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Panic teases a new iPad app, probably Panic Status Board
Panic is one of our favorite Mac developers -- they make the excellent Coda web editor, and Transmit, which is my OS X FTP client of choice. They have a new iPad app arriving this week, and word around the Internets is that it's an iPad version of Status Board, the internal tool the company developed for tracking projects, appointments and Twitter messages. As you can see above, the Panic tool is meant to be used by multiple people and can track updates and to-dos for multiple projects and products, but presumably a more personal iPad tool would be applicable to more than just the Panic team. Panic has tweeted teases that the app has something to do with "status," and of course we'll get to know exactly what it is when the app arrives tomorrow. There's no word yet on price, but given that Panic likes to (deservedly) pick a premium price for its software, like Diet Coda for US$19.99, odds are it'll be a nice chunk of money for a solid amount of value. We'll wait and see what the team has come up with.
Apple //e running source code loaded from an iPad
Stick with us here -- this is complicated but cool. So, Stewart Smith happened to see online that the Panic Software guys had an old Apple IIe (sorry, //e) sitting around their office, and he emailed to ask them if they could possibly use it to run an old text animation that he'd created for a song a while back. Being the considerate guys that they are, they agreed. There was a problem, though: Stewart's code was meant to be played on the old cassette deck source, and they didn't have one. "What did we have?" they ask, and the answer is, "an iPad." You can see the results in video over on their site, and they are magical. There are a couple of amazing things here: one, that the old source code can be "read" just as easily coming out of the iPad's audio port as it was when coming out of cassette tapes back in the day, and two, that the //e runs it so well. Let's also remember that we're watching it happen across the Internet in full audio and video quality, possibly even on an iPad itself. For all of the new and shiny that Apple has brought us recently, you almost forget how much history is building here, and it's somewhat surprising that a connection can be made between then and now so easily and elegantly.
