Prompt 3 4+

Unexpected disappointment

I didn’t see news about Panic making a successor to Prompt 2, I just saw it on the App Store one day and decided to give it a shot. Being a Panic app, I had some pretty high expectations for it, above other apps. But this app doesn’t even meet the bare minimum of what I’d expect from any random app, let alone to go above and beyond as expected from Panic (I am a long time customer of Transmit, Coda, and Nova).

Subscription fuss aside (thank you for putting in a lifetime purchase option!), this app frequently crashes, has strange bugs (e.g. when connecting to a server with latency of around 200ms, every key press happens twice. Until you make another connection in a new tab and go back, then it’s temporarily fixed), and has a strange design — who thought the tab bar at the top of the Home Screen was shippable??? It’s so ugly!

Other design tidbits / nitpicks:

- Press the “Info” button (with a weird icon btw) on the Home Screen and you get a full-screen sheet with just 3 options. You could literally play a game of tic-tac-toe in the wasted space. Why is this not just a dropdown menu??
- On launch there is like a 50% chance the search bar will have a black (light mode) or white (dark mode) box outline around it. I don’t know why, but there’s no way to get rid of it apart from closing all tabs.
- Go to settings and look at the icons closely. You’ll notice they all have different alignments, different rounded corners, different designs. No consistency whatsoever. Some are just straight up imported from Prompt 2 / Coda mobile.
- Speaking of imported things, the PIN code entry is unchanged and is an iOS 7 throwback on every launch (or when your Face ID fails). Oh yeah, and the passcode settings page has a weird padding on the top and the background is different. Just because why not.
- If you enable Connection Keeper and click on an entry, you get some usable UI… I guess. The text at the bottom doesn’t even have padding and it looks like it was made in SwiftUI in 10 minutes (maybe less?)
- To end it off, the app will sometimes randomly persist a (1) or (2) badge (to indicate active connections), even when they are all closed. The only way to fix it is to make the app crash, which is pretty easy — just connect to a server with a high latency, and eventually it will crash. Sometimes it even crashes on first connection! But hey, at least the badge is cleared.

However, it’s not all bad. There are at least two things I like which makes the app a 2-star and not a 1-star review:

- Storing SSH keys in Secure Enclave. This is a genuinely cool feature. It’s strange how it only allows to store just one (for instance, Secretive app on macOS lets me store unlimited keys in the Enclave), but at least it’s there. Better than nothing. Good job Panic!
- Redesigned icons — I really like the new purple themed fav icons. However changing the icon took me 10 minutes to figure out, and took me straight up an hour to find out how to change the protocol. For such a headlining feature, it ought to be more obvious! In it’s current state neither option is clear whatsoever. But I digress.

Also, one of the headlining features — GPU acceleration — is kind of useless for a *mobile* SSH client? GPU acceleration uses way more energy, iTerm has it enabled only when plugged in for good reason, and they are using pretty well tested Metal code. Do I trust Panic to make a better terminal emulator than iTerm?… Maybe, if it was a dedicated terminal emulator. (Actually, after this app, I have somewhat lost trust in Panic) But this is just an SSH client, so… not really. So that’s why I don’t use it and don’t recommend anyone else to do it unless they have good reason to use it and are comfortable with killing their battery life.

All in all, this would be a good first alpha version. But it’s not. It’s not even beta — this is release Three Point Zero Point Four. Five versions in (counting 3.0.0) and I’m yet to see any improvements. When I first got the app I thought this was just a rushed release and that it would quickly get better. But not only is it a rushed release, it’s an abandoned release. I don’t think anyone at Panic has even used this app outside of basic testing before shipping it. Or if they have, they have just been lazy and not bothered to fix anything to make it better. 😕

I’ll probably keep using the app — it’s a great SSH client, it (mostly) does its job (with a crash and bug here and there). I trust it more than other apps (especially because of the Secure Enclave feature), but wow is it rough around the edges. Oh well, at least it’s still a native app and not some janky packaged web app. That I at least appreciate.