para9 | blog

para9 engage !

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:33:00 -0400

Nous cherchons un développeur iOS prêt à joindre notre équipe à temps plein. Nous sommes une petite équipe passionnée par les aspects techniques et artistiques du développement d’applications mobiles. Nous développons des applications iOS pour des clients diversifiés, du jeu vidéo à l’app d’entreprise.

Vos tâches seraient:

Analyser et développer des applications iOS
Participer à la rédaction d’offres de service

Comme para⁹ est une petite boîte, vous serez impliqué à toutes les étapes d’un projet: de la soumission à la livraison au client.

Les exigences du poste sont:

Bilinguisme écrit et parlé (français et anglais)
2 années d’expérience en Objective-C souhaitables, sinon C++
Expérience dans le développement d’interfaces utilisateur
Expérience dans le développement iOS et/ou de jeux vidéos un atout

para⁹ est situé au coeur du centre-ville de Montréal, juste à côté du métro Guy-Concordia. Le quartier recèle de restaurants et de cafés tous plus délicieux les uns que les autres.

Ça vous intéresse ? Écrivez-nous pourquoi et envoyez-nous votre CV à emplois@para9.com.

Des nouveaux bureaux pour para9

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 17:31:44 -0400

para9 est déménagé ! Toute l’équipe est maintenant installée dans des bureaux tous neufs. Nous sommes situés au 1410, rue Pierce, dans le centre-ville de Montréal, près de la rue Sainte-Catherine.

N’hésitez pas à venir nous dire bonjour !

-Alexandre

muBlip on iPad

Wed, 12 May 2010 12:35:00 -0400

New release of muBlip is out on the App Store! The major feature of this release is support for iPad. The minute we laid our hands on an iPad, we knew we had to bring the game to the platform. Try it, you won’t be disappointed. Because we’re nice guys, muBlip is a universal binary, which means the same app will work on your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

The update also includes the following changes:

3 new levels (featuring Duchess Says)
Improved game performance
Slide blips are easier to grab
Easily identify worlds with new levels
Play in any landscape orientation
French localization
Minor bug fixes

We hope you enjoy these enhancements. Please update your reviews on iTunes if you like the game. Thanks for your great support and don’t forget to follow muBlip on twitter and facebook

-Quân.

NSSugarShack

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 11:43:00 -0400

A bunch of iPhone developers from the Montreal area are going to the sugar shack on saturday April 24. We’re calling the meeting NSSugarShack :) So far, we have gathered folks from WhereCloud, Edovia and para9. This is not a BarCamp; there won’t be technical presentations or anything of the sort. This is purely a social event, just devs meeting up to discuss iPhone OS 4.0, their shiny new iPads and share their love of bacon. If you’d like to join, send me an email at quan {at} para9.com by this saturday.

-Quân.

PS: Location is TBD. We’ll decide once the number of people coming is confirmed.

muBlip Music Announcements

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 10:54:00 -0400

Two music announcements regarding muBlip.

I. Fans have written to tell us how much they love the music in muBlip. Thank you all. Some have even asked if the game soundtrack was available for purchase on iTunes. The short answer is no, but we have something even better. How about we give you the game soundtrack? Yes, yes. All songs written by para9 are now downloadable for your listening pleasure. Enjoy!

II. muBlip has been getting rave reviews (see the testimonials on the official site), but fans and critics can’t get enough of muBlip and they want more levels. Ask and you shall receive. The next upgrade will include three new tracks. The twist is that the new songs won’t all be composed by para9. New levels will feature songs by the amazing Duchess Says! We’re big fans of the band, so we approached them to see if we could include some of their tracks and after seeing muBlip, they couldn’t help but say yes. We are really excited by this collaboration. Speaking of which, if you are an artist and would like to have one of your song in the game, contact us at mublip {at} para9.com.

We are working as fast as we can on the next release of muBlip. Thanks everyone for your support.

-Quân.

PS: Don’t forget to follow muBlip on twitter and facebook

muBlip available in the App Store

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:43:00 -0400

After months of hard work, we are proud to announce that muBlip is out in the App Store! muBlip is a rhythm & shapes game for music lovers. Think of it as Simon says meets multi-touch.

As IGF Mobile Finalists, Apple put muBlip in a featured section of the App Store. Cool, isn’t it?

The release of muBlip is a big milestone for para9, but this is really just the beginning. We’ve got a great roadmap for the game and we’re looking forward to sharing with the world.

Alright, enough chit-chat. Download the game and have fun!

-Quân.

Front Row Plugin 2.0.6

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:17:00 -0500

A new release of the DVDpedia Front Row Plugin is out! Here’s what’s new in version 2.0.6:

Apple TV 3.0.1 support (not tested on 3.0.0)
Fixed movie genre display
Fixed movie genre filtering for movies with multiple genres
Actors are now displayed
Directors are now displayed
Release date displayed is now the theatrical date

As always, the Front Row Plugin is offered as a free download. If you enjoy the plugin, please consider making a donation. Thank you.

muBlip IGF Mobile Finalist

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:07:00 -0500

To celebrate the nomination of muBlip as a finalist of the 2010 Independent Games Festival Mobile, we decided to reveal a short video of muBlip gameplay. The game is currently in beta. We plan to release muBlip to the App Store in March 2010. In the meantime, for details on development, beta, music and other news, follow muBlip on twitter.

Oh, this video was also an excuse to try out a technique to show the game content and hand movement at the same time. Neat isn’t it? Let us know what you think.

Make jrails_auto_complete work with Safari

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

In the process of migrating an application from Prototype to jQuery, we used jRails as an intermediary step for our rjs templates. As a replacement to Rails’ autocomplete plugin we tried Marty Zalega’s jrails_auto_complete plugin. Unfortunately, there was a problem when using it with Safari: we were not able to move up and down the suggestion list using the up and down keys.

The plugin listens to keypress events instead of keydown events to decide when the up and down keys are pressed. Since Safari 3.1 a keypress event is no longer fired when a non-character key is pressed. We found the explanation in this Stack Overflow thread. The solution is not explicitly shown over there, so here it is…

In the jrails.autocomplete.js file, replace the call to keypress near line 61 with a call to keydown:

$(this.update).hide();
$(this.element).attr('autocomplete', 'off')
.blur(function(e) { autocomplete.onBlur(e); })
// .keypress(function(e) { autocomplete.onKeyPress(e); });
// Use keydown here. Safari >= 3.1 does fire keypress for
// non-character keypresses
.keydown(function(e) { autocomplete.onKeyPress(e); });

We tested the fix in Safari 4, Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7 and 8.

For some background info, see John Resig’s post on that subject. There is also a nice writeup on Quirksmode describing the uses of both events.

Front Row Plugin 2.0.5

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Mathieu took some time during the long weekend to update the DVDpedia Front Row Plugin. The new release brings the much requested support to Snow Leopard and Apple TV 2.4.

Thanks to everyone who sent emails and made a donation. Your feedback and support is truly appreciated.

printf and Octal Values

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

We came across a strange issue while using ActiveMerchant to connect Moneris’ eSelect Plus payment gateway in one of our projects. ActiveMerchant raised an exception every time an order had ‘08’ or ‘09’ as the credit card expiry month.

The culprit was the way ActiveMerchant uses sprintf to format the month value before sending it to the payment gateway. In the file lib/active_merchant/billing/gateways/moneris.rb (around line 80):

def expdate(creditcard)
  sprintf("%.4i", creditcard.year)[-2..-1] + 
                sprintf("%.2i", creditcard.month)
end

Let’s test that in irb.

>> sprintf("%.2i", '06')
=> "06"	
	
>> sprintf("%.2i", '07')
=> "07"

>> sprintf("%.2i", '10')
=> "10"
	
>> sprintf("%.2i", '08')
ArgumentError: invalid value for Integer: "08"
	from (irb):1:in `sprintf'
	from (irb):1
	from :0

>> sprintf("%.2i", '09')
ArgumentError: invalid value for Integer: "09"
	from (irb):2:in `sprintf'
	from (irb):2
	from :0

Weird, isn’t it?

It seems like sprintf won’t accept values ‘08’ and ‘09’. This ruby-talk message explains why. The leading zero tell Ruby to interpret 8 and 9 as octal numbers. Anything above 7 is obviously not a valid octal number.

For example:

irb(main):005:0> 07
=> 7

irb(main):006:0> 08
SyntaxError: compile error
(irb):6: Illegal octal digit
	from (irb):6
	from :0

The solution is quite simple: just make sure you cast the expiry month as an integer (using to_i) before creating an ActiveMerchant credit card object.

A QuickTime logo instead of a video

Sun, 17 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

A couple of weeks ago, I replaced the video showing what our Front Row DVDPedia plugin looks like. The original video was too big to be watched on a mobile device and loaded right away, wasting precious bandwidth.

While playing around with QuickTime pro, I found the solution I was looking for. QuickTime can export various versions of a movie and create a script that serves the most appropriate one depending on the bandwidth available and the device used to request the media. Plus, it gives you a “click to play” link for free !

A couple of minutes later, everything was working correctly on my laptop. Unfortunately, once the website was deployed on our web server, it did not work as I expected. A big QuickTime logo was displayed where I was expecting the video. The funny thing is that it worked on our staging server, but not on the production server. It obviously had something to do with the web server’s configuration but a quick look at Apache’s logs showed nothing conclusive.

If this happens to you, make sure you have the right mime types activated in Apache. Our web server sent the correct mime types for the .mov file we originally had but it did not know what to do with the .m4v and .3gp files generated by QuickTime.

If you don’t have access to Apache’s configuration file, you can use a htaccess file. The syntax looks like this:

# Correct Mime Types for delivery of QuickTime movies
AddType video/x-m4v m4v
AddType video/3gpp 3gp

Put the htaccess file at the root of your website and you should be good to go !

Of course, this is explained in detail on Apple’s website but it’s not easy to find.

Front Row Plugin 2.0.4

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

We’ve just released an update to the DVDpedia Front Row Plugin. Apple TV users will be glad to learn that the most recent version of Apple TV (2.3.1) is now supported. As always, the Front Row Plugin is offered as a free download.

Announcing the Guichetier

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

We’re pleased to announce that our iPhone/iPod touch app, the Guichetier, is now available on the App Store. The Guichetier is an ATM locator for Montreal, Laval and the urban agglomeration of Longueuil. By finding your bank’s ATMs, the app helps you avoid additional transaction fees.

The Guichetier is available for $1.99. Avoid transaction fees once and the application easily pays for itself! For more details, visit the product page or go directly to the App Store.

para9's new look

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

With spring quickly approaching, we thought it was time to give para9 a new look. Please say hello to para9’s new logo and website.

We are also introducing our blog, so subscribe to the feed if you’d like to keep up with our latest musings. Heartfelt thanks to our friends at Ottoblix for the design of para9’s new visual identity.