Panic Software plans two new apps

Panic Software, renowned for their Transmit FTP and Audion MP3 applications, has plans to bring at least two new Mac applications to market this year, AppleInsider has learned.

Stattoo

Expected to fill one of the company's vacant "li'l app" slots, a new application named "Stattoo" will take all kinds of interesting digital information and displays it both beautifully and practically on a user's Mac OS X Desktop.

The application functions similar to the Mac OS X dock application, allowing users to drag-and-drop predesigned capsules to and from a docking station that floats transparently on the desktop. Capsules displaying current weather conditions, most recent e-mails, currently playing iTunes tracks, upcoming iCal appointments, laptop battery strength and available disk space are just a few of the widgets expected to debut with the application.

Users can adjust capsule transparency and brightness from the applications preference pane, as well as define a hot-key that will trigger the application to pop to the front of cluttered desktops, sources said. Additionally, the application's Audio capsule is compatible with Panic's Audion MP3 software.

Stattoo is currently in the early beta stages of development and is said be written entirely in Cocoa — allowing the app to take full advantage of Apple's Quartz graphics sub-system.

Unison

Separately, Panic has been focusing their efforts towards reviving the use of newsgroups with the development of its Unison news reader application.

Through the use of well designed content modules, this stunning application provides a sleek and speedy user interface to the forgotten realm of the Internet's newsgroup population.

Unison provides a Mac OS X style column-view newsgroup browser that spawns a threaded message viewer in the style of Apple's Mail application. The tabbed viewer automatically extracts newsgroup postings into Message, File, Image and Music assortments that are then easily browsed by the user.

Most notable is the application's interface to image and music content, sources said. Users of Unison are presented with a thumbnail view that allows for images to be downloaded on-demand, based on their descriptions. The image viewer can also be toggled into a slide-show mode that will automatically scale images to the size of the viewer window. Meanwhile, the application's music browser contains built in audio capabilities, allowing tracks to be previewed, scanned, or played in full directly from the newsgroup reader.

According to sources, users that are not privileged with access to a Usenet (NNTP) server will have the option to sign up for Panic's own censor-free Unison Usenet Access. The service, which is currently in testing, is rumored to cost $11.95 a month for up to 10 gigabytes of transfer. The Unison Usenet will retain over 6 months worth of discussions and 15-65 days worth of binaries — amounting to approximately a terabytes of data stored on the server at all times.

Unison is currently in the final candidate stages of development and is expected to debut in the immediate future.