Panic Blog

Yes. This Thursday, May 24th, you’ll be able to get Coda 2.

Coda 2 represents a incredible overhaul of every facet of our venerable all-in-one web code editor. It’s a release packed with tons of improvements that will make you more efficient and faster at your job. And on top of that, it’s got brand new features that will make it an even more indispensable part of your process.

You can learn all about Coda 2 here.

But that’s not the only big piece of news.

You’ll also be able to get the brand-new Diet Coda for your iPad.

Diet Coda takes everything we’ve learned about web code editing, and shrinks it down into the beauty and simplicity of your iPad. The perfect companion to Coda — literally, since the two can work together — it’s the ultimate way to make quick fixes while you’re traveling light.

You can learn about Diet Coda right here.

Coda 2 is a paid upgrade. Free upgrades will be available to customers who bought directly from Panic in the last month or so.

And there’s an important final thing: for the first 24 hours, both apps will be 50% off.

They’ll be available this Thursday, May 24th.

We can’t wait for you to use them.

So, what’s going on at Panic lately? Allow me to explain!

Let’s start with Coda 1. We’ve recently done a series of Lion updates, ending with Coda 1.7.4, which significantly improved the stability of our all-in-one web editor. That said, there’s still one annoying bug on our list that can prevent Preview from fully refreshing linked files such as CSS stylesheet changes. We think we’ve got this one licked, so look for a Coda 1.7.5 release in the coming weeks to fix it. One more important note about Coda 1 — at some point, our automatic update notifications broke! Ugh. The worst. We’ll fix it in 1.7.5, but you might be running an older version and suffering dumb bugs. Please, if you use Coda, choose “Check for Updates…” from the Coda menu and make sure you’re up-to-date.

We’ve been spending Transmit’s year gathering feature requests, planning for the future, and issuing important bug fixes to our world-class file transfer client — including two recent releases to improve Lion compatibility. Now at a nice place with version 4.1.7, we’ll continue to monitor bugs, and hope to spend some quality time with Transmit soon.

Prompt, our nice SSH client for iOS, just had an update to seriously improve the handling of private keys. We’re also finishing up a bug fix release right now — expect it in the next few weeks. We love this app, and we love hearing how it’s saved your bacon, letting you reboot your server while fire-eating at Burning Man, etc. While we’re insistent on not kitchen-sinking it, if you have feature suggestions, let us know. (SSH tunneling is the #1 request by my count.)

We’ve just found an issue with CandyBar where it doesn’t properly import icons that have 1024 ⨉ 1024 representations (the 256 and 512 go missing), so you can expect a 3.3.3 release in the near future. As a side note, people sometimes ask if we can add Lion’s new sidebar icons to CandyBar, and we can, but there’s a sad catch — the system automatically applies monochromatic shading to those icons. We get the feeling people want to bring back color, not have a blob of gray, but that’s not currently possible.

(As for the rest: Unison is in a solid place and we’ll continue to monitor and fix bugs. We’re still working out our plans for the weird little guys: Stattoo actually has a nice update ready to go (!), and Desktastic has a years-old and pretty cool complete rewrite in the can (!!) save for some testing, but internally we’re struggling with overall strategy — it’s hard to find time to support and maintain these tiny little apps. Lesson learned, but thanks for your patience (all four of you) while we figure this out. Also, we continue to develop internal special projects. Who knows what we’re up to!)

Finally, the only part you care about: Coda 2.

Coda 2 has now been in development for about a year and a half. All of us have been working incredibly hard on this forthcoming release. We’re finishing up new features, boosting up the editor, dramatically cleaning up the UI, and improving what Coda already does well today, all while, hopefully, keeping things extremely light and lean. By the time you see it, Coda might look a little different than you’re used to, but we think it’s for good reason. We’ll see how it shakes out, but we’re very excited.

Yes, we can at last see the light at the end of the tunnel. That means I have to make good on the promise I made in last year’s State of the Union, and tell you: we’re almost ready to start private beta testing.

That’s your cue: click here to apply for the Coda 2 private beta! The signup form is now closed. Thanks for your interest!

We only need a limited number of users, and we’re especially interested in Coda contributors — folks who wrote plugins, syntax modes, etc. If you don’t make it in, please note that we still truly appreciate your interest.

So, when will it ship? Coda 2 is an extremely complex and multi-layered app, and it will take significant time to test, debug, and improve. That means there are many, many more months ahead of us — this release is important and needs to be as close to perfect as possible. So, to those of you currently camped out on the street in front of our office: you’ll need to hang in there for a quite a while still. Thanks for your understanding while we test!

Regardless, this is a major milestone in our development, and we thought you’d be excited as well.

That’s the scoop around here. Onward!

The story of how we hired Ian, one of our Cocoa engineers, is a nice piece of life.

When Panic’s headcount was two — me and Steve — the first thing we needed help with was tech support, but the idea of finding and hiring an employee was overwhelming. (It still is, really.) Riding my bike through downtown Portland late one night, a girl flagged me down to ask which bus might take her to her friend’s house. My knowledge of Tri-Met is limited to the one line I use and which seats have the least crust, so I — stay with me here — instead suggested we could walk to my car and drive. On the way, she asked me what I did, and when I mentioned computers, she said “Oh, I have a friend at PSU who does computer stuff! He’s looking for a job!” I quickly lost touch with Cassie, but Ian has worked for Panic ever since.

After first proving his worth at the often thankless task of tech support while simultaneously taking CS classes at Portland State University, Ian’s programming skills gradually grew. Eventually he seemed ready to jump to the next level, so Stattoo was concocted as Ian’s first-ever Cocoa app, a chance to cut his teeth without jumping into the frigid waters of a Transmit. Today, Ian is a part of everything, including major pieces of Coda and Transmit. We guarantee you’ve used his code.

Today is Ian’s last day at Panic, after over 10 years of service. What’s next for him? Medical school!

I’m sad to see Ian go, but I’m happy to see him follow his heart — how many of us could make such a drastic life change? — and while I love Ian as a Cocoa programmer, I really love the idea of him as a fantastic doctor.

So, here’s to your future, Ian! We’ll miss you, and we’ll be rooting for you always.

Not long from now, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion will be ready to download for eager Mac users across the globe.

Well, we’re ready. Today we posted four (!) software updates, mainly to improve Lion compatibility and be ready for the future.

We haven’t yet dug into Lion-specific features, such as fullscreen, but these minor updates will at least keep you rolling with your favorite Panic apps well into 10.7.

Better still? All of these updates are 100% free for current owners.

Here’s what’s new:

• Coda 1.7.1. This important release fixes some annoying possible crashes in Lion. Not much else changed, but that’s because we’re very busy working on the big guy.
• CandyBar 3.3. Not only are we up to date with Lion’s icons, but we also tweaked our user interface to better match 10.7, fixed the Export size slider to snap to common sizes, and more.
• Unison 2.1.5. No known Lion issues to speak of, but we did fix a frequent crash with playing audio, squashed a rare situation where preferences would get reset, and more.
• Transmit 4.1.6. Our amazing Transmit Disk feature (try it!) now fully supports Lion (a “non-trivial” change, I’m told). We also snuck in support for the AWS Tokyo region, Cyberduck 4 favorites importing, and more.

(As always, you can get full release notes by hovering over the ‘Download’ button on each app’s web page.)

These updates are available immediately direct from us. Just launch and use the apps — they’ll update for you. (CandyBar users will need to manually download and replace their current app.)

If you bought via the Mac App Store, hang tight — these updates (save for CandyBar) are currently in the review process, and should be available very soon.

We hope you enjoy Lion!

Dear Internet,

This week, the Panic crew — all 15 of us, with the exception of Kenichi, who is expecting a baby soon, our fifth this year — will be attending Apple’s always-enjoyable WWDC conference.

We can’t wait to see what’s new in Lion and iOS 5. We can’t wait to meet up with our favorite developers, old friends, and brand-new acquaintances, to swap stories. And we’re beyond curious to know what’s up with iCloud, particularly since lots of people want Dropbox syncing in our apps but we’ve been secretly banking on Apple providing a free way for our users to sync their preferences instead. Oh please, please let that be a part of it.

Now, while we’re at WWDC, our support turnaround time might be a little higher than normal. That said, our support team endeavors to bring the show on the road, all guns blazing. (“They work in a hotel room!”)

Most important, if you see any of us at WWDC — let our Twitter avatars be your guide — please say hello!

We’d love to meet you.

Catch you next week!