Sandboxing Difficulties Mean Coda 2.5 Will Not Be Released on the Mac App Store


Panic announced yesterday that they will be moving away from the Mac App Store for distribution of their popular and Apple Design Award winning Coda app. Panic has been working for a number of months on a significant 2.5 update for Coda but have been struggling to resolve issues with maintaining adherence to the sandboxing requirements of the Mac App Store. Instead, Panic has decided to revert back to distribution of Coda outside of the Mac App Store so they can release the update shortly.

As we continued to work on Coda 2.5—a significant update that we’re really excited about—we continued to discover new corners of the app that presented challenges under sandboxing. Coda, to be fair, is a very complex developer tool and is something of a sandboxing worst-case scenario.

Panic makes this move despite the fact that they had a notable degree of help from teams within Apple - but it seems that ultimately it just was not enough. They write that Apple “to their considerable credit, spent a lot of energy assisting us with ideas, workarounds, and temporary exemptions we might be able to use to get around some of the issues”. The move also comes more than a year after Panic successfully made the decision to change the way Coda worked in some ways so that it could be sold on the Mac App Store despite the, new at the time, sandboxing rules.

The new version, which will be available from Panic’s website upon release, will automatically detect if there is a Mac App Store version of Coda installed and unlock the app for use. As a consequence of moving away from the Mac App Store, it also means the Coda can no longer use iCloud Sync and as a result, Panic have developed their own sync service - Panic Sync. This new service will be free and work across Panic’s apps, including Coda and Diet Coda.

Panic write in their announcement that they will always “evaluate the possibility of sandboxing with each future release of Coda”, with the hope of one day returning to the Mac App Store. Finally, Daniel Jalkut made the point on Twitter that Coda will no longer be eligible for the award it won last year, the Apple Design Award, because it is leaving the Mac App Store.

Birdbrain Updated with New iOS 7 Design, Graphs for Twitter Stats

Birdbrain is one of the oldest Twitter apps I’ve been using on my iPhone, but it’s not a Twitter client in the traditional sense. Before Tweetie 2 and Tweetbot, Twitter for iPhone and Tweetbot 3, Birdbrain, originally released in July 2009, allowed me to keep an eye on my Twitter stats for follower counts, mentions, number of retweets, and more. Part ego-boosting tool and part utility to better understand why or how many people follow you, Birdbrain is back today with an iOS 7 update that brings a redesign and a couple of new features to monitor your Twitter account.

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Teleprompt+ 3→

I’ve always heard good things about Bombing Brain’s Teleprompt+, a popular teleprompter app for iOS. While I don’t personally use it (although it may be worth experimenting with it for podcasts), I wanted to link to the latest version, released this week.

Teleprompt+ 3 adds rich text support for inline formatting, a quick edit mode to make last-minute changes to displayed text without leaving the current session, and a new design for a Universal app that runs on both the iPad and iPhone. Because it’s an app, Teleprompt+ takes advantage of iOS to enable features like remote control for multiple devices (have a technician adjust text and speed on a master device while text is displayed on a second iPhone or iPad), Dropbox import for text, and audio and video recording through the built-in microphone and cameras. I find it fascinating when old equipment and technologies are made obsolete by cheaper and smarter software, and Teleprompt+ is a good example of how iOS devices can be integrated in professional environments (it even supports third-party accessories).

Teleprompt+ 3 is a new version of the app, and it’s available on the App Store at $14.99 as a launch sale.

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Delight Can Trump Efficiency→

David Sparks, writing for Macworld:

We’ve been using computers with keyboards and mice for decades now, and many of us are quite adept at bending this traditional paradigm to our will. Then along come the iPhone and iPad, with no hardware keyboard and much less power, and they still manage to turn the computing world on its head. “But it’s not as powerful and I can’t script it,” some power users argue. True, but there’s a reason why we love our iOS devices despite these supposed inadequacies. Simply put, they delight us.

They delight us less when they randomly reboot or apps crash, but the underlying idea is absolutely true for me as well.

When people ask me why I like to get work done on my iPad, the hardest point to get across is that I have more fun with my iPad than my Mac.

Initially, I thought that novelty could be the reason, but after four years of iPad I don’t think that’s the case anymore. It may also be that I liked working around the limitations of iOS, but ultimately that’s a weak argument because I don’t like productivity masochism and most readers aren’t interested in complex workflows or scripts.

It’s difficult to quantify it, but I believe it’s important to have fun when working. I’m constantly amazed by the things modern iPhones and iPads can do, and I find a peculiar kind of geeky satisfaction in writing and publishing articles on the iPad or talking to people around the world with Tweetbot for iPhone. That’s why I’m always concerned when I read rumors of Apple trying to make iOS devices more like Macs – if that ever happens, I hope they won’t take the fun away but still combine delight with efficiency.

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Grave Business→

A great passage from Christian Donlan’s piece for Eurogamer about the E.T. landfill in New Mexico and lack of restraint on modern app stores:

But with that access - and without curation by companies that actually appreciated games - came a race to the bottom, where much of the good stuff was then buried by an endless deluge of miserable clones and cash-grabs that were allowed in because the gatekeepers didn’t care. Free-to-play is not the problem - it’s that publishers and platform holders and sometimes even developers let the deeper value of a game erode, that there was often a failure to find the correct free-to-play model that enhanced a game - and that some people apparently think it’s fine to refer to their most valued customers as whales.

The difference is that, thirty years from now, there won’t be a New Mexico landfill to recover old apps from.

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Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines Now On The iBooks Store→

Previously available on the web from Apple’s developer portal, the company’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines are now on the iBooks Store as a free download (via Dave Addey). The 20 MB guide is compatible with iPads as well as Macs running iBooks on OS X Mavericks, and it takes advantage of the app with inline video playback, two-page page layouts, and built-in annotations (plus, of course, font size and color controls for reading settings).

It looks like Apple did a nice job in converting the guidelines to iBooks, and annotations appear to be especially useful for developers and designers learning the principles of the iOS 7 visual language. The iOS Human Interface Guidelines are available on the iBooks Store here.

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Castro 1.1 Brings UI Tweaks, Sleep Timer

We first talked about Supertop’s Castro, a podcast client for iPhone, when it came out in December, noting how the app fit well with iOS 7’s aesthetic and implemented cool features such as fast search and a peculiar scrubber. Today, Supertop has released Castro 1.1, a major update that further refines the app’s design and introduces new functionalities for playback controls.

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