Panic, the maker of the popular web editing app Coda, announced that Coda 2 would be available on May 24th for the desktop. Along with that release, an app called Diet Coda will come to the iPad.

Nearly two years ago we wondered if we’d be able to use our iPad as our main workstation, but the fact that editing web documents on the fly wasn’t an easy process, it made this nearly impossible.

With Coda for the iPad, you’ll be able to use a built-in SSH terminal prompt built in, which will allow you to make quick content changes on your site.

Panic has incorporated many feature requests from its users for version 2, along with a complete UI overhaul. Some of the new features and changes are:

- Code Folding
Finally.
- Smart Complete
Autocomplete custom variables and functions.
- Workflow Improvements
Automatic indentation, smarter closing tags, etc.
- Streamlined Find & Replace
With our revolutionary Placeholder token.

Better UI

- New Tabs
Small, scrolling tabs. Large or small. Images or text.
- Super Sidebar
All your tools accessible with a customizable dock.
- Plus Button
A new editor (or terminal, or book, or…) one click away.
- Code Focus
Hide the sidebar, and go full-screen, to focus.

Being able to do all of this with Diet Coda on your iPad is going to be a fantastic and PC-freeing experience for developers. It will cost you $9.99 as soon as it launches. That price could increase as time goes on.

Coda 2 and Diet Coda are set to drop on May 24th, so get ready.

➤ Coda 2 | Diet Coda for iPad

This is kind of handy – and just in time for TechCrunch Disrupt. The team at Lemon Labs just launched a new app called “Hashtag App,” which lets you follow Twitter hashtags on your iPhone or iPad. But there are a bunch of apps for that, including Twitter itself, you say? Very true. That’s why Hashtag App kicks things up a notch and supports Instagram hashtags as well. Fun!

The app was designed for events and conferences (like #tcdisrupt, of course). However, you can use it to follow any hashtag of interest – not just those related to an event. Another nice thing about the app is that you don’t have to log in to either Twitter or Instagram to use it. You just launch the app, enter a hashtag and go. The app uses the conventional “pull-to-refresh” feature, allowing you to update your hashtag-filled stream whenever you choose. It would be nice if there was a real-time option, like Streamboard, though. (Maybe in a later version?) When you want to change hashtags, you just click the “X” to head back to the homescreen. Nice. I’m going to give it a go today from Disrupt and see how it holds up.

The app creators are Lemon Labs, a self-described “funky app production house” working in startup mode from Vilnius, Lithuania, of all places. They presented the prototype last month at a tech startups conference for the most promising entrepreneurs of the Baltics and Scandinavia. The app’s creators include Monika Katkute, Mindaugas Kuprionis, Marius Kazemekaitis, and Jonas Lekevicius.

Katkute says they have not received outside funding, as the company has generated revenue from commercial projects they’ve done before. However, they’re currently talking to potential investors in the Nordics.

You can grab the app from iTunes here.

Ever been told that you should fully discharge your battery to prolong its life? Or that jailbreaking your phone is illegal? Or that you should wait for the newest Intel processor because it's going to be "so much faster"? These are tech myths we hear all the time, and likely spread to our friends—but most are just a waste of your time (and in some cases, they can actually harm your gadgets). Here are some of the worst offenders. More »

I recently jailbroke my iPhone and now that it's done I'm very overwhelmed by Cydia. I've downloaded a couple apps, but I don't understand most of what I'm looking at. The descriptions and explanation in Cydia don't help much, so I'm wondering: can you help me wrap my head all this stuff? More »

Why is Flash video so awful?

Can we have Flash now? So went the tasteless internet meme just moments after he who was once known as his Jobsness passed from 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino California to, well, the infinite loop.

As a pretty PC-centric computing enthusiast it would be all too easy to sneer knowingly at Jobs' fundamental refusal to allow Flash video onto his iPads and iPhones.

It's certainly hard to square Jobs' claim that the iPad offered the best possible browsing experience with the fact that he'd locked users out a massive chunk of the web.

As it happens, the lack of Flash video support is the only reason why I don't own an iPad. But I don't want to get into an argument about that. Instead, I'm going to contradict myself and say that Jobs had it right. In fact, I'd like Flash banned on PCs with immediate effect. Because Flash video is by far and away and without a shadow of a doubt the worst thing about using a modern PC.

At this point I probably need to qualify things a little. Casual PC users probably won't have a major issue with Flash. Light web browsing with one or two browser windows or tabs open isn't enough to out Flash's awfulness. Not most of the time, anyway.

Per-tab threading

As a proper web junky, however, I've finally and comprehensively lost my rag with Flash. For the record I'm a Chrome user. It ain't perfect, but for better or worse it's my favourite browser. But it pretty much perfectly showcases how awful Flash video is.

Chrome is threaded, of course, which should mean that your general browsing session just keeps on trucking, no matter what. But Flash isn't threaded. So when it bombs out, it's brings your entire browsing world down, all 68 tabs of it.

You could argue it's my tendency to have a ton of tabs open that causes a lot of the problem. But even if that were true and it wasn't the case that it's about time Adobe coded it for efficient per-tab threading, Flash has plenty of other problems.

Can HTML5 save the day?

As I sit and write this, the Daily Show stream on 4oD I'm half watching has just hung. For the third time. If I want to pick up where I left off, I'm going to have to sit through no fewer than five full length ads. Again, for the third time.

Meanwhile, over on my laptop, the video turns green after five seconds in iPlayer. I can fix that by turning off hardware acceleration, but then my CPU gets hammered and my battery life goes south. A graphics driver update might do the trick, but why should I have to bother when I rarely going on never have any issues with other video formats? It's just Flash.

I used to think Jobs was being a bit of a bully in his dealings with Adobe regards Flash. But I've had enough now and as far as I'm concerned Adobe got no more than it deserved for allowing Flash to remain so shonky.

Of course, HTML5 is coming to save the day. But it's taking its sweet time. Until it has entirely taken over, Flash will be my number one computing enemy.

Pulse, the popular free mobile news reader for iPhone, iPad and Android, could soon get ads. Until now, Pulse, which launched its first app in May 2010, was ad free and the company focused more on user acquisition than monetizing its service. A new job posting on Pulse’s site, however, clearly spells out the company’s plans to start making money through advertising in the near future. The company is currently looking for its first sales executive and says that it is “building innovative and disruptive ways of empowering brands to share their content and tell their story in a way that’s natural and native to Pulse.”

Even though it’s now been more than two years since its launch, the company never revealed its monetization plans beyond a few glimpses here and there. Now it looks like some form of advertising is definitely coming to Pulse. Judging from this announcement, though, those ads won’t be standard mobile ads.

The job posting stresses that Pulse is not looking to sell standard ad units and is instead “reinventing what marketing can be and should be on mobile devices.” Pulse notes that, in the long run, it plans to build a global sales organization, but for now, the new sales executive’s job will be to establish the company’s relationship with brands and agencies and to evangelize the Pulse platform and the company’s approach to marketing.

Asked about the job posting, Pulse CEO Akshay Kathari told us that Pulse ads won’t look and feel like ads. Instead, they will “resemble the high-quality content that keeps users coming back to the app.” As the product is still a work in progress, though, he wasn’t in a position to say more about it at this time.

So far, Pulse has raised $9.8 million. Its mobile apps had about 11 million users by the end of 2011 (up from just 1 million a year ago) and the company was seeing a new download every 2 seconds. Pulse also comes pre-loaded on a number of devices, including Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

It’s worth noting that, for a short time in 2010, Pulse was actually banned from the App Store for a few days after the New York Times complained that the app was using its content and making money off it (at that time, Pulse for iPad was still a $3.99 app). It’ll be interesting to see how Pulse plans to avoid similar issues once it starts selling its own ads.

Time Warner Cable is on a roll with this whole TV Everywhere thing. Just a day after adding Viacom channels to its live streaming iPad app, the cable provider has announced support for HBO Go on the Xbox, Roku streaming boxes, and Samsung connected TVs.

It’s been a long time coming: Time Warner Cable was one of the last holdouts to even hook up with HBO Go, the on-demand video service which gives subscribers access to every piece of HBO original programming ever… But it’s catching up fast.

By supporting HBO Go on game consoles and connected TVs, Time Warner Cable joins the likes of Verizon, AT&T, and Dish Network in offering access to the service. And it even comes out ahead of some providers, like Comcast, which still doesn’t authenticate with HBO Go on Roku.

For Time Warner Cable’s HBO subscribers, that’s great news, as they’re no longer tied to watching HBO shows as they air on Sunday night, or reliant on crappy cable VOD services to get access on demand. For everyone else who loves HBO but doesn’t want to pay $100 for cable, though, they’re stuck waiting and hoping that maybe, some day, HBO Go will be available a la carte.

The Wall Street Journal made waves yesterday. Citing unnamed sources, the Journal reported Apple is ordering larger touchscreens for the next iPhone. Now, citing its own unnamed sources, Reuters somewhat confirmed the reported. Prepare yourself, iPhone diehards. All signs point to a larger iPhone.

The thought of a larger iPhone clearly scares people. Read the comments on my post yesterday, “It’s Time For A Larger iPhone.” They say 3.5-inches is the best size. You don’t have to move your thumb to navigate the whole screen, they say. A phone with a 3.5-inch screen fits in my hipster jeans!

But really, the main underlying thread seems to be some people are afraid that, just perhaps, Apple will adopt something from Android like the trend of a larger screen. Scary, I know.

Change is hard. Apple has used the same form factor for 4 iPhone generations spanning 5 years. The iPhone 4, and the 4S for that matter, is still one of the best looking phones on the market, with an impossibly thin design and stunning good looks. But it’s time for a change. Besides, logic and other credible rumors point to an internal change that might be forcing Apple’s hand in using a larger screen.

Along with a larger screen, the next iPhone is said to have 4G data connectivity. This requires a new mobile chipset, which, as proven by the new iPad presents a new set of challenges. Instead of growing the iPad’s height and width (and therefore the screen size), the new iPad was made a bit thicker to accommodate the larger battery needed to power the 4G chipset and retina display. Apple doesn’t have that luxury with the iPhone. The next iPhone cannot be thicker than the current iPhone. But it can be taller.

4G chipsets are generally not as mature as their 3G counterparts. They require more power and thus require a larger battery. Instead of making the iPhone thicker, logic suggests that Apple would then make the phone a bit taller, making room for a larger, likely retina, display.

This change will likely upset the Apple diehards. As the screen size increased on Android phones, iPhone users took to Internet comments and forums to defend the smallish iPhone’s 3.5-inch screen. It seems sooner versus later now, Apple will use a different screen for the iPhone. Change is hard.

[image via Mark Wilkie/Flickr]

Customers of Time Warner Cable have some reason to rejoice today, as the cable company has gotten the go-ahead to add channels like MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central to its live streaming iPad app. The addition comes after the channels’ owner Viacom has settled its differences and resolved litigation with Time Warner Cable.

The legal fight erupted last year, after Time Warner Cable released its iPad app, which lets subscribers stream live shows to tablets inside their homes. While many networks grumbled about the app, Viacom was most vocal in rejecting the app, taking its distribution partner to court over whether or not it had the right to stream to other devices.

Time Warner Cable’s argument was that the iPad was just another TV in the home, while Viacom argued that the tablet was a new device and required additional rights for distribution. Not to mention, the networks were probably annoyed because Nielsen wasn’t able to measure consumption of video delivered to the iPad — which meant there were eyeballs not being counted, and subsequently not being sold to advertisers.

But that’s all over now. Hooray! Although, even with the legal case settled, both are sticking to their original legal positions.

One aspect of the settlement that sticks out is Time Warner Cable’s agreement to carry Viacom’s Country Music Channel (CMT). As is usual with these types of deals, the content provider (in this case, Viacom) tries to get the distributor (Time Warner Cable) to pay for a whole bunch of channels, and often lumps in those that aren’t that highly rated and, in the cable company’s view, doesn’t provide a whole lot of value. CMT was one of those channels, and its carriage was apparently a sticking point in the negotiations.

Official comment below:

Viacom and Time Warner Cable have agreed to resolve their pending litigations. All of Viacom’s programming will now be available to Time Warner Cable subscribers for in-home viewing via internet protocol-enabled devices such as iPads and Time Warner Cable will continue to carry Viacom’s Country Music Television (CMT) programming. In reaching the settlement agreement, Time Warner Cable and Viacom were also able to resolve other unrelated business matters to their mutual satisfaction. Neither side is conceding its original legal position or will have further comment.

When it comes to business social networking products, Convo, created by Scrybe Labs, probably doesn’t have the name recognition (or the funding) of Yammer. But judging from the demonstration I saw recently, it has a compelling product, and it’s announcing some nice additions today.

CEO Faizan Buzdar came by the TechCrunch office last week to demonstrate Convo and its new features. It was the first time I’d seen the product, and even though the TechCrunch team pretty much lives in Yammer, I was impressed. When you first open the website or the desktop app, it looks pretty similar to other enterprise social networks — a stream of conversations and shared content from your coworkers.

What’s really compelling, however, is the quality of the integration between the conversation and the documents (or other content). You can highlight items in a presentations, for example, and thumbnail of what you’ve highlighted will show up in the conversation stream. When someone clicks on that image, they’ll be taken to that exact point in the presentation. You can do the same thing for live websites, which is useful, for example, for tech blogging customers like The Next Web. This isn’t Convo’s only feature, but it’s the one that makes the best case that the service isn’t just “a stream of chitchat,” as Buzdar puts it.

As for the new features, Convo is launching an Android app today. The company already has an iPhone app, and Buzdar says the Android functionality is pretty similar. Both mobile apps are designed around letting people keep up with the conversations in Convo, rather than porting all of the desktop version’s features onto the phone. The next step in the company’s mobile plans is an iPad app, which should come much closer to the desktop experience, except with a touch interface.

Buzdar also plans to launch a group chat feature later this month, where users can start a conversation with select coworkers in a private room. What’s appealing, especially for anyone who’s ever had a “Wait, who said what where?” moment of being overwhelmed by all of a company’s different conversation channels, is the fact that these group conversations can eventually be shared (perhaps with some light editing, if some of the conversation isn’t always polite about your coworkers) with everyone else in the workplace, and they can be marked up like any other piece of content.

We last wrote about Convo about a year ago, when it was known as Convofy.