Blog
muBlip on iPad
2010/05/12
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
2010/04/15
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
2010/04/15
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.
muBlip available in the App Store
2010/03/16
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
2010/02/02
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
muBlip IGF Mobile Finalist
2010/02/01
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
2009/10/14
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
2009/09/07
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
2009/08/13
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
2009/05/17
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.
