Excellent collection of free icons

I've looked high and low for a collection of low-cost or free icons I could use with Poker Copilot. Typically you have to buy a set of 300 fonts or so, even if you only need one. The search left me empty-handed and frustrated. I had given up and was ready to commission some icons.

However a few days ago I stumbled upon Silk Icons, a set of 1000 icons, all suitable for use with Mac software. Elegant. Professional. Price: $0.00.

Massaging Spreadsheets

Sometimes I have to manually clean up and adjust spreadsheets. My monthly sales data from FastSpring, for example. It's a pain. Here's a product that makes the pain go away.

Website Redesign Coming

A few weeks ago I went to the "European Software Conference" in Berlin. More than once I introduced myself and got the response, "I think I've read your blog". Ah, the warm inner glow of name recognition and ephemeral fame.

I learnt many things, met many people, and drank a lot of fine German beer at the conference. I jotted down notes all through the conference, notes about improving my software, improving my marketing, improving my customer support, and improving my sales. Afterwards I summarised my notes into a "Post-Conference to-do list", which I keep on my Mac desktop, as a continual reminder to actually do the things within.

Amazingly, I've actually been working through the list, although sporadically. The next major item on my list to get the Poker Copilot website redesigned by a professional. I heard often that this is an important step to improving sales for small software companies. I've found the person I would like to do this, but as this will be the largest amount of money I've spent on a single part of Poker Copilot, I'm still a little hesitant. Nevertheless I've made the decision and I'll stick to it.

Versions: Top-notch Subversion client for Mac OS X

I love IntelliJ IDEA. It's almost the perfect IDE. But only almost. Its Subversion integration causes me no end of headaches. So I went searching for something better for accessing Subversion. And I found it. Versions is everything Mac OS X software should be and everything a Subversion client should be. Not free, but highly recommended. I finally feel like I have my Subversion source code repository under control.

Discovered Stack Overflow Yet?

Software developers, programmers, and Informatiker (as they say in Germany): have you caught on to Stack Overflow, the forum for coding questions that is actually helpful?

By cleverly taking into account the sociological aspects of a discussion forum, the Stack Overflow team have created an excellent site. I find that when I post a programming question there, I get a sensible, working solution in less than 30 minutes. I've asked Java, XML, and Objective-C questions and have always received just the right answer.

More info about the New Heads-up Display

A loyal reader asked if the new Poker Copilot HUD will support 6-max tables. Indeed it will. The HUD will work for:

• 6-max tables
• head-to-head tables
• 9-max (Full Tilt) and 10-max (Poker Stars)
• Tournaments and cash games

So far I've been solely testing against Full Tilt Poker. I intend to release support for Full Tilt and PokerStars together, although it is possible PokerStars support will come a little later.

I played two tournaments simultaneously a couple of days ago and had functioning HUDs on both tables. So I'm quite convinced the concept will work.

The New Heads-Up Display

Work is coming along nicely on the revamped Poker Copilot Heads-Up Display (HUD). I've got a prototype working with Full Tilt Poker 9-max tables. There are still a myriad of issues to resolve, but I'm conquering them one by one.

Poker Software on Mac OS X

It's asked over and again on poker forums: what are the Mac OS X options for poker software? Here are the choices that I'm aware of:

Poker Rooms for Mac OS X:

• Full Tilt Poker has full-featured Mac software. As well as their outstanding and innovative user interface you also get all the advanced options such as saving hand histories for later analysis and tracking. The downside: the minimum stake level for ring games is pretty high, especially for Hold'em Limit players. That's not so good if you have a small bankroll.
• PokerStars has native Mac software. It's good, although not quite as slick as Full Tilt. PokerStars is an excellent choice for micro-stakes, with plenty of tables as low as $0.02/$0.05.
• Party Poker can run within a browser, and therefore can be used on the Mac. On the Mac, however, it lacks some of the features I expect, such as table filters, table resizing, and saving hand histories.
• Absolute Poker also has a low-feature version that runs within a browser on the Mac.
  

Poker Tracking and Analysis Software for Mac OS X:

• Naturally I'll start with Poker Copilot for Mac OS X - it's my software, after all. Poker Copilot is the only poker hand history analysis software for Mac OS X that supports both Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars, as well as cash games and tournaments.
• There's also MacPoker Pro. Although this showed early promise, the developer seems to have abandoned it. Apparently it chokes and becomes unusable due to slowness once you've got 10,000 hands or so in your hand history.
• FlopZoom caters only for tournament players on Full Tilt Poker. At the time of writing there is no PokerStars support.
  

If you are really hankering for the options your Windows-using friends have, then you can use Parallels or VMWare to run Windows poker tracking software. I've successfully run Poker Tracker this way, although it was somewhat cumbersome. And let's face it: you didn't buy a tasty Mac expecting to have to use Windows.

My preferences are Full Tilt Poker for tournaments, PokerStars for micro-stakes ring games, and Poker Copilot for Mac OS X to track my play and analyse my poker statistics.

I didn't know classical music could be funny...

...but this is hilarious.

That's my diversion over. Back to programming Poker Copilot HUD: The Next Generation.

Finally, Better Tournament Support

If you are one of the people who have been requesting better tournament stats in Poker Copilot, here's early access to an update: http://pokercopilot.com/downloads/pokercopilot1.38.dmg

It's still not up to ring game level, but as an interim step I hope you like it.

Already this has revealed to me that I've been not performing too well in tournaments:

Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet?

Real time info at http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

Getting Comfortable with Being Open

I ran a consulting company some years back. There I was coy about rates, progress, plans, directions. I kept my musings and ideas to myself. With Poker Copilot it's been different. I was so excited at the outset that I started blogging on day one, and (so far) I never stopped. At first I was unsure whether it was wise being open about what I was doing.

Six months later, I'm now comfortable mentioning plans, problems, and processes. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that regular and open blogging is my "secret sauce". It shows potential customers that I'm a real, approachable person. It gives me the chance to hear what people like and don't like about Poker Copilot. And it's kinda fun.

Books Recommendations for Odds, Chance, Poker

If you play Poker, here are two books I highly recommend:

• Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
• Black Swan, also by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

On the face of it they both have nothing to do with Poker. I consider these books, however, as useful reading for any endeavour based on playing the odds long-term. Choosing a career, playing the markets - and Poker.

A Happy Poker Copilot Customer

I got some nice Poker Copilot feedback today:

Great program Steve! I had trial downloaded an earlier version, and held off buying. Version 1.0 was a lot more basic, and I was holding out for Poker Tracker. Read over on the PT site today though that PT native for Mac won't be available until sometime in 2009 "at the earliest" -- http://www.pokertracker.com/forums/v...025f1&start=20 -- Not promising.

After I read that I went back and looked at your site and noticed you'd already made some big improvements, so I bought it. Hope you keep up with it.

It's already a much improved product. And the HUD has improved 10 fold. I've never used any kind of HUD before so it'll be interesting to see what I get out of it. But just having the sortable hand histories and charting capabilities is fantastic. In 30 minutes I've found a couple painfully obvious leaks. Very happy with the new version and the purchase so far.

Please stay with it though, and keep improving/tweaking it. You own the Mac market right now. Grab it.

Thanks, Matthew!

PokerStars players: Please update Poker Copilot

PokerStars has switched on the change to the hand history files. This means that if you play PokerStars you should download the Poker Copilot 1.35 update.

Keeping the Website Running

Poker Copilot is a business that sells purely over the Internet. Therefore it is critical - nay, essential - even vital, that the Poker Copilot website is always running. But I can't be manually checking this. Well, like most of us one-person software firms, I do check my website often, almost as a compulsion. But is it up when I am sleeping? when I am away from the computer? when people want to download or buy Poker Copilot?

Fortunately I found moni.tor.us, a free service that monitors my website. They send me weekly summary reports, and notify me when the site is down. Which fortunately seems to be hardly ever the case. And for that, I should give my site hosting firm, ServerPronto, a mention too.

It's always comforting when I get my weekly moni.tor.us report showing somewhere between 99.5% and 100% uptime.

New Poker Copilot beta

Imagine if Poker Copilot...

• had a custom chart generator, where you could compare any two stats, by date or by hands played? and could save the custom charts?
• checked for updates automatically?
• remembered all your filter settings between sessions?
• had meaningful bankroll info for tournaments?
• could import PokerStars tournament summaries?
  

You could imagine, or you could simply download the newest beta, Poker Copilot 1.35. This is an interim release, to make sure a bunch of tweaks, bug fixes. and new features are fine, while I continue working on the Big New Feature.

Warning for PokerStars Players

PokerStars have just announced that as of about ... NOW ... they are changing their hand history format slightly. This will almost certainly stop Poker Copilot being able to include new hands.

Naturally, I'll be rolling out an update as soon as I can, hopefully by the end of the weekend.

Update: Contrary to what PokerStars announced, the hand history doesn't seem to have changed at all. I worried for nought. So there is no imminent andimportant Poker Copilot update after all.

Create Your Own Big Shiny Download Button

A week or so ago I posted about Big Shiny Download buttons. The post was popular - ridiculously so, picked up by a popular aggregation site and linked to from several other blogs. It got 50 times more hits than any other of my blog entries. Sometimes this Internet thingy still surprises me.

Here's the online tool I used to create the big shiny download button.

Got something positive to say about Poker Copilot?

I'm creating a testimonials section on our website to help prospective customers decide to try Poker Copilot. Would you like to help me build it? Then please e-mail me and tell me what you most like about Poker Copilot in a sentence or two.

Thanks!

PokerStars officially permits Poker Copilot usage

Yesterday PokerStars updated their lists of prohibited software and explicitly permitted software. I am happy to announce that Poker Copilot made it on the good list. Poker Copilot is approved by PokerStars.

Seeking Help from PokerStars Tournament Players

I've been working on improving PokerStars tournament support. It's a bit tricky as PokerStars doesn't write the tournament results to disk. Instead you have to request the results to be sent to you via e-mail.

I've tried to make it easy to import those e-mails. If you play tournaments on PokerStars, would you like to test it out and tell me if you encounter problems?

Instructions:

Step 1: Download this Poker Copilot update (caution: this is a development version and could be somewhat unstable).
Step 2: Go to the "Tournaments" summary. Hopefully I've made it clear and simple enough to proceed from there without further instructions.

If all works as expected, you should see full results in the "Tournaments" summary's "Result" column.

Many thanks!