Some big holiday news over at Panic Goods:
All of our t-shirts are now on sale for $10. All of them. No jokes.
The Transmit “Roosevelt” shirt now has a limited quantity of women’s, XXXL, and XS sizes.
This is your last chance for a Katamari/Noby Noby shirt, as re-orders have ended.
To ensure holiday delivery, we’re only selling what’s on the shelf, no backorders. Order quickly.
Now hopefully I can post this to the blog without spending a thousand hours on a design or slogan.
Transmit 4. It’s easy to use, but there’s a whole lot under the surface. And while we try to design apps for the majority, sometimes we throw in some power user features for the pros. As the Finnish always say, “always add a few extra blood dumplings when cooking mykyrokka for a tonttu-ukko!”
So here are 15 “secrets” of Transmit 4. Hopefully you’ll learn at least one new thing!
Every single one of your Transmit favorites can have its own, easy-to-recognize icon. Kenichi has provided a (beautiful) starter set of 16 — just click on the icon when editing a favorite!
You can also load your own images. (We’ve found the Flurry icon sets from the Iconfactory to be a particularly good set.) And if you choose “Use Server Favicon”, we’ll do our best to get the icon from the server itself and slap it on a nice little label for you.
Add a counter to your path bar to see some useful numbers. Just choose View ▸ Show Item Count.
It’s a hugely powerful new feature that’s a little bit hidden: in Transmit 4, you can have Transmit arbitrarily skip files based on any number of rules. Hate .svn or .git folders? Never want to accidentally transfer your apps to a specific server? There’s lots to explore here.
Right-click in a Favorites list to reveal a secret menu: “Use Small Icons” and “Arrange By”. The former gives you a much more compact list. The latter will allow you to perform a one-time sort of your items.
Inspired by the late Erik J. Barzeski (he’s alive), Dock Send is a great feature for those of you who quickly fling items to various favorites all day long.
First, edit a Favorite, and enable Dock Send.
Make sure the favorite has both a Remote Path (where your files go) and a Local Path (where your files come from) assigned to it.
Now, drag a file from your specified Local Path to the Transmit dock icon.
Transmit will look at the local path of the file you just dropped, then look at your favorites and say, “Hey, is Dock Send enabled for any favorite that uses this Local Path? Oh, here’s one! I’ll connect and upload this file to the specified Remote Path right away!”
Does that make sense? Based on where the file came from, Transmit picks the right place for it to go.
With judicious use of Dock Send, you can have a full suite of virtual droplets that are as easy as dragging items to the dock icon.
Don’t forget about droplets! Save them anywhere on your disk, send them to clients, or put them in your Dock, and get a system-wide drag target for instant uploads. Just click Save as Droplet… when editing a Favorite. (Make sure Transmit is installed on any machine using a Droplet.)
First, edit your Favorite and set a proper “Root URL” for your Favorite. I.e., the base web URL that your files are served from. Then, connect to your server, right click an item, and choose “Copy URL”.
(Bonus sub-tip: right click and choose Preview In Browser… for instant preview action!)
Do your local files share the same hierarchy as your remote files? With Linked Folder Navigation, why not have Transmit automatically change both sides at once when as you navigate?
Choose Go ▸ Link Folder Navigation, or add the Folder Linking button to your toolbar and click it.
Now, every time you open a folder, Transmit will check to see if there’s a folder with the same name on the other side. If there is, Transmit will open that folder too!
Transmit 4 is pretty smart about this — if you navigate into a folder that doesn’t have a twin on the other side, that’s fine. When you return to the folder you branched from, it’ll start paying attention again.
The traditional Get Info window is good for learning about a single item. But maybe you want to Get Info on a whole bunch of things, and you don’t want to open 4,000 windows.
No problem. It’s easy to create a Get Info “Inspector” — just hit ⌥⌘I (Option-Command-I).
Now, as you change files, Get Info will automatically update.
Did you know you can drag files into all areas of the path bar?
There’s also spring-loaded folders. When dragging, simply hover over a folder and watch it spring open allowing you to drill down the folder hierarchy mid-drag. The file lists also trigger activation, so dragging items from other applications or another Transmit window is quick and easy. While dragging pause over a file list for a second and Transmit will activate the window/application allowing for seamless drag and drop without obstruction.
Another useful AND “secret” feature is the ability to drag re-order file operations in the Transfers list. Simply grab a top-level row and drag it to a new location in the list, boom, instant prioritization of your transfers.
It’s totally possible. (This is a Windows thing, yeah?)
Choose View ▸ Show View Options, then check Show folders above files.
If you’re connected via SFTP, and are connected to a Unix server, it’s super simple. Don’t waste a transfer!
Select an item, and choose File ▸ Send SSH Command. If you click on the little action button, we’ve pre-loaded “zip” and “unzip” shortcuts, but you can execute any UNIX command.
Got your Terminal window open? This one’s for experts only.
If you want to prevent the Finder from automatically opening Transmit Disks after mounting, paste:
defaults write com.panic.transmit OpenMountedFinderWindow -bool NO
defaults write com.panic.transmitmenu OpenMountedFinderWindow -bool NO
If you want to hide the Bonjour collections from Favorites, paste:
defaults write com.panic.transmit RendezvousEnabled -bool NO
defaults write com.panic.transmit ShowiDiskInFavorites -bool NO
Hope these help somebody.
It’s a minor point, but worth mentioning — if you use Quick Look on any image, local or remote, we’ll put the dimensions in the title bar.
This one is pretty fundamental, but seems to slip by some — it’s possible to set both sides of Transmit’s split window to the same view.
Just click the tiny icon on the right side of the path bar to toggle between a local or remote view.
If you want to manage your local hard drive with the ease of Transmit, or if you want to easily fling a file from one server to another, there’s no better way.
It’s possibly one of the greatest hidden features in Mac OS X, and works for almost all apps.
Want, say, Send SSH Command… to have a keyboard shortcut?
First, open System Preferences ▸ Keyboard, and click Keyboard Shortcuts.
Now, select “Application Shortcuts” on the left, and click the “Plus” 
.
From the pop-up menu, choose Transmit.
Now, let’s type in “Send SSH Command…”, and give it the shortcut of our choosing!
(The ellipsis is important! If the menu item has one, you need one. Hit Option-Semicolon to type it.)
That’s it! Without even having to relaunch Transmit, your shortcut has been added. One note: this can be tricky for dynamic menu items that change based on what’s selected — you’ve gotta match the name exactly.
Enjoy the hot tips!
Hi there. We’re Panic. I’d like to try being more transparent. So here’s what going on, right now.
Let’s start with Unison. Earlier this year we released Unison 2, a dramatic update that totally modernized our Usenet newsreader. Since release, we’ve been actively fixing bugs and adding the occasional feature — here’s the full list — and now we’re up to to 2.1.2, just released. Even though Unison 2 work is complete, Dave continues to look at incoming crash logs and exceptions daily, fixing them in a continuous cycle. Now, will there be a Unison 3? It’s hard to say, for two reasons: with a few exceptions, we can’t think of many major features to add (without diving into minutiae — our design goal is to keep Unison general-purpose), and the future of Usenet itself always feels a little uncertain. We’ll play it by ear, but we believe Unison 2 is one of the best newsreaders on any platform — period — and we’ll continue to make it shine into the future.
After a huge development cycle, Transmit 4 has been a huge success, personally and publicly. If you’ve got files to transfer, we’ve got your truckback. We just released version 4.1.3, which fixes our most-encountered known issues — here’s the list of changes. Looking forward, Will is always checking out incoming bugs and crashers and we’ll keep fixing. We’ll also be integrating updates from Amit — the original creator of MacFUSE — who is steadily adding improvements to our massive new (and now 64-bit) Transmit Disk feature. Transmit 4 is exactly where we want it to be right now — smooth, easy-to-use, powerful file transfer. But hang on — that doesn’t mean we’re done, or don’t have long list of bigger ideas and improvements to make in the future. (We read you, Rackspace Cloud Files fans, and heavy-duty Places users.) It’s a matter of timing and we’re swamped — once we can take a breather from the next item in this list, we’ll keep working to make Transmit even better than it is now.
For the most part, though, it’s all hands on the next Coda. That’s what we’re living and breathing. Wade, Will and Ian are doing the heavy lifting, Steve’s also spending a lot of time in this world, and we’ve brought in The Coding Monkeys — Dom and Martin — to work directly with us on some lower-level engine changes. Last year’s plan for the future of Coda was to keep things simple, not touch the UI, and only focus on highly-requested editor features. Something about that didn’t feel quite right to us, though — it wasn’t a “true” Panic 2.0? — so after two fateful days locked in front of a whiteboard, we’re now looking at more substantial improvements and changes, while trying our best to stay balanced (keeping in mind the supreme court case of Baby v. Bathwater). We really see the next major Coda update as a massive, unmissable opportunity to fix and clarify a lot of Coda behavior that’s been nagging us from day one. We won’t do a half-hearted job — we want to rise to the challenge and make something special for you. This excitement comes, of course, with deflating expectation-setting: the next Coda is going to take some time still. But we’re working hard. And instead of guessing at a release date right now — guaranteeing disaster — how about I make the following promise: when we hit private beta, I’ll let you know via this blog within seconds. Then you’ll know things are close.
One last little exclusive Coda tidbit: we’re wrapping up Coda 1.7 for release in the next couple of weeks, which adds much-requested HTML5 goodness to our completion dictionaries! This includes all HTML5 elements (with appropriate attributes, values, and hints) and additional CSS attributes (including -moz and -webkit extensions). JavaScript also gets a massive completion update in 1.7, including HTML5 event handlers, core language keywords, and tons of missing DOM objects and properties. It’s quite nice. We were originally planning to roll this work into a more major Coda update, but that didn’t seem fair. We hope it helps you out while you wait for the future!
Finally, software-wise, Wade has a few bug fixes in the hopper on CandyBar, and has a few new ideas on how to improve its reliability, but it’ll take a little downtime for us to wrap up a release. Next year we hope to talk to our friends at The Iconfactory about where we go next!
What else is going on? We’re also got some very interesting iOS experiments. Dave and the recently-hired Garrett are doing some exciting proof-of-concept work on… things. It’s far too early to discuss. But rest assured that, not counting 2009’s Pantscast, we’re not ignoring this incredibly, critically important platform. You can quote me on that.
Finally, something interesting but similarly oblique: we’ve hired Greg (formerly of Apple, pinball documentaries and more) to tackle what we call “Special Projects“. What? Well, every now and then we’re approached with a job for an outside organization, where we make cool apps and creative things that we’ll likely never be able to tell you about. 99.9% of the time we say “no”, since I’m not super fond of agency-style work, but every now and then it’s fun, satisfying, and something we’re actually interested in, like right now. Greg’s doing code and art for this world, while in the future possibly becoming more of a “project manager” for all of our apps. (Welcome to Portland, Greg.)
While all of this is happening, something incredibly important but little-discussed is going on in the back of the room: the formative rumblings of a formal QA department. We recently hired James (formerly of Omni and bicycles) to work with our existing crack support team, also known as Les and Tim. They’re devising processes and methods to improve our regression testing, release checklists, bug triaging, and more. With any luck, this hard work will take a little pressure off the engineers, and improve the release quality of our software.
Speaking of Support, our queues are lower than they’ve been in months thanks to the ultra hard work of these very guys, also including Noby’s work in Japan and Mike’s handling of the non-technical stuff while establishing our ironic-or-earnest? sales department. If any of these guys have helped you lately, let them know. For me. My ultimate dream goal is getting Panic to a 24-hour turnaround time for all e-mail requests — can we pull it off before 2011? Stay tuned! Also, mysteriously, Neven and I continue to deeply enjoy handling support via Twitter. 140 character tech support is the greatest, most refreshing thing in the world. If you have a company and don’t do it, do it.
Last but not least, the Art Department — myself, Neven, and Kenichi — work daily to support every single thing you’ve just read, with a steady stream of mockups, icons, and more. And while a sharp increase of art department work has meant a sharp reduction in blogging, we also hope to keep posting fun things here, including the infamous “Panic Office Tour” post, as the Quicktime VR’s are finally done. The big albatross that looms over us? A redesign of the Panic main page, with (possibly) a refresh of our company logo. It continues to terrify, but we’ll get there in 2011, I swear. (This website redesign ties directly into minor updates of Stattoo and Desktastic, which we should have released long ago. My apologies — if I did it again, I wouldn’t make those dependent on each other.)
And, well, that’s us in a nutshell.
As always, thanks for your support, thanks for your purchases, thanks for your great ideas and suggestions, and thanks for your word-of-mouth advertising that has become the foundation of our company. You are the reason we do what we do.
We’ll always keep working to make even more cool things.
This is extra-curricular, but we thought you might find it interesting.
Einstein is an open-source project to run (via emulation) the Newton OS on modern hardware. It was written and released by Paul Guyot several years ago. It’s quite an amazing piece of work.
The project got a shot in the arm earlier this month when Matthias Melcher got it up and running on iOS and posted a video of himself running it on his iPhone. Being a Newton fan since my original MessagePad in 1993, it was quite a sight to see.
Matthias mentioned he didn’t have an iPad yet, so I grabbed the source and built it for my iPad so I could take a little movie and share:
Since then, I’ve been graciously granted the ability to contribute changes to the Einstein code base. My work has so far been limited to just helping out with the iOS port. I don’t yet know much about the guts of the emulator.
The last couple of evenings and very early mornings (not during Panic hours!) I’ve helped get the existing CoreAudio sound driver working on the iOS build, and made some tweaks to allow the virtualized Newton to run at any screen resolution. In this video, it’s running at the iPad’s native resolution of 768×1024, but you can also run at the original 320×480 scaled-to-fit.
To answer the most common questions:
Regardless, I hope you enjoy this blast from the past — proof that, no matter how “obsolete”, it’s very hard to kill a technology that people are passionate about.
Panic’s history pretty much begins with Transmit. This makes it maybe a little weird that for some time now, we haven’t had a Transmit shirt in our Goods store. “Why don’t you make a new Transmit shirt?” people ask us. Sounds good. Heck, we’ll make two!
The sincere Roosevelt (left, in hard-working black aqua) speaks to an earlier era of transport and transportation, where hard-working teamsters made sure your things got where they needed to go, on time, and with a smile — sure thing buddy, you have my word. An ultra-soft and comfy poly-cotton shirt.
The optimistic Nixon (right, in brave gold color) reflects the power, promise, and potential of a fossil-fuelled future, shining like a fluorescently illuminated rest-stop beacon on a long stretch of I-5 in 1978, long before the corporate parent re-branded under a much less severe, and much more eco-conscious, green leaf.
Designed by the world-renowned Draplin Design Co. of North America, both of these tees are perfect for moving stuff around – at your computer or literally in person.
Many thanks to our users for joining us on Transmit’s eleven-year-long ride!