It turns out, we cannot be trusted to pack a box.

It started simple enough with a goal to pack our CD’s for our upcoming move. The first distraction was sorting through the CD’s to make sure to avoid moving anything we’re never going to listen to again–naturally it would be a terrible waste to move a few 3 ounce objects for nothing. Now however, it has digressed into sorting them into “his” and “hers” collections, digitizing every album that made it through the first gauntlet and finding appropriate digital artwork to go with each and every CD. This, for music we mostly haven’t thought about in the last 7 years.

The above snapshot is my stack that remains to be digitized tonight. Part of it actually.

At this rate, we’ll be ready to move in about 10 years. But, we will be very organized.

Last week a number of the supervisors from Imageworks took a few hours to get hands-on with the latest stereo rigs and equipment. Stereo Supervisor Rob Engle led the group through some prepared material and facilitated a discussion that continued through the morning.

Many of the supervisors at Sony Pictures Imageworks have already worked on one or more stereo films. This made the discussion and the experimenting with the rigs all the more interesting.

Academy Award winning VFX supervisor Scott Stokdyk at the stereo controls. Even if you know exactly how you want to dial the inter-axial and convergence, it takes a bit of rehearsal to get used to the controls.

After a few hours on stage, the team returned to the screening room to review the results and talk about the merits of the various experiments.

It’s rare to be able to get that kind of group together in a room for a few hours to discuss and experiment with the latest in an evolving technology. Certainly one of the perks of my job.

HP/Palm is running a new campaign featuring a few webOS developers. They featured our work on Paratrooper in the series. Thanks Palm!

Although it’s already pretty straightforward to right-click on an image in Picasa to edit it in Photoshop, sometimes it’s nice to be able to just tap a button.

If you’re on a mac, you’ll notice this button designed for CS3 doesn’t work for you. I’ve taken their work and made it work for any version of Photoshop on a Mac.

To add this button to your Picasa, click to automatically download and install. Let me know in the comments below if it works for you or if you run into any trouble.

Download and install. (12Kb file)

My tweets from this year, in Wordle form.

Larger version here.

To participate, make Paratrooper your #WebOSAppDay purchase and then tweet about it. Make sure to include the words “Paratrooper” and “#WebOSAppDay” in your tweet. At the end of today, we’ll pick 10 winners at random and pay for your copy of Paratrooper!

(A couple of details: If you don’t already follow @kaboomapps follow us so that we can DM you for your winnings. Alternatively, look for a tweet from @kaboomapps tomorrow to see if you have won. We’ll pay each winner $2.50 USD via paypal to cover your purchase price and any paypal fees. Void where prohibited)

I received an email a few weeks ago from a Palm employee who indicated they had used Paratrooper as part of their CTIA and CES booth. Since they were retiring the panel, they wanted to know if I was interested in re-using it.

He indicated the panel was large, but I had no idea. The box was 10 feet tall and 4.5 feet wide!

The print looks so good, my daughters thought the keyboard might actually work.

Larger than life! It’s fun to see a 10 foot tall version of Paratrooper running on the Pixi.

Thank you Palm for sending this along. Another example of Palm treating their developers like first class members of the team.

After creating the full version of Paratrooper for WebOS, I created the free “mini” version to give people a little taste of the game. In the mini version there is an “Upgrade” menu option that fires up the Palm App Catalog and launches directly to the page where a customer can pay the tidy sum of $1.99 for the full version of the game.

A couple of people have written to me to ask how I created the upgrade menu option. Not too tricky.

First, you need the URL for your app. Find your app’s URL by navigating to your app in the app catalog and clicking the Share button. Send that link to yourself by email or SMS. Then, you use that application ID and your packageid in the code below.

Here’s my complete “Buy Game” callback that get’s executed when the Upgrade menu item gets clicked:

StageAssistant.prototype.buyGame = function (callback) {

    var currentScene = Mojo.Controller.stageController.activeScene();

    var launchParams = {
        id: "com.palm.app.findapps",
        params: {'target': "http://developer.palm.com/appredirect/?packageid=com.185vfx.paratrooper&applicationid=765"}
    };

    currentScene.serviceRequest('palm://com.palm.applicationManager',
    {
        method: 'open',
        parameters: launchParams
    });

    if (callback) {
        callback();
    }
};

This works great, as long as the user has access to paid apps in the App Catalog in their country. In the case of Paratrooper Mini, we receive a handful of support requests each day (and a few low ratings) wondering why the “Upgrade” button takes them to a blank page in their App Catalog. It would be wonderful if Palm would upgrade the catalog to provide the user a warning indicating that the App Catalog will provide paid apps in their country in the future.

This makes me happy. I can almost smell it.
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