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Posts tagged with "Panic"

Diet Coda Relaunches as Coda for iOS→

The excellent Diet Coda for iOS (which I first covered three years ago) has been relaunched by Panic as Coda for iOS today, bringing a new iPhone version, support for Panic Sync, and tons of other enhancements that make this a desktop-class text editor and file manager for web developers.

As I noted on Twitter, I’m no developer, but Coda feels exactly like the type of app we need on iOS. A full-featured iOS counterpart – not a “remote” or “companion” app – that brings over features that make sense on iOS and that can be even better because of the portability of an iPhone or iPad. While not everyone will always manage a site completely from iOS, such goal doesn’t sound ridiculous anymore, and I’m glad that Panic has brought Coda back and made it more powerful in the process. Between this and OmniFocus 2.6, it’s been a good week for productivity software on iOS.

Coda for iOS is $9.99, but a free update for old Diet Coda customers. Great deal.

(Please note: the tweet above is sarcastic.)

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Transmit for iOS 8 Review

Since I got serious about trying to get work done on an iPhone and iPad in mid–2012, I’ve constantly come across a roadblock that required me to set up complex workflows and scripts: uploading images to my server. Transmit for iOS 8, released by Panic today on the App Store, provides a solution to the problem of managing transfers to and from your own server with a feature set that, thanks to extensions and secure authentication with Touch ID, makes Transmit a first-class citizen on iOS.

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Panic PunchClock→

Panic has fun with iBeacons:

With this new technology in-hand, it wasn’t too long before I put together a brand new office In/Out tracker called PunchClock. It uses a combination of a geo-fence and iBeacon tracking, plus a simple Sinatra backend hosted at Heroku. The part that took the longest to fine-tune was figuring out the right combination of polling to provide good location information without draining the battery.

Not only does their internal app look great – it’s also available on GitHub for you to play with.

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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.