I've gotta say, Panic takes software design to a new level. That is, the design of software. Literally. Coda, their new all-in-one web development application, really takes design seriously. In fact, they took it so seriously that they even made their own font for it, called Panic Sans.

I love this font. It looks like garbage without anti aliasing, but with it, it's gorgeous. Clean and easily readable. Kudos, Panic guys! I loved it so much, I wanted it in my OS (specifically to use for Terminal).

It's not there by default, but it's pretty easy to pull it from Coda and stick it into Font Book. Here's how you do it:

1. Open up Font Book
2. Go into your applications folder, and right click on Coda -> Show Package Contents
3. Go into Contents->Resources, and locate the file 'Panic Sans.dfont'
4. Drag it into the font listing in Font Book - it's imported, and you're done.

If you're on a Mac, and you do web development, you owe it to yourself to check it out. It's shareware for 15 days.

So I've been checking out pownce over the last day or so, along with the guys at the office. In short, it's intention is to be a convenient way to send messages, files, and links to friends. And it's pretty slick, no doubt about it. In a joking conversation that quickly turned genuine, one of the guys brought up this peculiarity in the registration form:

The resultant conversation bounded between humor, social commentary, hypersensitivity, and then landed soundly on one particular revelation.

This ambiguity - It's a bit of a microcosm for pownce itself, isn't it? Really.. what is pownce... for? The entire service can be defined by this very dropdown. As my friend Joel put it:

"It's a vague service, offered for vague reasons, apparently to be used by people of vague gender."

I've gotta say, humorous as the statement is, I agree with him. While I feel like this really is the springboard for AIR to hit the map (And believe me - I think AIR, or at least the concept of it, is very well ingrained into our future), I think that pownce itself really hasn't found an audience. In it's current form, I doubt it will really find one, either. What the hell is it good for, anyway?

Getting away from the browser is an admirable goal, though, and one that I think will be followed as the web evolves.

Update: A friend just pointed out to me that Twitter, too, is really essentially pointless, and yet still unabashedly popular. So I'm probably wrong. It'll probably find an audience, just maybe not the type of audience I'd associate with.