SubMate's blog!

We are glad to announce that SubMate’s team just welcomed a new member: Amokrane.

Amokrane is a RoR and Android dev. He will help Clement implement new features on SubMate and will start working on an Android version of SubMate!

We have a lot of exciting stuff coming up and Amokrane will help us release them faster!

On a longtemps hésité sur le titre (“SubMate recherche son Bûcheron, développeurs iPhone acceptés”, “Steve Jobs Killah, ou pêcheur de Cocoa”, …) mais on fait finalement très simple : SubMate s’agrandit encore et recherche un stagiaire en développement iPhone (H/F).

Pour en savoir plus, vous pouvez consulter l’offre sur RemixJobs : Développpeur iPhone, ou la télécharger en PDF.

Si vous avez des questions, ou si vous êtes impatient de nous communiquer votre CV, envoyez-nous un email à ninja(at)submate.com ou contactez-nous sur twitter (@submate)

Si vous avez un compte GitHub, ou des profils HackerNews et StackOverflow n’oubliez pas de les préciser dans votre réponse !

SubMate a décidé de s’agrandir un peu plus et recrute un stagiaire (H/F) Ruby on Rails qui souhaiterait venir apprendre et pratiquer ce joli language au sein de notre équipe de dev!

Si cela vous intéresse, vous pouvez voir l’offre complète sur RemixJobs: “Developpeur Ruby on Rails H/F” ou la télécharger directement en PDF.

Si après avoir lu tout cela il vous reste des questions ou si vous êtes impatient de nous communiquer votre CV: ninja(at)submate.com ou twitter (@submate)

Si vous avez un compte GitHub, ou des profils HackerNews et StackOverflow n’oubliez pas de les préciser dans votre réponse !

Finally, the new version of SubMate iPhone app is available in the App Store!! 

You can download it for free:

Kevin, our iPhone dev, did a great job and this update contains a lot a new features/improvements:

• new signup form using facebook connect
• the app is faster and smoother
• the design has also been improved
• we fixed Bugs and known Issues
• and we also changed how the app is interacting with our server so that we can update the database easily.

We are very proud of our new version, and already hard-working on SubMate 2.0 for iPhone :)

Please give us your feedback on that new version!

Some bonus screenshots after the jump:

Read More

In short…
A few weeks from now, we’ll be releasing the new, improved version of SubMate. The real vision, the real v1.

We would like to share the love with startups or media outlets. So we’re glad to announce the SubMate Launch Partners program. 

Become a launch partner, and be a sponsor of SubMate in your city(ies). We’ll get feedback and use cases on our platform. You’ll get some exposure.
It’s free, it’s simple, check it out.

 More info
When we launched the prototype of SubMate last May in London, Paris and New York, we got an amazing feedback by the users and press. Not only did we get some coverage in tech media (like TechCrunch and Business Insider), we got an amazing response by mainstream media. And when we say amazing, we mean it: on Saturday following the Thursday launch we made the freaking page 3 of the NY Post, in full page. Page 3 of the NY Post! Talk about mainstream! 

We’ve also been covered on the NBC, the BBC radio in the UK, the Daily Telegraph, the Gothamist, the Huff Post, LCI, … We also managed to get in a few conferences as finalists or winners.

All this effort got us some great traffic. In the first few weeks after the opening of the prototype, the app attracted about 30,000 uniques and over 100,000 page views. 

Ok - it might just not work as expected, we know it. But we’ll work our asses off to make it happen again, but this time, we aim at making it bigger. We got a brand new website with a cool, sexy design, a great iPhone app coming up, and we got amazing features lined up. We already cover 8 cities, and aim at 30 to 40 new cities before spring.

This time around, we want to partner with great startups or media outlets who would like to get on board. We will win the feedback and use cases on our platform. You will get some (more) visibility and exposure.

Of course, we cannot promise anything, but it’s worth the try, don’t you think? So get on board now, so we won’t have to say (finger crossed): “we told you so!”.

Wanna know more? Check the details out!

We worked all summer to bring you a new version of SubMate with exciting features and a beautiful new design. The release of that new version is only a couple of weeks away but you can already discover a sneak preview of the new design! How?

By simply going to SubMate.com and click on the blue badge on the bottom right. We would love to have your feedback! We will share other elements of the new version in the coming days. So stay tuned :)

Laurent, Co-Founder of SubMate, will be in London this Thursday to talk about Location Based Services and SubMate at the “TradeDoubler Summit”.

SubMate is available in London since the first day, so we are really happy to have an opportunity to meet some of you.

If you are also planning to attend “TradeDoubler Summit”, please feel free to send us an email he will love to have a coffee with you!

Axel, one of our great RoR dev, just shared his development environment. I know that a lot of you are pretty curious so I thought that we should share it here:

Brew, Zsh, Git and RVM

This first post purpose is to guide you through my environment setup.

Brew

Brew is a package manager for MacOS X. It will let you install a bunch of UNIX tools that aren’t included in the system.

Packages are installed into their own isolated prefixes and then symlinked into “/usr/local” where binaries are located in “/usr/local/bin”.

MacOS X is POSIX compliant, so you already have a “/usr/local/bin” in your PATH environment variable even though MacOS X doesn’t use this directory.

This working way permits brew to avoid a package management database like fink or macports.

Another advantage of homebrew compared to fink and macports is that it reuses the programs you already have installed in your system rather than taking an isolated system approach preventing you from having yet another version of a library to install when you already have it.

Moreover, it will let you install and manage programs without using the sudo command, preventing your from security issues and messing things up.

Oh and one more thing: it’s written in Ruby!

Go check it at http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

ZSH

Several months ago, I decided to switch from bash to zsh because of its great features (advanced file globbing, spelling correction, programmable tab completion…), what else?

While I was searching for some documentation on how to customize the shell to fit my own needs (essentially adding git integration), I found an awesome git repository which aim is to centralize some zsh configurations: oh-my-zsh. It will let you tweak your zsh shell with a modular approach by including some extra shell scripts (plugins) to extend your experience (e.g. git integration). oh-my-zsh also offers a bunch of themes out of the box, so you just can use it right away and modify it later on for your own needs.

Here is the installation process:

[To read the rest of the article, check out Axel’s blog.]

Last week, SubMate’s team went on a field trip…

We worked (and are still working) really hard for the last 3 months to bring a new version of SubMate’s iPhone app and website before October. This new version of SubMate is huge for us, and we hope that it will also be huge for you, our users.

So as we tried to be 100% all the time, at the end of August we felt like we needed a change of air. We decided to go on a field trip with all the team to escape Paris and spend some time in the countryside. And there we were leaving for Normandie for 4 days…

To put it simply: it was great!

A nice opportunity to be even more close to the team and to learn more about them (like the fact that Kevin is a great cook). The field trip wasn’t a vacation. It was more an opportunity to work almost harder than normally but in a way nicer environment.

Where we could take nice breaks:

We resisted to make some investments at the Casino:

Old time, good time. We really spent 4 amazing days and we promised ourselves to do that again ASAP (maybe in September?)!

We are lucky at SubMate to have a team passionated about the product and who get on extremely well with each other…

It was our little interlude before a busy September. We hope that you have all had a great summer and that you will stay tuned for the next episode of SubMate’s adventure.