In all honesty, CocoaPad was really more of an exercise for me to get familiar with Cocoa. I doubt there's much practical use for it, but it was a fun little thing to write, and I definitely learned a lot by doing it. However, I was pretty young and n00bish back then, so a lot of my coding "techniques" are, well, sucky.
If you attempt to build CocoaPad on Jaguar (using the source files—the project is Xcode and therefore Panther only), you will get about 10 compiler warnings saying that the Panther-specific methods won't work. Ignore these. CocoaPad already has a system of using Panther-specific methods only if they can be used.
Unfortunately, because of lack of weak-linking support, CocoaPad cannot built on Mac OS X 10.1 or earlier (unless you remove the Find panel and Word code, which could be a tad messy).