2008 is going to be an interesting, exciting year for Panic: the creation and possible launch of Panic 4.0. Indeed, running the business almost seems like a product in itself — some years it's in maintenance mode and you don't have to do much with it, but then other years you have to do a major upgrade, and it takes a shocking amount of time.

According to Panic lore, Panic 1.0 was Steve and I sharing an apartment on Belmont with a terrible noise-sensitive neighbor while creating Verso and Transit on our Power Macintoshes and sharing a single 14.4k modem connection. And a bedroom. Not that way. Panic 2.0 found Steve and I still sharing an apartment (a bigger one this time), but had the benefit of some employees arriving into the mix: Dave doing coding on the couch, Ian doing tech support in the kitchen, and Audion being created. Panic 3.0 was marked by the move to our first office space here in the Pearl, and what started out as just a few of us huddled down at one end of a massive empty space has, over the last five years, transformed into a space full-to-the-walls of people and stuff, ten of us creating the Mac apps you know and, hopefully, love.

We're out of room. We want to do more things. We want more cool people. And that, my friends, is why this year I'll be working a lot on shipping Panic 4.0.

To that end, step one is complete: