Don’t, Panic
January 5, 2018 at 8:55 PM by Dr. Drang
You’ve no doubt heard by now that Panic is set to suspend sales of its remote upload/download app, Transmit for iOS, because it just doesn’t earn enough revenue to justify continued development.
Jason Snell’s eulogy matched my thinking pretty closely:
This is a real bummer for me personally, because Transmit is a huge part of my iOS workflow. Whether it’s editing HTML files on my web server, uploading images to reference in Six Colors articles, or uploading podcasts to a content-delivery network, Transmit (and its integration with Workflow) is a tool I rely on. It’s also frustrating to see a professional-level tool fail to catch hold on iOS.
I don’t upload podcasts, but as I use my iPad Pro more and more (I’m writing on it now), Transmit—in particular, its Share Sheet—has become a important part of my blog writing process. As Cabel Sasser said in the Panic blog:
Transmit for iOS always felt like an obvious addition to our lineup, but we never thought it made a ton of sense in the tightly-restricted world of iOS until Apple announced the “Share Sheet” for iOS 8. Finally, we thought, in addition to using Transmit iOS to upload/download whatever you need, you could easily (?) get data out of apps and send it to your favorite servers.
Transmit’s Share Sheet action is how I move all my iPhone photos and screenshots to this blog’s server. It’s fast, easy, and has never failed me. It will, I assume, continue to work through at least the next version of iOS, but those of us who use it will have to start thinking about what comes next.
(My first thought is to work out something with Pythonista and the paramiko library that comes with it, possibly setting it up to be called via Workflow. There’d be some irony in using Workflow to replace Transmit, as Workflow’s future has been in serious doubt ever since Apple bought it.)
Oddly enough, today was the day I finally got around to installing Blink Shell, a mosh (mobile shell) client app I learned about from Erik Hess. Assuming it does what I want, Blink Shell will replace the other Panic app in my regular iPad repertoire, Prompt.
