New Poker Copilot User Interface

When adding new screens to Poker Copilot, I found the "Tab per screen" approach was becoming cumbersome. Poker Copilot was heading towards a dread category of software: "software with a user interface that looks like it was designed by a techie". This is definitely a category I do not want Poker Copilot in.

Therefore I shut down my Java IDE, read some articles on software user interface design, and reflected on what to do. I chose to adopt the user interface used by Mac OS X's Finder, iTunes, and Apple's Mail. This allows me to add many more screens. These screens can be grouped and selectively revealed while leaving plenty of screen real estate for showing graphs and tables. This is the result:


The next update of Poker Copilot will have this new user interface.

ScreenFlow: Great tool for making software demo movies

I discovered ScreenFlow recently, a Mac OS X program for making "screencasts". I experimented making "how to use Poker Copilot" video. It was unbelievable easy to use with quality results. It can record my screen and iSight video simultaneously. Maybe I'll add a demo video to the Poker Copilot website soon.

Should I replace "% Raised" with "% Raised preflop"?

Somebody requested replacing Poker Copilot's "% raised" stat with "% raised preflop". If you have a strong opinion on this one way or the other, please let me know here.

Out of Control Inflation at Yahoo?

Has Yahoo moved their offices to Zimbabwe? I discovered a charge on my credit card from Yahoo for $43.95. A quick investigation revealed that Yahoo's annual charge for domain name renewal has more than tripled in a year.

Note to self: move all domain hosting post-haste from Yahoo to a registrar without exorbitant renewal fees.

Small HUD Improvement

Several people asked me to add the number of hands played to the HUD. Although I am not working on any HUD improvements for the next release, I did find time to add this minor tweak. Here's the HUD with number of hands played in brackets after each player name:

Supporting Users While I Sleep

Three facts:

1. Most users of Poker Copilot are in North America.
   
2. People usually play online poker in the evening.
   
3. I live in Europe.

Due to these three facts, I'm usually sleeping when people use Poker Copilot. Therefore I read most user support emails when I start up my computer in the morning. There's usually a couple per day.

Last night (European time) I added a link to the Poker Copilot Get Satisfaction site on the Poker Copilot support web page. This morning I found that instead of posting me emails, people had posted directly on Get Satisfaction - just as I had hoped.

So what's so blog-worthy about this? Someone had already answered one of the posted questions while I was still sleeping. Users helping users - while I sleep. Sweet.

(Many thanks to "trixilw", the Get Satisfaction user who correctly and succinctly posted the answer.)

I get a kick from the idea that out of nothing there now exists a Poker Copilot "user community". A community of users who discuss Poker Copilot on poker forums, who request new features, and who blog about it. All for a product that didn't exist a few months ago. I even discovered a nice referral for Poker Copilot on a German discussion forum last weekend. Sweet - again.

FTP on the Mac

I got my first Mac about a year ago. I ordered at a time when supplies in Germany were limited and so I had to wait three long, long weeks. Finally it arrived the day before I was due to fly to Israel. I had been planning the Israel trip for a long time, and I had already delayed it a year earlier due to the 2006 Lebanon War. Even so, I was sorely tempted to cancel the trip at the last moment and play with my new toy.

I'm still learning about the Mac, OS X, and the everyday apps you need. FTP is one area where I was clumsily and suboptimally getting by in this new environment. For a while I endured command line FTP. Eventually I tried a couple of GUI apps. I've finally settled on Transmit, a simple, elegant, and complete FTP app from Panic, a company with an awesome tagline: "Shockingly Good Mac Software". Transmit is a great example of what I've come to expect from Mac software: it simply works.

Dow Jones vs World Travelling

A brief comment on another form of gambling: the stock market.

Conventional wisdom says that in the long run you always get a decent return on the stock market, right? in the long run? What does that mean specifically? Eight years or so, that, for me, is a long time.

So let's see...the Dow Jones index on - let's pick a date for this contrived example - oh, I don't know, how about January 14th, 2000 - was 11,722.

And the Dow Jones today is 11,388. That's a total return over almost nine years of -2.8%. Take inflation into account, and we talking about a serious way to lose money. If you had $10,000 to invest back on Jan 14th, 2000, you'd have been wiser blowing it all on an extended round-the-world trip. Which is, coincidentally, what I did.

Up and Running with Get Satisfaction

I've been contemplating using Get Satisfaction for Poker Copilot support, ideas, and problems. I'm finally done it.

Please slide, slither, or shuffle over to Poker Copilot's Get Satisfaction area and let me know what you want to see in future versions of Poker Copilot.

Best Paragraph I Read Today

I couldn't agree more:

70% of good code is error checking and handling. When I started programming that way, my code got a lot better. Thinking about what can go wrong and then handling it right away has made a huge difference. It feels like doing all that checking is just getting in the way of getting the code up and running, but it shortens the time from start to finish by a factor of 2 to 4.

Poker Copilot Aggression FAQ

This is a draft that I will add to the yet-to-be-released Poker Copilot FAQ. Comments appreciated.

What does aggression mean?
Aggression is a measure of how passively or aggressively a person plays post-flop. The higher the number, the more aggressively the person plays.

How is aggression calculated?
Aggression = (bets+raises)/calls,
where

• "bets" is the number of hands in which the player bets post-flop
• "raises" is the number of hands in which the player raises post-flop
• "calls" is the number of hands in which the player calls post-flop
  

How do I interpret aggression?
It depends. A very tight pre-flop player usually has good hole cards so the aggression measure will be skewed upwards. A very loose pre-flop player's aggression will be skewed downwards.

A reasonably acceptable reading is as follows:
< 1.5 = passive
> 2.5 = aggressive

Why is aggression sometimes infinity?
This happens if a player in the post-flop streets always raises and never calls. You'll sometimes encounter this when you have only a few hands for a particular player.

Stake Level Table: Sneak Preview

The next release of Poker Copilot will have a useful summary of your stats at various stake levels. Here's an early look:

Hopefully this will let you know at what level you are a winning player.

Mac OS X Source Lists in Java

You know the left-hand panel in Finder? The same type of control you find in iTunes? Apple calls this a Source List. The good news for Mac Java programmers is that Ken "High Fidelity" Orr has produced a Source List component for Java.

Issue Tracking for One-Person Software Companies

Until today I've been using a spreadsheet to keep track of Poker Copilot bugs, features, and tasks. It's a cumbersome approach, so I started looking for a free-but-good web-based solution. It turns out that FogBugz has a free version for 1 or 2 users, hosted by them.

FogBugz is easily the second-best issue tracker I've ever user. It is clean, simple, and elegant. It's way, way, way better than any open source issue tracker I've seen, and even better than most "enterprise solutions" than have been forced upon me in my consulting gigs.

So now I have my free "startup" account, and I've manually transferred all outstanding Poker Copilot issues. (Hey, FogBugz team, if you read this, how about adding a flexible CSV import?) During the process I was surprised that FogBugz is smart as well as good-looking. It seemed to be learning which values I tended to select for each field and auto-select those values for me. Or was I just imagining this?

FAQ: "Why am I not seeing any hands in Poker Copilot"

This is a commonly asked question. Here's the answer.

PokerStars
Have you enabled hand histories in PokerStars? From the Options menu, choose "Instant Hand History Options..." and make sure "Save my hand histories" is checked.

Full Tilt Poker
Have you enabled hand histories in Full Tilt Poker? From the Option menu, choose "Hand History..." and make sure the check box "Save My Hand Histories" is checked.

I'll be making a FAQ soon for this and some other information.

Upcoming Poker Copilot Features

I'm planning an update of Poker Copilot for mid-October. The list of planned features is in flux, but this will give you a rough idea:

• "Position Summary". This shows your vital stats for each position around the table. Do you win substantially more often on the button than in position 1?
• "Stake Levels Summary". For each stakes level you can see your stats. Do you make a profit at $0.25/$0.50 but merely break even at $0.50/$1, and lose money at $1/$2? This is important info.
• Many more statistics on a new "Dashboard" screen. Aggression, 3-Bet, Cumulative winnings, Blind Stealing are some of the stats I'm looking into. The challenge is to keep it clear, precise, and understandable to all players, not just the experts.

Naturally, your current license will still be valid for the next version. So if you are considering buying Poker Copilot, there's no need to postpone your purchase.

Spotted the Tournament Bar Graph?

With last week's quick release of a Poker Copilot update, I allowed a new feature to sneak in. Well, it's not so much a new feature as a small addition to something already there. Take a look:


Did you spot it? It is subtle. The "Results" column is filled with a pale green bar according to how far you got in the tournament. It makes it easy to see how well you've done in tournaments.

Something I didn't expect when adding the coloured bar is that you can easily turn this table into a useful bar graph. You can do this by ordering the table by "Results".


I'm pleased to see that I've finished in the top 50% all but 3 times over the last month!

This feature only works for Full Tilt Poker. As far as I can tell, PokerStars doesn't supply enough information to calculate tournament results.

Java Swing meets Mac OS X: A Screenshot

A pure Java Swing GUI. A pure Mac OS X GUI.

New Update Ready for Download

You can download it here.

This is an important update for PokerStars players. It fixes a problem introduced by the new software that PokerStars released on September 1st.

The problem, if you want to know, was as simple as this: PokerStars used to write dates in the hand history like this:

2008/08/27 - 15:34:08 (ET)


Now they write dates like this:

2008/09/03 1:59:42 ET

Important News for Poker Copilot Users

It seems that as of September 1st, PokerStars has made some changes to the hand history files. Poker Copilot is having trouble with the changes.

A new update to Poker Copilot to solve this problem will be released in the new day or so. Fixing this problem is now my top priority.

Update: I've found and fixed the problem. I'm now packaging up the new update.

Update 2: Please read this.

High Fidelity Mac OS X Apps with Java

It's an open secret that I'm using Java to create Poker Copilot. Java is not a common choice of language for Mac desktop apps. Sometimes it is a struggle to get that Mac OS X look and feel correct to the last pixel.

Fortunately there is Ken Orr, a Mac Java programmer who is dedicated to producing high fidelity desktop apps. With the help of Ken's blog, I've been working on adding a unified toolbar and a source list to Poker Copilot.

End-of-month Report

Two months have passed since I released Poker Copilot. That's enough months for me to create some comparative charts.

Downloads:



An excellent improvement. I think the increase has come from me posting to poker forums.


Purchases:



No hard numbers for this graph. Just a rather meaningless unlabelled graph! I'm extremely happy that I've sold some licences already in my second month. Given my limited advertising, it makes it clear that there is indeed a market for Mac OS X poker tracking software.

Charts produced with the Google Chart API.