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.
[source]

Paratrooper was selected as one of the Best Pre Apps of 2009 by the webOS-authority Precentral. This is added to a recent feature by WebOSRoundup picking our game as their Top Pick.

With over 6000 downloads of the full game, and over 37,500 downloads of the demo version Paratrooper Mini, it’s been a great start for our little trooper.

What a nice way to round out 2009!

One of the few things that is not very slick on the Mac are the print dialogs. This is particularly obvious when trying to print with a non-standard setup on something like photo paper. By default, every time the requester comes up, it will restore the default settings. With hundreds of options to configure, it can be a real hassle. Setting the Preset to “Last used settings…” can help with that.

However, nothing has been as frustrating to me as not being able to “Print Selection Only” from within Firefox. I’m constantly wanting to print just part of a web page and the option is nearly always greyed out for me. Here are the steps to ensure the “Print Selection Only” option is clickable with Firefox on a Mac:

1. Select what you’d like to print in Firefox.

2. Select File->Print (or Command-P)

3. Set the Preset to “Standard”.

It’s mind-boggling to me that setting the preset to anything but “Standard” would cause the “Print selection Only” option to be unselectable, but that seems to do the trick. If you’d prefer to print with other printer settings, don’t forget to manually adjust those to your preferred settings after you’ve set the preset.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is going to be well-represented at Siggraph 2009 in New Orleans this year. In addition, I’m participating in some other panels on behalf of Imageworks. Hope I bump into you in these sessions if you’re going to be at the show:

Keeping a Job in CG for Entertainment

Monday, 3 August | 3:45 PM – 5:30 PM | Room 260-262

I’ll be a panelist

From Pitchvis to Postvis

Wednesday, 5 August | 10:30 AM – 12:15 PM | Room 271-273

I’ll be a panelist

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Making Mouthwatering 3D

Wednesday, 5 August | 1:45 PM – 3:30 PM | La Nouvelle Orleans Ballroom

Presenters Karl Herbst, Danny Dimian, and me.

Rendering: Practical Uses of a Ray Tracer in Cloudy

Friday, 7 August | 8:30 AM – 10:15 AM | Auditorium C

Presenters: Karl Herbst and Danny Dimian

Deconstructing Watchmen

Thursday, 6 August | 8:30 AM – 10:15 AM | La Nouvelle Orleans Ballroom

I’m a Panelist

Screening Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Selected Scenes in 3D

Friday, 7 August | 1:45 PM – 3:45 PM | Rooms 260-262

It’s going to be a very busy show, but it’s a great opportunity to get to show everyone a taste of Cloudy and our other recent work.

Sony Pictures Imageworks announced our first 5 open source projects today. We’re still getting some of the code online, but the initial reception has been exciting. Hopefully it’s just the start of something big.

Additional coverage at Variety, fxguide, CGSociety, and the official press release here. The news also hit reddit’s home page today and started an interesting discussion.

First, the 3 complaints from other reviewers that I’ve found to be wrong:

3. When browsing contacts, you do not need iPhone-esque alphabetical tabs for navigation. The Pre has a keyboard and jumps to the contact when you type.

2. The keyboard works very well.

1. The edge of the keyboard is not dangerously sharp. In fact, the edge of my Macbook Pro is much sharper.

Second, my 3 favorite features:

3. Photos automatically sync for your contacts from Facebook or Google and get used throughout the interface.

2. When in card mode (not in an app), you can search for anything just by typing. This means you don’t have to launch the phone app to dial the phone, find a contact, or search google/wikipedia. Very slick.

1. The Sprint software that gives turn-by-turn directions actually works very well.

And third, the 3 things Palm needs to do with future updates:

3. Allow me to add more items to the auto-correction list. In fact, allow 3rd party software to enhance them too. Update: Available in a 3rd party app now.

2. Copy and paste is inconvenient at best. Please remedy.

1. There needs to be a way to completely turn off a notification message at the bottom of the screen. I always have email and I already know that. Update: This has been fixed in firmware update 1.1.0. Thanks!

Also, I’d love for there to API suport for network sockets and a canvas element that supports paths [Update: Canvas element is complete enough in 1.2.0], then I could write the Guess-A-Sketch client for the Pre.