Apple II Bits

Panic is one of my favorite software developers. Besides making Transmit, an excellent FTP client for Mac OS X, they also have a great attitude. One of its founders ran the amusing Web comic Spamusement! He and his cohorts recently welcomed a new employee to Panic with a vegan cooking competition. And last year, they had a professional artist develop box art for their products as if they were Atari 2600 games — which led Jason Scott to hire that same artist to create the cover art for his upcoming documentary, Get Lamp.

Yesterday, Panic graciously accommodated a fan’s request. Stewart Smith wrote to Panic with a link to an Apple II music video he had made in 2005, set to the song “Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground” from the album The Sophtware Slump by Grandaddy:

Mr. Smith’s request was simple: could the developers at Panic run this program on the Apple IIe they had in their office? Sure, they responded … but the source code was in the format of an AIF sound recording, as would be used by an Apple II’s cassette tape storage device. Without a cassette tape deck, how would Panic load this file back onto an Apple II? Any modern device with an audio output jack could play the file into the Apple II’s audio input — so Panic decided to use their iPad.

There’s nothing technically impressive about this hardware collaboration, but it’s still extremely awesome to witness. Kudos to Panic for acknowledging their roots and pleasing the fans by inventing the “JediPad”.

(Hat tip to Jason Scott)