It’s only been about a day since we unleashed our Status Board app to the world, and we’ve been truly astonished by the amount of cool things people have built to make it even more useful and amazing.

Here are some of the greatest things we’ve seen so far.

Dead Simple Greatness. One click for new things:

• TubeTracker — an incredible one-click layout for people in the UK who rely on the tube (pictured above)
  
• AAPL — simple panel for Apple’s stock price (don’t follow too closely or you’ll go crazy)
• LastFM — see your last-listened track
• App Store Review Times —  a great way to see how busy Apple is
• WWDC Alert — but really, how fast are tickets going to sell out this year
• Bart Arrival Times — for those of you in San Francisco

New Native Sources. Direct-from-the-source data for your Status Board.

• LeafPing — output your Envato sales data to Status Board. An example.
• uri.lv — track your podcast statistics on the big screen.
• AppViz — this must-have app for App Store sales tracking can now output to Status Board
• Don’t forget our amazing launch sources: StatHat (so useful!) and Hockey.

Sources/Conduits. Some code experience necessary to get these going:

• Nest — a quick look at the temperatures on N
• Server Statistics — keep an eye on your server loads
• OmniFocus — a Python conduit to get your tasks up and running
• Google Analytics — 7-day website stats
• Jenkins — display running jenkins jobs in a table
• TimeTiger — interestingly, a Windows app for time tracking
• Mint Analytics  — a Pepper to create Status Board-compatible web stats
• Mite — time tracking reports
• Things — a way to get your Things to-do lists up and running
• AppFigures 1 — a conduit for displaying your AppStore sales data
• AppFigures 2 — another simple PHP conduit for AppStore sales data
• BitBucket Issues — track open issues in Git/Mercurial hosted source

(And you can always add a new Do-It-Yourself panel and point it to always-running Mario.)

We’ve heard of some fantastic web services working on native Status Board data, including AppFigures and GoSquared. Stay tuned!

Finally, some unofficial third-party sites are springing up to track new things: Pinboard, StatusBoardWidgets.com, and StatusBoardApp.info.

And we love seeing photos of people’s Status Board installations, such as this one in a Ducati dealership:

Keep sending us your cool things! Tweet to @panic or give us an e-mail!

Before we can add new features to Coda 2 in the Mac App Store, we must first “Sandbox” it — adhere to a set of Apple guidelines aimed at increasing the security of Mac OS X.

What does this mean, really?

Well, for safety, sandboxing limits an app’s access to your local files until you give the app explicit permission to interact with those files. And once you’ve done this, your permission is remembered in the future. In other words, Coda won’t be able to see most of your local folders until you specifically select them in a traditional “Choose” dialog. The good news? Coda has Sites, and Sites have a Local Path, and once you “Choose” the Local Path when setting up your site, you’ll be able to view that folder and interact with it in the future. The bad news? You’ve got to reset all of your Local Paths, and if you don’t use Sites in Coda (which would be a bit weird) there will be brief bumps.

These changes should only affect the Mac App Store version. And we think most users won’t even notice that anything has changed.

Here’s the full list of what will change, slated for a future Coda release:

1 Local Root

Your site’s “Local Root” will have to be reset. You’ll be prompted to do this the first time you try to connect.

You only have to do this once for each of your sites!

2 Go To Folder

It will no longer be possible to “Go To” any local path by typing it in. “Go To Folder” on a Local path will now bring down a traditional “Choose” panel.

3 Path History

In the Sidebar and the Files browser, the “Path” pop-up can no longer show anything above your defined Local Root. To go above your Local Root, you’ll have to use Choose.

If you’re not working in a Site, you will land in a generic sandboxed home directory, and must Choose another folder to continue.

You only need to “Choose” a folder once!

4 Path Bar Browsers

If you click on a folder outside of your Local Root, you have to manually choose the folder via Choose panel.

You only need to “Choose” a folder once!

5 Saving Files

It’s no longer possible to Save files you don’t have write access to, and Coda is no longer able to offer an authorization dialog to permit this behavior.

This includes any files you don’t own and don’t have proper permissions to write, such as files owned by a “web” process.

This is also an App Store restriction.

6 Get Info

It’s no longer possible to change permissions of files that require Administrator/Root access from Coda’s Get Info window.

You’ll have to switch to the Finder and adjust permissions there before editing these items.

This is also an App Store restriction.

7 Places

Any Local places will be cleared during the upgrade, and will need to be recreated, once.

Note: Places are defined per computer, so they will need to be reset on each computer Coda is used on.

8 SVN and GIT

Tool paths may need to be reset depending on their location on your computer.

9 Local Shell

Coda will no longer be able to open a direct local shell/terminal. (You could always turn on Remote Login in Sharing preferences, and connect through that.)

That’s it. What do you think?

For the truly curious we’ve put together a special Coda 2 build with these changes.

We don’t have a timeline on this release, but we’re curious to know your general thoughts on Coda 2 and Sandboxing. Once again, we do not think these changes will affect most people, but we’d love it if you could please take this survey:

[polldaddy survey=”CE7F658FF4C50ABA” type=”button” title=”Take Our Survey!” style=”inline” text_color=”000000″]

Thanks for reading, and thanks for using Coda 2. We’re excited to finish sandboxing and start work on more new, awesome things!

Like Minecraft? Then surely you’ll love Mooncraft!

Except, well, you really won’t. Really:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqZrBGcsV9Y

What happened here? It’s pretty simple.

1. Scammer makes an extremely simple iOS app and submits it to Apple.

2. Once it’s approved, they change the screenshots, description, and name — things you can edit at any time.  Piggyback off a popular game!

3. Buy hundreds of fake ★★★★★ reviews, somehow.

4. Sit back and relax as you slowly and gently travel towards hell.

This isn’t Apple’s fault, of course — it’s bait-and-switch, the classic inch/mile situation that scammers rely on. How can Apple fix this? Being able to adjust screenshots/descriptions after submitting is important, and we don’t want that to go away. And it’d be unreasonable for Apple to manually review all screenshot changes.

How about this: after an app hits the store, if it has nothing but 1-star reviews (that include text!), and those reviews mention keywords like “scam” a lot, flag it for further inspection?

I bet there’s an algorithm out there that could find these apps pretty quickly.

Either way, Quang Nguyen (which might be a fake name, of course): you’re a terrible person. (Thanks to Steve for missing the tiny popup button and clicking “Buy App” by accident.)

UPDATE 12/10/2012: For a while, Mooncraft was pulled from the store. But, of course, it’s back.

UPDATE 1/10/2013: Apple has announced a new policy that screenshots can only be updated when they accompany a new application binary submitted for review. Hopefully that will put a stop to this particular type of trickery.

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!

A quick update on CandyBar!

Updated for 10.8.

First, we’ve updated CandyBar for Mac OS X 10.8! You can now customize the 10.8 system icons. Just launch the app and click the big “Update” button to get the latest IconData.

But there’s a catch, or two: in Mountain Lion, Apple changed how the Dock is rendered, so it’s no longer possible to customize the Dock’s look. (You can still customize the indicator lights!) Also, CandyBar still can’t change the internal icons of Mac App Store apps, due to code signing.

CandyBar, although simply changing files on disk, has always fallen into a slightly-uncomfortable-for-us grey area of existence. It seems clear to us that there will undoubtedly come a time (soon?) when CandyBar can no longer customize system icons at all. So, what do we do?

Now free, and unsupported.

Since we’re unsure about the long-term future of changing system icons, we’re not comfortable charging money for CandyBar, and we’re also not comfortable simply making it disappear, instead we’re going to make the current CandyBar free — but unsupported.

That said, being CandyBar fans, we’ll strive to keep CandyBar up-to-date with minor 10.8 releases, so you can keep using it for the foreseeable future! But, if something major changes, on the level of the Dock changes in 10.8, we can’t guarantee compatibility.

First, here’s the latest build of the app:

Then, here’s a serial number everyone can use:

PPQA-YAMA-E3KP-VHXG-B6AL-L

Even if technically unsupported, CandyBar is still super cool. We hope you enjoy it.

(Also, if you bought CandyBar from us in July or so, we will refund you. If interested, e-mail the Iconfactory.)

Finally, CandyBar heads to The Iconfactory.

So where does CandyBar go from here? Well, there’s the other half of the app: the convenient icon organizer, and Quick Drop icon changer, that many of us use often. We’re handing the reins of CandyBar over to our friends at The Iconfactory. They’ve got some thoughts on CandyBar’s future, and where they might take it from here. If you bought CandyBar from us, you will of course be considered if something new shows up. Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, please contact support@iconfactory.com.

TL;DR: CandyBar updated for 10.8, but changing system icons won’t work forever, so CandyBar is now free and unsupported — and may turn into something new at The Iconfactory later.