Sorry to interrupt your regular blog content: but, did you hear? Panic is having a sale! All of our major Mac apps are 50% off. Transmit! Coda! Unison! CandyBar! Cheap! For three days only.

Act now! Click here and make it happen! We thank you.

Well, if I can't convince you, maybe this guy can:


(Here's a YouTube version!)

Iced Oatmeal? Taffy Sandwich? Circus Animals?

While not necessarily ever having tasting like something a mother has made, Mother's cookies have been around forever, and are beloved by children, adults, the obese, and the obese-at-heart.

But in October of 2008, Mother's Cookies went out of business, the result of a stock-punching series of bad business decisions, a corporate bond scandal, and, naturally, these uncertain economic times.

Fully bankrupt, Mother's sold their fairly tasty assets for a cool $12 million.

A few months later, much to the delight of fans, the cookies re-appeared in stores, this time as "Nabisco Classics"!



There was just one problem: Nabisco didn't buy the rights to Mother's. Kellogg's did.

Cookie skullduggery!! Yes, they're failure-ready fakes!

I like to imagine that Nabisco had this factory fully built in 1986, with a hardhat-wearing mustachioed staff member ready to push the button and turn out Mother's cookieulcrums at any moment — just waiting, silently, for the company to go chips up. I also like to imagine that Nabisco has a factory ready for every competitor: "Good news, Jenkins! Time to fire up the Pepperidge Plant!"

While none of this is probably true, but it's nice to know that even in the cookie world, competition is serious business.

(For you Mother's fans, Kellogg's has finally fired up the old machines, and the real Mother's cookies are now back on store shelves.)

Next time: The Most Intense Gamer

Of the many areas of nerdery I have merit badges in, photography is surprisingly not one of them — so my requirements for digital cameras are dead simple. I want a camera that:

• Can easily fit in a pocket, comfortably, and isn't hideous looking.
• Has a wide angle lens. (My first-ever digital camera had this, spoiling me for life.)
• Can record video. I love a pocket video!

Of course, there are smaller wishes: automatic orientation detection, a nice enough UI, good macro lens, SDHC support, etc., but they're all features you'll find on just about every camera in the world. I've also traditionally been a Canon man, always keeping an eye on their new models.

Here's why the new Canon SD960 is my current favorite digital pocket camera.

Updated UI

It's a minor miracle: Canon updated their UI. It's... not bad! (New on the right.)

Good Looking Photos

It's almost a given at this point, but it takes some sharp looking pictures:

You can see the whole set over on Flickr

HD Widescreen Video!

The killer feature, and one that's blown my mind. I know the Flip Mino HD has been available for a while (I've always thought them a little bit ugly and prefer to carry one device instead of two whenever possible) and I'm sure other digital cameras have had HD video for a while, but this is my first experience with pocket HD, and it is amazing and liberating. Maybe it's because Kid Cabel once longingly stared behind the cruel, child-taunting plastic Toys 'R Us display cabinet at the Fisher-Price Pixelvision, which recorded laggy, low-speed grain-and-white video to an audio cassette tape (!), old man, etc., but the fact that I can bust a shiny device out of my pocket and record a moment in widescreen and very high resolution onto a tiny memory card that holds many gigabytes and cost, like, fifteen dollars, is flat-out space-age awesome. It won't replace your RED ONE camera, but for a spontaneous video, it's great.

How great? It's H.264 compressed and 1280 x 720 resolution, but you should see it for yourself. Armed with my new camera on a quick relaxing trip to Palm Springs, I decided to use the opportunity to make a sample video. Enjoy:


That's scaled down, too — click here for the full size 1280 x 720 version (110 MB)

I bet you'd also get the same video quality from the two other new Canon models that shoot HD — SD780 and SD970 — but, for my money, the 28mm wide-angle lens of the SD960 seals the camera-buyin' deal.

And that's why I love it. As of this writing, it's only $299 over at Amazon.

Questions? Do you prefer a Flip? Are those affiliate links OK or tacky? What's your favorite digital camera? Let me know!

Next time: cookie skullduggery!

Good evening, Internet. It's been a while. As they say, life is like a San Franciscan Cable Car: it starts a little creaky and awkward, before you know it's going surprisingly fast, and at the end of it all you're dumped right into Fisherman's Wharf.

To catch up, here's a quick recap of some happenings around Panic — your humble servant of a Macintosh software company.

New! Office

On November 4th, Panic 4.0 fired up in a brand new office. For me, someone you might call "detail-oriented" (LOLnderstatement), this was easily as time consuming and difficult as designing and shipping an app: turning the empty shell space of a once-garage into something we can be proud of and look forward to working in. The process was also eerily familiar, from designing obsessively crazy ideas (with Holst Architecture) to getting "are you serious?" reactions but eventual perfection and pride from the construction team (R&H). I promise you a post telling the full story, sharing photos and Quicktime VR's of the space, and giving you some of the lessons we learned. And I promise to have it done this year! ¬ ¬

New! Noby Noby Boy T-Shirts

Meanwhile, we certainly haven't forgotten about the enigmatic "and also some t-shirts" part of the company charter!

Is it a game? Is it an art project? Why is there a squirrel in the corner? Keita "Katamari" Takahashi's latest PS3 game, Noby Noby Boy, is a truly mysterious but fulfilling time-waster. We love Keita's work, so we asked him to design some new shirts to celebrate the release of the game.

They're beautiful, they're available in a variety of design "lengths", and they're shipping right now. Please enjoy!

New! People

In late 2008 we added two new faces to the Panic family: Ned Holbrook, formerly of Apple, who jumped into our engineering group head-first and who we're thrilled to have on our team. Also, Neven Mrgan, our first additional designer, a talented fellow (fellow?) who most recently designed the AP Mobile News iPhone app. Neven has also introduced me to a freakish new kind of miracle: I can be working on a design, and he can be working on design for something else, and we are somehow working on two things at once! (It took ten years to figure this out?) These are great guys.

Including the brilliant minds at our international, sprawling mega-subsidiary Panic Japan — Noby, who localizes, supports, and runs the show, and Kenichi, an amazing icon artist — this brings the current Panic head-count to an often-amazing-for-me 13 people.

Wait, 13 people? For reals?

It's true! It breaks down like this: two designers, six engineers, and three support guys, plus one designer and one support guy in Japan.

We've discovered this (very cautious) growth to be a great thing for two reasons. First, we can respond to requests and add new and innovative ideas to our software faster than we ever could (and than you'll ever get from) a one-or-two person company. Second, we can finally work on multiple applications simultaneously, trying to remove our long-standing and very painful (for all of us!) "we're working on this so we can't on that" delay.

To be fair, we haven't perfected all of this yet. Right now these two modes are somewhat at odds with each other, and we're still trying to figure out how to smoothly accomplish both goals at the same time — easier said than done.

So what's up right now? We're in "working on multiple apps at once" mode, preparing updates to nearly every single product we currently ship. It's an ambitious undertaking, but I think the end results will be worth it, even if it takes a bit of time to get there. Thanks for your patience while we work hard. I promise great new things are on the way.

(Also: at what company size do I have to stop eating ramen and Hot Pockets? Because I eat those a lot. It's only at, like, 100+ employees, right?)

New! Coda Plugins and Updates

All the while, we've been working hard to keep Coda humming and fix a lot of nits. Coda 1.6.4, released earlier this month, is one of these tiny-fix releases that really does make Coda even better. But it's also important to mention that we've been adding more and more cool plug-ins to the Coda Plug-ins Page over the past few months! Head over and check them out.

Boring! Follow Me On Twitter

Since posting on the blog is an epic undertaking for me — "I should do short posts!", I always tell myself — you can always follow me on "Twitter" internet website, where the barrier to spew is much lower. Same content — snacks, stupid jokes — in 140 characters or less.

Anyway, hope all is well!

Next Time: a few words about my favorite new digital camera.