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The Road to Mordor: Dungeon-running with Turbine
As we talked about last month, Turbine's toting around a double-barreled shotgun full of content that it's preparing to unload. While the biggest blast will undoubtedly be Lord of the Rings Online's third expansion, Rise of Isengard, the team is working hard to provide us with plenty to do between now and then. Part of that effort is directed at Update 3, which is currently scheduled to go live on May 23rd in North America and after June 1st for Europe when the LotRO Global Service takes effect and all of the accounts are moved under Turbine's purview. I eagerly sat down with Turbine's Aaron Campbell and Joe Barry for a play-through of Update 3's two new three-player instances, Halls of Night and Inn of the Forsaken. Both of these scalable instances will be available to a wide swath of players, and they feature mechanics and sights never before seen in the game. Also, they're wicked cool. So join me today as I take you on a brief tour of horrors and adventures beyond imagination. Has everyone used the restroom before we go? Are you sure? It's a long article; I don't want you leaving in the middle of it. OK, let's ride!
Prompt from Panic does SSH on iPad and iPhone
Prompt from Panic is probably not an app you'll download just to muck around with and then forget. An SSH client is one of those things you either need and use a fair bit, or not at all. Described by developer Panic as "a clean, crisp, and cheerful SSH client: it helps you when you need it, and stays out of your way when you don't," early reviewers seem to like it a lot. Panic says the app is "for system administrators, web developers, movie-style hackers ('Let me just TCP/IP into the UNIX port!'), or any person who needs to connect remotely and type some magic." It seems reasonably priced at US$4.99. Let us know if you've tried it. [Via Macgasm]
Facebook's 'Panic Button' gives Britons a way out of unsavory conversations
Caving to pressures from just about everyone after a 17-year old gal was lured to her death by a 33-year old male posing as someone far younger on Facebook, the famed social networking site has just enabled a new "Panic Button" to be installed for those logging in from across the pond. The app, which is an opt-in service, was created by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center, and Facebook is now recommending that users under the age of 18 install it. If pressed, users will be put in contact with the aforementioned organization in order to report abuse, and potential predators will hopefully be turned off by notifications that the user they're about to initiate a conversation with is currently using ClickCEOP. Not exactly the type of panic remover found in H2G2, but it's certainly a lovely start.
iPad used to replace Apple IIe data cassette, feels seriously underutilized (video)
You know how we much love our old Apple IIe around here, and whether it's being used to create chiptunes or as an 8-bit Twitter station, we're always tickled when the venerable home computer makes an appearance. When an artist named Stewart Smith asked a Mac software developer called Panic to run some software on their in-house Apple IIe, he provided them with the source code as an audio file -- but he failed to supply them with a cassette player to load it from. The solution? Panic played the program off its iPad. As you can see from the video below, this isn't just any old program either -- it's a homebrew video for Jed's Other Poem (Beautiful Ground) by Grandaddy. Thanks for amusing us, guys. And thanks for reminding us how much we enjoy The Sophtware Slump.
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.
Transmit 4 offers new features, faster performance
Transmit is the FTP client by Panic that has won legions of fans (myself included). After 5 years of version 3.x, Panic has finally released version 4.0 with a new UI, faster performance, and a slew of hot new features. Transmit 4 is a near-total re-write of the application. The most notable change is the UI. Gone is all the white and Aqua-style drop-downs. This version offers a nice path bar and custom icons for your favorites (use theirs or supply your own). There's a new sync button and for the first time, Coverflow and thumbnail view. Finder classics like disclose folders and color-coding are now in place, and the beefed up progress bar tracks both overall progress and individual files. Nice! I've only used the demo briefly this morning (we'll have a full review up at a later date), but it's noticeably faster than its predecessor. Panic claims a speed increase 25 times greater than version 3, and I don't doubt it. Not only does Transmit seem faster when transferring files, but just moving between directories is very snappy. The most impressive feature I found during my brief testing this morning is Transmit Disks. This allows you to mount any favorite in the Finder, even if Transmit isn't running. You're free to interact with the disk as you wish once it's mounted. It's quite nice. As I said, we've got a full review forthcoming. For now, we can say that Transmit 4 is well worth your attention. A sleek, modern look, greatly increased speed and new features like Transmit Disks make version 4 a must-update for all users. A full license costs US$34. Users of version 3.x may upgrade for $19. Anyone who bought Transmit 3 on or after March 1st, 2010 can upgrade for free.
Panic's free ShrinkIt turns humongous Illustrator PDFs into tiny ones
The brilliant minds at Panic noticed that something interesting was happening with PDF files created by Adobe Illustrator. Like many developers, Panic uses Adobe Illustrator to create icons and other image resources for their applications. The resulting PDF files, which were relatively "big-boned" (a politically-correct way of saying "fat"), would magically shrink in size when they were run through Apple's Mac OS X PDF processing. Apple's method is used when you save a PDF from Preview, which explains why most of the time those files are fairly small in size. Being the intelligent chaps that they are, the Panic engineers decided to look into the cause of this. What did they find? "Will started digging into the files and brother, you won't believe what he found. Swatches, patterns, preview bitmaps, all sort of metadata; even though we'd specifically turned off all the extra options when saving from Illustrator: Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities, Embed Page Thumbnails, etc." Apparently just opening the obese PDFs in Preview and then saving them would shrink the file sizes dramatically. Rather than force their staff to go through this process each time they found a large Illustrator PDF, Panic did what most developers would do and wrote an application to automate the process. Devs can simply take a big batch of files, like the contents of an application's Resources folder, drop 'em onto ShrinkIt (download link), and watch the file sizes magically shrink. According to Panic, ShrinkIt can reduce an app bundle size by 4 megabytes. While ShrinkIt is a Panic-internal utility, the company has made it available to the world for free. Please note that ShrinkIt is primarily made for shrinking simple vector-resource PDFs, and probably won't work well on press-ready PDFs.
Panic releases Unison 2, improves binaries support
Panic has released a major update to its Mac Usenet client Unison. Usenet is one of those historical districts of the Internet that's a bit off the beaten track these days, but still has its uses. It began as a global message board system and still has lots of folks doing that, but it has also become a huge repository of binaries and a good alternative to bittorrent and other peer to peer systems. Back in the day I was a Usenet fiend, but I'd fallen away until very recently; I returned courtesy of NewsgroupDirect, a good, Mac-friendly third-party Usenet provider that provided a review account for TUAW use (you generally have to subscribe these days for Usenet access). What I was surprised to discover on my return was the advent of NZB files and search engines which make it extremely easy to find binaries (unlike the old days when you had to look for everything manually). The new version of Unison offers native support for NZB searching within the application (via binsearch.info and others). It also automatically takes care of finding missing parts, PAR recovery, and RAR unpacking. In short, Unison is now clearly your best bet on the Mac for Usenet binaries. Of course Unison also retains its older message reading features and adds handy new ones like threading. There's an updated interface and the general level of Mac goodness one associates with Panic. Unison 2.0 is $29 ($18 upgrade from version 1) and a 7-day demo is available. If you need a Usenet subscription, Panic is offering the companion service Unison Access for $9 a month; NewsgroupDirect offers a range of plans from $8 to $20 per month.
Pie Guy: A web game for the iPhone
Back when the iPhone was first announced, there was no SDK, you'll remember. Jobs said that developers could just make web apps, and that they would be good enough. Of course, he was wrong -- given what you can do with your iPhone now compared to what you could do with your iPhone then, even Steve would be happy to say that yes, there is a native app for that. But let's not toss the projects out with the development platform, so to speak. Neven Mrgan, one of the devs over at Panic, has released Pie Guy, a free and surprisingly full-featured game for the iPhone that exists only as a Javascript web app. To play it, just point your iPhone 3GS (the page says you need one of those, and while I was able to play it on my 1G, it was too clunky to enjoy) to mrgan.com/pieguy, add that page to your homescreen, and there you go. In case you haven't guessed from the pic above (or the name), the game itself is a straightforward Pac-Man clone. But what's most interesting here is the example this game sets. Think about it: a full featured, automatically updated game release, delivered straight to the iPhone without any approval required by Apple. The revenue model might need some work, but maybe we dismissed this whole "web app" idea a little too quickly. For devs looking to go around the App Store's process, maybe there's a solution here. Boy, Flash sure would help with that, wouldn't it?
Prices so low, they're practically insane: Panic 3-day sale is on
It's been hinted at for a few days, but Cabel Sasser and the rest of the crew at Panic Software may have accidentally slipped some mind-altering substances into their last batch of Coda Cookies; how else to explain a three-day, 50%-off sale on all of the company's well-designed and well-regarded apps? The FTP/SFTP client with the often imitated icon, Transmit, is $14.50US; Web authoring jack-of-all-trades Coda is $49.50. Interface tweaker CandyBar 3 and newsreader Unison are also discounted at $14.50 and $12 respectively. The sale page notes that these licenses are also good for discounts on future paid upgrades to the product line, which are expected soon. Sale pricing is in force until 11:59pm PST on May 29.
PTR forums are up! Panic some more!
Maybe PTR character copies being up today isn't a fluke after all ! The US PTR forums just came up as well, ready to become an unceasing wall of jungle animal noises. Head on over if you're so inclined. With the character copy page being up too, signs are continuing to point to it being 3.1 PTR go time very soon. Be ready to download that client and, as always, keep an eye out here for when the PTR news trickle inevitably turns into a flood. We swear to shake it up if you swear to listen.
Are Paladins going to get nerfed?
There's a cloud of gloom hanging over our collective Paladin heads over here at WoW Insider, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that Divine Plea still works. Even with the 50% healing penalty, Divine Plea is still a critical spell that's used without much of a second thought. Now it's just used a tiny, tiny bit less. Of course, Ghostcrawler also mentioned in his explanation of the new mana regeneration changes that they're going to nerf Spiritual Attunement for "non-tanking Paladins," too. So yes, there's that cloud.Here's the thing, though... that change will hurt Retribution Paladins more than it will Holy Paladins. Retribution Paladins rely on the synergy of Spiritual Attunement and Seal of Blood / of the Martyr in addition to Judgements of the Wise, Replenishment, and Divine Plea. We'll probably have to see exactly what the incoming nerf looks like before we panic, but considering how Paladins have a history of getting beaten by the nerf bat, it's not an altogether rosy proposition. In fact, I think Paladins are probably going to get nerfed beyond the current Divine Plea and the future Spiritual Attunement. My thoughts after the jump.
Transmit 3.6.7 is available
Earlier this week, one of the applications that I use every day, Panic's Transmit, was updated to version 3.6.7. Since the previous version was 3.6.6, this seems like a minor update, but it does bring some welcome bug fixes, including Re-worked preview drawer to avoids possible transfer stalls Fixed S3 uploads with files greater than 2 GB Fixed a problem in which files may be deleted when moving them into a subfolder Improved S3 copied URLs when connecting to the EU S3 server There's more, of course, and you can read the full change log here. We've written about Transmit several times, but I'll briefly tell you why it's my choice for an FTP application. First, changing permissions is ridiculously simple. The droplets are great as well. If you're unfamiliar, Transmit will let you create shortcuts to often-used directories on your server and save them as "droplets" on your desktop.I also appreciate the tight integration with another Panic product, Coda. Simply right-click on a html or PHP file, for instance, and select "Edit with Coda."Finally, the UI is so friendly and Mac-like that even a person who has never used an FTP app before will feel comfortable.Thanks, Robert!
Coda 1.6 released, offers plug-in support
A cheery little dialog box informed me just a few minutes ago that Coda 1.6 is available from the fine folks at Panic. Coda is a one-window web-development and editing environment that is one of my favorite apps, and one that we've covered here before. Coda 1.6 introduces a plug-in architecture that extends Coda's already pretty robust text-editing functionality. With Coda Plug-in Creator, even users who aren't familiar with Cocoa can create plugins, which follow a similar format to TextMate's command bundles. The plug-in functionality mirrors that of up-and-comer Espresso, with its Sugar plug-ins. Espresso is still in beta. Also included in the update is the Open Quickly command: a Spotlight-like command that searches your sites for files to open. Hit Control+Q to show the Open Quickly window, type a few characters, and open one of the files listed to get to work. On top of that, Coda improves spell checking support, and now includes an Objective-J syntax mode. Full release notes are available here. Coda 1.6 is available from Panic's website, or from inside the app by selecting "Check for Updates" from the Coda menu.
Coda updated to 1.5.1
Lost in the din of yesterday's Apple announcements, Panic has updated Coda, its all-in-one website editing tool, to 1.5.1. The update largely fixes possible crashes, issues with source control, and squashes several bugs. CFML syntax coloring has been improved, and the release notes promise more syntax coloring improvements to come. Coda 1.5, released on August 26, added Subversion source control, multi-file find and replace, custom books, and a host of other additions and improvements. Coda 1.5.1 is available by selecting Check for Updates... from the Coda menu, or via their website. Thanks, Gordon!
Transmit turns 10, we Panic
Milestones come and go, but the big milestone of the day was 10 years in the making. Panic's Co-founder, Steven Frank, noted on his personal website that their flagship product, Transmit turned 10 years old.Transmit, originally called "Transit," was released on September 8, 1998. Who knows, without the success of Transmit we might not have the other beautiful applications from Panic. If you want to relive the old days of Transmit, Panic offers up a free version (you must be running a pre-OS X Mac, or have a classic mode enabled Mac) for your downloading pleasure. Join TUAW in saying, "Congratulations, Panic." We cannot wait to see what is next!
3.0 won't break everything
A lot of people (including some folks here at WoW Insider) are super concerned that when Blizzard does release a 3.0 patch early, it'll basically break everything we're doing now. Potion sickness on the live realms? Shield Block cooldown extended? With those changes, it seems bosses like Illidan would be basically unbeatable.But Blizzard says, as they always do: don't worry. The latest word is that 3.0.2 is heading to the PTRs, and it's pretty clear that if 3.0 is going to break everything in the game, that's where Blizzard will find out. Don't forget that we've got months until the expansion comes out (and likely even a few months until the actual patch hits the live realms), which means there's tons of time to tweak and twist and get all of the new changes working with the old content.This doesn't mean that things won't be broken -- we're curious to see, especially in even older instances like AQ and Molten Core, what things are like with all of the 3.0 updates. But it does mean that they'll likely be broken on the PTR -- in a few months from now, when this patch finally goes live, Blizzard should have most of the wrinkles evened out.
Panic releases Coda 1.5
Panic has released Coda 1.5, a free update to my favorite all-in-one web development application. Coda 1.5 adds several major new features, including find-and-replace across multiple files and a fully-integrated Subversion client. Also included in the update is a user-customizable bookshelf, which allows you to specify any given website as a "book." You can also enter a sample search URL with a wildcard character, and command-click on terms to look for them in the book you created. Syntax highlighting has also been improved, as well as performance running under Leopard. Full release notes are available, too. The update is free for all registered Coda users, and $99 for new users. Discounts are available for registered Transmit owners, too.
Transmit 3.6.6 relieves .Mac sync problems
Panic recently updated their Transmit software to version 3.6.6 after the previous (3.6.5) update caused problems with syncing over .Mac. Steven Frank (co-founder of Panic) wrote on his personal blog about the issue. According to Steven, "TransmitSync," a service that syncs Transmit favorites with .Mac, would crash when certain configurations were in place. The other change made in the 3.6.6 update is restrictions of dot characters when uploading to Amazon S3. Transmit 3.6.6 is a free upgrade to all Transmit 3 users and can be downloaded from within Transmit or from panic.com.[via Steven Frank]
Nintendo shares hit 7-month low on recession fears
Seems the money-market-fueled stock dip Nintendo suffered last week isn't over yet. Bloomberg is reporting that the company's stock tumbled down 5.9 percent today to its lowest point since early July '07.The reason for the precipitous fall isn't so much Nintendo's recent performance -- the company is still more profitable than a solid-gold hippopotamus that periodically spits out smaller golden hippopatami. According to Bloomberg, the stock sell-off for Nintendo and other export-based Japanese companies seems to be based on the recently reported rapid contraction of the U.S. service industry, which has also caused problems for the U.S. stock market. Traders are reading the contraction as a strong sign of a long-predicted U.S. recession, which means less money to go around for non-essentials like video games.Will less discretionary spending mean tougher times ahead for the games industry, or is huge growth last year indicative of a somewhat recession-proof sector? We'll see, but in the meantime we'd recommend stuffing your mattress with small bills and loading up on canned goods. You know, just in case.
