You know Tim, right? Of Panic Support, of the Coda Slider, of the Panic Sale?

Turns out, Tim is in a band — Cabinessence — and they’re celebrating the release of their new record, Naked Friends, this Friday, 3/12. If you’re in PDX, see them at Doug Fir Lounge in East Portland — 9th and Burnside, 9 PM, $7.

Cabinessence Naked Friends

In the meantime, listen to the whole catchy, rockin’ album on their website – or pre-order a copy. And hooray for multi-disciplinary Panic employees.

Tim FTW! (For the wim.)

Of course, you know we’re huge fans — we even improbably made a whole series of Katamari and Noby Noby Boy t-shirts together.

Recently, Keita and his team shipped Noby Noby Boy for the iPhone. What is it? Wh.. where do I begin? Take basic iPhone utilities — camera, music player, notes, etc. — then press them through the mind of a toddler, squeeze a couple drops of comedy, sprinkle a little ground physics engine, then coat them in pastel fondant. I’ll say this: the built in GPS function has the best music of any GPS, ever. Give it a try for $1.99.

Anyway, to celebrate, Keita drew the following Panic/Noby wallpaper for readers of the Panic Blog.

Enjoy! We can’t wait to see what Keita comes up with next.

This is good. But a lot of things happening means a high chance that I, the man who lives and breathes Panic and has a giant status board in my head, might not properly explain everything to everyone. Steve and I realized it was high time we made this Cabel Status Board public… using technology!

So, with partial inspiration, Neven, Steve and I built the Panic Status Board. Take a secret, sneek peek:

What’s on the board?

The idea quickly grew beyond “Project Status”, and has become a hub of all sorts of internal Panic information. What you’re actually looking at is an internal-only webpage that updates frequently using AJAX which shows:

• E-Mail Queue — number of messages / number of days.
• Project Status — sorry for the heavy censorship — you know how it is!
• Important Countdowns
• Revenue — comparing yesterday to the day before, not so insightful (yet).
• Live Tri-Met Bus Arrivals — when it’s time to go home!
• The Panic Calendar
• Employee Twitter Messages
• Any @Panic Twitter Messages — i.e., be nice! They go on our screen!

Instant Pay-Off

Les, one of our support guys, said it best after a week: “That board is like magic.” Our support turnaround time is faster than it’s ever been. Just the simple act of “publicizing” those numbers — not in a cruel way, but a “where are we at as a group?” way — has kept the support process on-task and, I think, made it a bit more like a video game. (It helps that when all the boxes are at “zero”, a virtual bottle of champagne appears on-screen, and a physical one is likely removed from the fridge.)

We can’t wait to add more data in the future. Open bugs?

Implementation Notes

For the truly curious. Display: I picked the Samsung 460UXN-2 professional display for the thin bezel and lack of branding, airport-style. To my surprise, it had a built-in Windows XP Embedded computer (boo), which meant we didn’t have to waste a machine to drive the display (yay). We loaded Chrome on it, since it has a nice full-screen view — sadly, that meant we had to lose Safari’s beautiful text anti-aliasing. Display Mount: Hard to find a vertical mount! Wound up with the Premier Mounts RFM, and like it. Support Queue: I’m weird, and PHP IMAP libraries felt too heavy for just getting message counts, so I decided to do raw IMAP protocol calls over a socket. Bus Arrivals: this is using the fantastic Tri-Met real-time REST API. Calendar: Steve used the PHP iCalendar library to parse our group Mac OS X Server calendar. Twitter: feeds use Twitter’s simple (little-known?) blogger JSON service. HTML/CSS: Neven says, “This baby is all WebKit candy. The only images here are the icons. The rounded corners, the gradients, the animation – all CSS. Learn -webkit-transform and love it! Oh, I tried using Google Chart for the support graph, but it wasn’t flexible enough. Our little graph is infinitely scalable and stretchable.”

From start to finish, this was about a three-week project.

And no, it didn’t slow down development on [insert the app you want the most here]. Check the board!

PS: For one full year I’ve been promising a blog about the “new” office. If you can believe this, we’re still waiting on a guy to finish processing a couple of nice QTVR’s of the office under construction. With any luck, he’ll be done soon, and I’ll start writing…

For the game developer Accolade, the period between 1984 and 1990 marked a serious and unbeatable streak of awesome. We’re talking bold, timeless art; none of this so-bad-it’s-good nonsense. Click ‘em:

It’s obvious that all these games are from the same company, and yet the variety of illustration/photo/type styles is fabulous. That Killed Until Dead image: how understated and powerful is that? Who does that sort of classy thing with video game covers anymore? (No, really, who? Please feel free to tell us!) Take heed: the simplicity and clarity of these boxes has given them eternal life.

Note also that since these are very design-y, often abstract covers, there’s less potential for Box Disappointment™. I mean, Mr. Grumpy obviously won’t be there in photographic flesh when you fire up Mini-Putt; no one expects that. But his curmudgeonly spirit will be, regardless of how many pixels he’s built of. That’s what a product box should ideally do: make the product more badass.

Unfortunately, right around 1991, as Accolade began to hire Boris Vallejo as a cover artist, things became… a little too much badass. And a whole lot less timeless.

You had a great run, Accolade. I wonder who the art director was?

(All images found at the invaluable MobyGames.com. Oh, how many nostalgic hours we’ve spent there!)

(It’s 11.) Being a responsible and forward-thinking developer, you’re probably good and ready for the day Mac OS X supports resolution independence – lol – so you use multilayer TIFFs and PDFs instead of flat bitmap images whenever possible.

Try this: get the file size of one of those Adobe Illustrator®-produced PDFs. Now open it in Preview and resave it. Notice anything? Once a PDF has gone though Apple’s PDF processing, it’s way, way smaller.

We sure noticed this, and it bugged us. A lot. What was all this extra crud? 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.

We could have re-saved all our PDFs in Preview, but why not make it totally batch-y? Thanks to Will, we present:

ShrinkIt

ShrinkIt is a simple, small, Panic-internal tool (for Mac OS X Snow Leopard) that will automate the process of stripping needless metadata from PDFs by re-saving them using Apple’s PDF processor. For app resources and icons that aren’t using high-end Illustrator features, this should be lossless — Apple’s PDF code is not compressing anything, just removing cruft. Simply drop a bunch of files (not folders) onto it — such as the contents of your app’s Resources folder — to have it find the PDFs and do its magic. The original files will be renamed with the prefix “_org_” for backup safety. That’s it!

Update: ShrinkIt is intended for simple vector resource PDF’s that have more Illustrator cruft than vector data. It may not work well for complex bitmap-heavy or press-ready PDF’s.

Update 2: ShrinkIt is now at version 1.1, which will not replace files whose end result might be larger than the original, and will let you drag items to its dock icon.

A circle with an X? A circle slash? No, this isn’t delete — this is like clearing the list in Safari’s download window. Just removing things you don’t need to see anymore. A little brush, dustpan style? Without color, it reads as a paintbrush, and seems too detailed.

As it turns out, this is tricky. Apple solved this problem… by using the word “Clear”.

Cheaters! Well, fully understandable cheaters.

Well, for your curiosity, here’s what the Panic Art Department has come up with so far:

Our final choice? None of these. You’ll have to wait for a future software release to see what we decided on. (Yeah. Total mocktease.)

As a side note, amazingly, Google dug up an actual patent for “CLEAR DATA FROM A BATCH QUEUE” ICON FOR A DISPLAY SCREEN OF A PROGRAMMED COMPUTER SYSTEM. Well, that sounds perfect!

Yeah… I don’t think we’re going to use that one.

Until now.

Last week, Steve filed the paperwork, took the interview, jumped through some bureaucratic hoops, and became an official American. Hooray!

I made a quick little video to document this fascinating and momentous moment — it was legitimately wonderful — and to illustrate some of Steve’s difficulties in adjusting to American life. As if in a sitcom. A sitcom where he hasn’t already lived here for almost three decades.

Welcome to America, Steve!

“All I ask is one thing, particularly of young people that watch. Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism. It’s my least favorite quality. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard, and are kind, amazing things will happen.” -Conan O’Brien

Unison 2 wasn’t the only usenet-related upgrade this week: we’ve also made great improvements to Unison Access, our usenet service.

Remember, to use Usenet, you need two separate things: a Usenet client (that’d be Unison 2), and a Usenet server to access. Some ISP’s provide access, but increasingly, many don’t.

Unison Access is now $9 a month, with unlimited transfer.

That’s right: no transfer limit. And all the trimmings are included: SSL support, a European server, 300 days of binaries, up to 8 simultaneous connections, etc.

There’s more! If you launch Unison 2 with no server configured (or choose “Setup Assistant…” from the Unison menu), you can even try a one-time 24 hour trial of the service, free of charge.

There are a whole lot of excellent choices out there for Usenet service. But since Usenet Access isn’t our bread and butter, we can offer this crazy good deal — one of the best prices you’ll find anywhere.