Panic Blog

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!

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!

All of us at Panic deeply appreciate the hard work the everyone has put into creating so many excellent extensions for Nova, our Mac code editor. Your amazing efforts make Nova an even better Mac app.

To make the process of maintaining extensions easier for developers, we’re excited to announce the new and (slightly-awkwardly named) “Nova Extension Developer License Program”. In short, extension developers can now request a free, not for resale (NFR) license of Nova, on the house, once an extension meets the following requirements:

• Published or updated within the last year
• Contains proper documentation, as outlined in the extension template
• 500 or more downloads from the Nova Extension Gallery

To request a license or renewal, simply email us at nova-extensions@panic.com from the email address associated with your developer account, and include the following information:

• A link to your listing on the Extension Gallery
• The name and email address you’d like your license to be registered to
• The serial number associated with your current license (in the case of renewal)

Only one license may be requested per extension developer, and the license is non-transferrable. After the first year, just send us another email and we’ll happily renew your developer license for another year under the same terms.

If you have additional questions about these requirements, or other suggestions about how we can improve the extension development community, please let us know. We’re all ears!

Hi, friends. Panic has a very special opportunity in 2018 for a nice, creative, talented engineer to join our award-winning dev team. We’ve got a lot going on over here, including work on a brand new version of Coda, as well as constant fixes and improvements to Transmit, so that means we’re desperately looking for macOS developers.

A rare breed, we know, but we think you’re out there.

I like to think that Panic is a place where you can write your own destiny and make a real impact on our products and our future. (In fact, you kind of have to write your own destiny, because there’s not a lot of managerial oversight.) You’ll call a lot of shots, you’ll own a lot of things, and with any luck, it will feel pretty good.

If this sounds interesting, head on over to our jobs page and submit your resume soon.

(Also, there’s one other thing I want to mention that’s not explicitly stated in the job posting: if you read our qualifications, feel like you’re really really close to matching them all but you’re missing one, or maybe you aren’t a super confident person or feel a touch of the ol’ imposter syndrome creep in as you read the page, please consider pushing through and applying anyway. 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.

Proposed design for the Official Flag of “Responsive Video” by Yours Truly

Just when you think you have a handle on every conceivable size variation of every iOS App Store screenshot for your app, you remember: there’s also the App Store Preview video! Dang.

The App Store’s autoplaying App Preview video feature is really great, allowing you to show your app in action to potential users, but including video with all of your other App Store marketing materials adds yet another layer of complexity to shipping your app.  The Preview video sizes are all different from their static-image counterparts, and of course, there are twelve different Preview video possibilities, thanks to various screen sizes and options for portrait and landscape orientations. Hoo boy.

I’ve attempted to make the App Store Preview video export process a little easier to wrangle for myself (and, hopefully, for you!)

I use Adobe After Effects to combine screen recordings, text, and other elements for my videos, so I’ve made a master After Effects project that includes every size and orientation you could want for your Preview video.

Since Preview videos can be uploaded on a per-device basis, you can mix and match landscape and portrait orientations for them. We did this with our Prompt Preview, using a portrait orientation to match our screenshots for iPhones, and a landscape orientation to match our screenshots for iPads. Six different videos! Phew.

The AE Project 

Here’s a look at what’s inside:

 

And here’s an example use case: a video I just started working on for Coda iOS. I’m working from a 1920×1920 composition titled “MAIN”, which I’ve dropped into various device-specific pre-comps. This way, I can see the effect of positioning elements in “MAIN” at any video size. It’s like responsive design, for video. Kinda.

 

I recommend deciding which orientation you’ll use at each device size first, then working at the largest-possible size (like I do in “MAIN” in the example above), and scaling down for smaller devices as needed. The “Combined” comp has every size and orientation overlaid (labeled and color-coded by screen size), but you can drop your video into any of these nested pre-comps as needed, to see how it’ll look, and make any adjustments. Each of these is thirty seconds long, and has a frame rate of 30 frames per second (both app store maximums; note that your video must also be at least fifteen seconds long in order to be accepted). 

Even if you don’t use After Effects on a regular basis, I hope you’ll find this project file helpful in wrangling your App Previews. Happy rendering!

P.S. If this project file is overkill and you’re just looking for a list of App Preview video dimensions, here you go:

Device(s)	Portrait	Landscape
iPhone SE, 5s, 5c, iPod Touch 5th Gen	640 x 1136	1136 x 640
iPad Air, iPad 4th Gen, iPad Mini Retina	900 x 1200	1200 x 900
iPhone 6, 6s, 7, 8	750 x 1334	1334 x 750
iPad Pro	1200 x 1600	1600 x 1200
iPhone X	886 x 1920	1920 x 886
iPhone 6 Plus, 6s Plus, 7 Plus, Apple TV*	1080 x 1920*	1920 x 1080