications, including the device simulator, and video capture utilities, which run on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Ideally, you would also be willing to proactively develop and maintain any tools and processes to streamline and simplify QA.

The ideal candidate will have lots of experience with git and issue tracking systems like GitLab. Command-line expertise is a requirement. Experience with embedded systems like Playdate and firmware testing is a bonus, but not required. Experience with deployment and measurement tools such as Memfault is also nice, but not required. Self-direction and strong self-motivation are critical. Interest in creating the necessary tools to make the QA and Release process easier will help a lot. If you think you’d have an unstoppable sense of pride in being the last stop on our software release chain, we’d love to hear from you.

One other thing

Also, a standard and important Panic note about our job postings. If you read our qualifications, and feel like you’re really really close to hitting them all, but you’re missing one — or maybe you aren’t super confident or are prone to imposter syndrome and a voice is telling you to walk away — please consider pushing through and applying. None of us here are perfect geniuses or have it together 100% — we’re all just doing the best job we can, and I’m confident you can do that too.

We really look forward to hearing from you.

Click here for full details, and to apply to our Playdate Senior QA/Release Engineer (March 2022) job. Applications close April 4th, 2022.

Nova Sale

Wednesday, March 16th, 2022

Your time is valuable. We’ll keep this brief.

For the next two weeks, Nova — our powerful Mac code editor, the successor to Coda, the future of native editing — is now on sale for 50% off, just $49, and you even get a full year of updates for free.

Get Nova For Just $99 $49

But hurry, the sale ends on April 1st, 2022.

Not only is Nova 50% off, but Nova 9 adds support for debugging! You can now debug code in PHP, Python, Chrome, Node.js, and of course, our own Playdate Simulator. We’ve also expanded our extension API so users can implement their own debugging support for other environments. There’s a new Debug sidebar, a Debugging pane in the Console, breakpoints, and more.

If you downloaded Nova before and already gave it a shot, don’t worry — we’ve reset the trial period, so everyone can try Nova 9. And remember, Nova is a free download.

That’s it! We hope you’re enjoying Nova and we hope you consider picking it up while it’s on sale! In the meantime, please enjoy this powerful sales video produced by our marketing department.

Help Wanted: Python Web Services Engineer (Early 2022)

Wednesday, January 12th, 2022

Hello!!

Panic has a job opening for a Web Services Engineer on our award-winning team.

Panic does a lot of interesting things, from developing Mac and iOS software (like Nova, Transmit, and Prompt), to publishing video games (like Untitled Goose Game and Firewatch), to developing our own handheld gaming system from scratch with a full SDK (Playdate).

We’re looking for a Python developer with Django experience to help us maintain some of our existing web services and write some new ones.

We are mostly located in Portland, Oregon, and would be happy to pay for your relocation here if interested, but we are open to remote work for this position if you are based in the USA. (We hope in the future to expand our hiring and compliance to include international applicants, but we’re no there yet.) We have a number of remote workers and have, like most companies, been entirely remote since, oh, right around 2020. We do hope to return to the office in a hybrid fashion, only for those who are interested, whenever that is possible.

What kind of web services work?

Panic, as you might imagine, has an incredible amount of web infrastructure. In addition to good old fashioned self-hosted websites, there’s our solid and reliable Panic Sync service used by Transmit and Nova, our homegrown store platform for direct app sales which recently added sales tax calculations, our Playdate account management and game distribution system WOPR, etc. We currently have just one web services engineer, and we need your help with any number of these projects.

You’ll call a lot of shots, you’ll own a lot of things, and with any luck, it will feel rewarding. Sound interesting?

We think the person that would do best in this position will have Django or Python experience, but perhaps you currently use another modern web framework. You will need to be self-directed and care about good documentation. More than any degrees, we will want to see your past work, and hear about your experiences.

One other thing

Also, a standard and important Panic note about our job postings. If you read our qualifications, and feel like you’re really really close to hitting them all, but you’re missing one — or maybe you aren’t super confident or are prone to imposter syndrome and a voice is telling you to walk away — please consider pushing through and applying. None of us here are perfect geniuses or have it together 100% — we’re all just doing the best job we can, and I’m confident you can do that too.

We really look forward to hearing from you.

Click here to apply to our Web Services Engineer (Early 2022) job. Applications close February 1st, 2022.