Good news! [Panic has just published a blog post](http://www.panic.com/blog/2011/10/panic-state-of-the-union-11/) confirming that Coda 2 is going private beta. As a Coda user I am super happy that they’ve gotten to this milestone.
I found a few things mentioned in the post interesting.
"Coda 2 has now been in development for about a year and a half."
Three years ago [I published an interview with Panic](http://cdevroe.com/notes/panic-interview/) and they seemed to indicate that they were already working on Coda 2 but I guess they didn’t start on it officially for another 18 months. I don’t think they tried to trick us (or me) deliberately but I thought it was interesting considering how early we, the people, were asking Panic to begin working on Coda 2. Amazing insight.
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!
For Panic to come right out and say that it will be "many, many more months" before Coda 2 will ship is fantastic for its users in a number of ways. It is exactly the reason I published the interview with them focused on transparency in software development and not just about the next version of Coda. You’ll remember, if you’re a long-time reader of my blog, how excited I was that immediately following our interview [Panic reached out to ask how they could be more transparent](http://cdevroe.com/links/help-panic-transparency/), and a bit later [they got on Twitter and started a blog](http://cdevroe.com/links/panic-blog/).
With this post Panic has educated Coda users so that they’ll know when to expect an update to Coda. They don’t think it is coming before the end of the year but will, more than likely, come sometime early next summer (my guess). This is huge. Over the next 8 or so months if you need an application that does more than Coda currently provides – you may want to look into investing in a different application for the time being. This is a decision that, before this blog came out, would have been very hard to make. Especially for larger development teams.
Imagine starting a company with three, five, or ten developers and that you wanted a license for each of them. You take a look at Coda’s features and you know that you’re developers require, or would prefer, an editor that does something that Coda currently does not. You can now know how long your investment will take take to make a return for you. Perhaps you pick up a Coda 1.x license. Perhaps you don’t. Now you know. Before you didn’t.
If you read my interview with them you’ll know that this is not the way Panic has always operated. In fact, it may not be the way that they prefer to work. But they’re doing it anyway. For you. Noodle that a while and then [go thank Panic in their comments](http://www.panic.com/blog/2011/10/panic-state-of-the-union-11/).
