So, what’s going on at Panic lately? Allow me to explain!

Let’s start with Coda 1. We’ve recently done a series of Lion updates, ending with Coda 1.7.4, which significantly improved the stability of our all-in-one web editor. That said, there’s still one annoying bug on our list that can prevent Preview from fully refreshing linked files such as CSS stylesheet changes. We think we’ve got this one licked, so look for a Coda 1.7.5 release in the coming weeks to fix it. One more important note about Coda 1 — at some point, our automatic update notifications broke! Ugh. The worst. We’ll fix it in 1.7.5, but you might be running an older version and suffering dumb bugs. Please, if you use Coda, choose “Check for Updates…” from the Coda menu and make sure you’re up-to-date.

We’ve been spending Transmit’s year gathering feature requests, planning for the future, and issuing important bug fixes to our world-class file transfer client — including two recent releases to improve Lion compatibility. Now at a nice place with version 4.1.7, we’ll continue to monitor bugs, and hope to spend some quality time with Transmit soon.

Prompt, our nice SSH client for iOS, just had an update to seriously improve the handling of private keys. We’re also finishing up a bug fix release right now — expect it in the next few weeks. We love this app, and we love hearing how it’s saved your bacon, letting you reboot your server while fire-eating at Burning Man, etc. While we’re insistent on not kitchen-sinking it, if you have feature suggestions, let us know. (SSH tunneling is the #1 request by my count.)

We’ve just found an issue with CandyBar where it doesn’t properly import icons that have 1024 ⨉ 1024 representations (the 256 and 512 go missing), so you can expect a 3.3.3 release in the near future. As a side note, people sometimes ask if we can add Lion’s new sidebar icons to CandyBar, and we can, but there’s a sad catch — the system automatically applies monochromatic shading to those icons. We get the feeling people want to bring back color, not have a blob of gray, but that’s not currently possible.

(As for the rest: Unison is in a solid place and we’ll continue to monitor and fix bugs. We’re still working out our plans for the weird little guys: Stattoo actually has a nice update ready to go (!), and Desktastic has a years-old and pretty cool complete rewrite in the can (!!) save for some testing, but internally we’re struggling with overall strategy — it’s hard to find time to support and maintain these tiny little apps. Lesson learned, but thanks for your patience (all four of you) while we figure this out. Also, we continue to develop internal special projects. Who knows what we’re up to!)

Finally, the only part you care about: Coda 2.

Coda 2 has now been in development for about a year and a half. All of us have been working incredibly hard on this forthcoming release. We’re finishing up new features, boosting up the editor, dramatically cleaning up the UI, and improving what Coda already does well today, all while, hopefully, keeping things extremely light and lean. By the time you see it, Coda might look a little different than you’re used to, but we think it’s for good reason. We’ll see how it shakes out, but we’re very excited.

Yes, we can at last see the light at the end of the tunnel. That means I have to make good on the promise I made in last year’s State of the Union, and tell you: we’re almost ready to start private beta testing.

That’s your cue: click here to apply for the Coda 2 private beta ! The signup form is now closed. Thanks for your interest!

We only need a limited number of users, and we’re especially interested in Coda contributors — folks who wrote plugins, syntax modes, etc. If you don’t make it in, please note that we still truly appreciate your interest.

So, when will it ship? Coda 2 is an extremely complex and multi-layered app, and it will take significant time to test, debug, and improve. That means there are many, many more months ahead of us — this release is important and needs to be as close to perfect as possible. So, to those of you currently camped out on the street in front of our office: you’ll need to hang in there for a quite a while still. Thanks for your understanding while we test!

Regardless, this is a major milestone in our development, and we thought you’d be excited as well.

That’s the scoop around here. Onward!