Link of the Day

Selling software online? Andy Brice created an invaluable list: 100 ways to increase your software sales in 2009. This will be my checklist for the next few months, I suspect.

Poker Copilot, the HUD, and PowerPC users

A few people have reported having problems with Poker Copilot and the new HUD. Problems include sluggishness, and eventually, crashing.

As far as I can tell, the common factor is that all people having these problems are running older Macs, usually PowerPC machines. Unfortunately I don't have a PowerPC machine myself, making it a little tricky for me to work out what's going wrong.

But don't fret. Fixing this is a priority for me. I've got some ideas I hope to implement and test in the next few days.

Finally: Poker Copilot with new HUD released

For all who have been dying to have a "real" head-up display for Mac OS X on the poker tables, here's good news. I've just released Poker Copilot 1.46, which is the first Mac poker software to give you an on-table HUD.

You can download it directly from http://pokercopilot.com/

There's some other improvements too:

• PokerStars tournament results support is much better.
• The "Recent Hands" screen now shows _all_ hands you have ever played (and just may be the first step of a yet-to-come feature...)
• Full Tilt matrix support
  
• Lots of bug fixes

Happy HUDding!

Sentence of the Day

How to succeed as a tiny software company:

Persistence, polish, listen to customers, polish, tweak continually, polish, patience and never give up, and polish.

Gaming for Grandmothers

My nieces got a Wii for Christmas. When I made my Christmas telephone call, my mother - their grandmother - told me about it excitedly. She says she loves playing it. I have never seen or heard of my mother playing computer games before. It seems the Wii has opened gaming to a whole new (or old?) generation.

New HUD Preview (version 1.45)

I keep tightening up the new HUD based on feedback, testing, and observation. Here's the latest preview version (1.45).

This introduces Full Tilt matrix support, some improvements to PokerStars tournament results importing, some small performance and stability enhancements, and a database statistics window.

Best of all, though, is an indicator of how reliable HUD stats for a player are. When you play against player X for the first time, the HUD shows stats in a pale gray. As player X plays more, the stats gradually brighten until you've reached 25 hands. Then the stats switch from gray/white to yellow. I tried this out in a tournament last night and found it effective.

The Long Tail

I had an idea in May 2008...for poker tracking software...for the Mac. Users must have a Mac, play online poker, want software to analyse their game, AND be prepared to pay US$49.95. Oh, and finally, they should like my solution.

As a business plan, it sounds somewhat crazy. I, for one, did not think it likely that there would be enough people in that niche. But I tried anyway. Somehow it worked. It's Chris Anderson's famous Long Tail in action.

Starting a software business is remarkably easy today, courtesy of the Internet, a payment processor like FastSpring, affordable and reliable hosting, and high penetration of broadband Internet. You can get an idea for a software product and a few weeks later launch the first version. The initial outlay required is so low, you don't even need to max out your credit card.

If you have an idea for a software product, no matter how half-baked or far-fetched it seems, I recommend getting a basic feature-lite version on the web, for download and purchase as soon as possible. People will soon let you know if the concept is of some value. They'll also let you know what features you should move to the top of your to-do list.

There are so many people online, using computers, who might have what you want. Only a sliver of a tiny percentage need to want and buy your software to make it viable.

Playing Tournaments by Not Playing

I just conducted an experiment. I played in a 45-player tournament on Full Tilt Poker. Buy-in was $1 (+ 25c for the house). The prize pool was split amongst the final six players. I came seventh.

So what, you ask? I sat out in the first hand, ate some dinner, and read for a while. I did not play a single hand. Which means I had to cough up the blinds when it was my turn, and that was all. And I only just missed the cut to win money. There were many players trying hard to win, and I beat all but six of them by doing absolutely nothing.

It seems to me that in the lowest stakes tournaments, being ultra-tight is a winning strategy. Play the strongest hands well when you have position, and fold on everything else. Don't take risks. Exercise patience, patience, patience.

Learning Italian

I used to be able to speak Italian. Clumsily, and with a strong Australian accent, but well enough to have conversations. Sadly, I've forgotten most of it, mostly pushed out of my head by the German I've had to learn to live in Germany. I've decided to learn Italian again to conversational level. But I need your help.

Here's my goal: by the end of January I'll have completed the first 30 lessons of Pimsleur's Italian course. By the end of January I'll have had a five minute Italian conversation with a native speaker - either my colleague Giovanni, or the friendly staff at the local Italian restaurant.

If I don't reach this goal, I'll donate 500 euros to charity.

How can you help? Please hold me accountable. Demand to know at the end of January whether I've met these goals. If I haven't, demand that I make a donation and publish the receipt on the web.

This could be an expensive goal...

Link Bait Failure turns to Google Success

I created my Poker Software on Mac OS X blog entry to answer forum questions about Mac OS X poker software. The idea was to post a link to the page when appropriate. I thought that other people might pick it up and link to it. The SEO people call this "link bait": a web page offering useful and unique information, to which many people link.

Although the page hasn't succeeded yet as link bait, there's been a nice side effect. That blog entry has been getting more traffic from Google searches than any other page on my blog. Over the last month, 74 unique search terms have guided people to the blog entry. The search terms include "os x poker software", "poker hand analysis mac", and "full tilt poker statistics software mac os".

More HUD news

Thanks for the feedback on the new, new head-up display. I'm slowly working my way through the info I received.

In other breaking news...I added two small features to the HUD:

• the HUD windows now resize proportionally to the table window. Make the poker room table smaller and the HUD text shrinks. Make the window bigger and you get nice, large, smooth text. Thanks to Juan from Chile Colombia for the suggestion. Chevere!
• the players stats shown in the HUD are not meaningful until you've played against someone at least 25 times or so. Now HUD stats for a player indicate through colour how often you've played against a person. A dark, barely-visible gray means you've only played against this person once. As you play more, the colour gradually brightens towards white. When you hit that magic 25-hand mark, the colour chages to bright yellow.

This features will be available in the next release.

HUD Feedback Please!

Some people have reported that the new HUD doesn't work. If this is your experience could you please send an email to support@pokercopilot.com, with more information about what doesn't work?

For example, does the "Show HUD" button show something? Do you see the "No HUD Data yet" info? Does the HUD Info window show up, with information about the table you are playing?

Many thanks,

Steve

New HUD for PokerStars and Tiger

Here's the latest preview version of Poker Copilot: The One with the New HUD.

This version adds:
* support for PokerStars (but only with the "PokerStars Classic" table theme)
* support for Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4)
* more HUD stability, faster HUD updating, and better HUD info
* slightly improved positioning of HUD player stats

Update: PokerStars "Hyper-simple theme" is also supported, as well as a couple of others. But if you are having problems with layout, I recommend switching to Classic.

Does Yahoo Still Matter?

I use Google Analytics to log visits to Poker Copilot. Amongst the many statistics it offers is "Visits via Search Engines":


Poker Copilot ranks pretty much the same in both Google's and Yahoo's search results. But Google supplies me with 47 times more visitors than Yahoo.

I thought Yahoo would still have, I don't know, let's say 10% of the search market. But the actual number, according to my stats, is miniscule. The other way to look at it is that Google now completely, utterly dominates search, at least based on my small sample space.

Support via Remote Desktop

Occasionally a Poker Copilot customer has a problem, which, despite my best efforts, just can't be solved via e-mail. It's frustrating for me when this happens, but even more frustrating for the customer.

Luckily there's plenty of remote desktop options for this desperate situation. Remote desktop software allows me to see and control a customer's computer via the Internet - with their permission of course.

I've assessed several remote desktop products and settled on Copilot. It's remarkably simple to set-up and use, both for me and the person I'm trying to help. It seems solid. The pay-as-you-go pricing is also perfect for my situation.

And the similarity in name with Poker Copilot? That's a serendipitous bonus.

Poker Copilot Review

There's a new review of Poker Copilot at MacPoker.com.

New HUD Feature

If you are one of the enthusiastic people who have bravely tried out the new Poker Copilot HUD, read on.

Did you notice the feature that I snuck into the HUD Preferences? You can now turn labels off and on.

Sentence of the Day

From the always-readable Jeff Atwood:

In short, swoopo is about as close to pure, distilled evil in a business plan as I've ever seen.

Early Access to new HUD: Take 2

If you are still feeling adventurous, you can download a new cut of the Poker Copilot early access version. Here's what's new:

• The new HUD is more stable now. You shouldn't experience strange and stubborn HUD windows.
• Full support for all Full Tilt table styles (Classic and Racetrack).
• Ability to switch between "New HUD" and "Classic HUD". If you're really clever, you can even have both running at one!

Your feedback is more than appreciated.

HUD Limitations

If you've tried the experimental new Poker Copilot HUD that I made available yesterday, you would have noticed that the HUD only shows on one window at a time. You have to click on a Full Tilt table window to move the HUD to that window.

Naturally it would be better if the HUD showed on all visible windows. And this is my aim. But to make a complex task achievable I've broken it into bite-sized pieces. For now, the morsel I'm working on is what I call "single-window mode".

Early access to new HUD for Full Tilt players

Feelin' dangerous? Wanna try out the new Poker Copilot HUD? You can download and run an early preview version now.

This is a not a full-featured version. It only works with Full Tilt Poker, and is only suitable for the classic table theme. Also, at the moment it only works with Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). Sorry Tiger users, I'm still chasing down some Tiger issues.

I'll be adding PokerStars support soon.

A table-tracking bug has held me back for the last week or so. I think I've finally nailed it though. I'll gratefully receive any feedback of problems you discover via email to support@pokercopilot.com.

Customising the Poker Copilot HUD

The first release of the HUD will allow some simple customisation. You can choose up to 6 statistics to be on-screen at once. This video demonstrates how:



I eventually aim to have more customisations. For example, colour coding the stats (red/yellow/blue to indicate different ranges).

The video quality is cruddy. I'm new to this online video uploading thing that all the cool kids are doing. There's a better quality video here. Tips for online video demos gratefully received.

Another PokerStars Update. Oh no.

So I start PokerStars this morning, and it informs me it has an update to install. Please, please, please don't have more changes in the hand history format, prays Steve to himself. If there are changes it will steal another day from my work on the HUD.

Update: I played a couple of hands on PokerStars and had no problem.

On Luck and Success

This article is my reaction to a post in an online forum. It is based on my strong belief that luck has more to do with success than most of us acknowledge.

"In my experience it doesn't take much at all to succeed in this world," wrote someone in a forum.

His experience is probably limited to rich parts of this world. Most people "in this world" draw the short straw and are born into poor, corrupt, over-populated countries.

There are several countries where 25% of people die before they turn five, usually due to malaria. Are they to blame for not working harder for success? Can one say this: "those good-for-nothing 4-year-olds in Mali - they expect life to be handed them on a platter. It's their own fault for dying." Of course not.

Most of you reading this are super lucky, born into rich countries with low levels of corruption and (relatively) high education, health, and literacy, where personal liberty and economic freedom taken for granted. We are not representative of the world population.

I'm slightly impressed with people in rich, developed, uncorrupt countries who succeed. I am incredibly impressed with people in countries such as India who succeed. I've been to India. Corruption and poverty are normal. To succeed from there into the wider world is astonishing.

I was born white, male, in good health, in the late 20th century, in a rich country, where English is the mother tongue. While growing up I received free health care and free education, at levels ranked amongst the world's highest. I have the economic and personal freedom to travel to most parts of the world. All of this happened through no action of my own. Percentage-wise I am one of the luckiest people who ever lived.

Poker Copilot Update Available

If you've been having problems adding PokerStars tournament summaries to Poker Copilot, then this message is for you.

I've released Poker Copilot version 1.39. You can download it now. It fixes problems with PokerStars tournament results not being processed.

Now that's resolved I can get back to finishing the new HUD.

PokerStars Tournament Summary Problems

PokerStars have suddenly changed their date formats again. This means that your PokerStars tournament results can't be read.

I woke up this morning to find my inbox overflowing with people telling me about problems importing PokerStars tournament summaries. I put it down it coincidence at first, but now that I've got my hands on someone's most recent summary, I've quickly found the problem.

I'll try to roll out a patch with 24 hours. Stay tuned.

HUD Sneak Preview

I've been working industriously on a new heads-up display (HUD), one that will show statistics next to each player on your poker table. It's about time I proved that this is more than vapourware. Here's a look at what you can expect in the first cut:


To anticipate some questions:

• when you move and resize the table window the HUD repositions itself nicely.
• you can customise the HUD somewhat. You can choose up to 6 statistics out of 10 to show.
• as shown in the screenshot, you can view full information for any player in a pop-up window by clicking on their stats.
  

If I get the last outstanding issues resolved and my tests on Tiger (OS X 10.4) go smoothly, you can expect a beta release in a few days time. Note that the first beta release will only show the HUD on Full Tilt Poker.

Instead of "rewriting from scratch..."

Continuing on from Nobody cares that you "rewrote from scratch"...

There's a common belief amongst programmers that when confronted with a revolting, despicably complicated codebase with severe quality issues, the best you can do is throw it away and start again. That might have been true once (although I suspect not), but it's certainly not true today.

First, one has to ask, why is the codebase so bad? Almost always, the answer is due to shoddy processess - lack of testing, no culture of quality, a prevalent cowboy attitude within the coding team (or person). No number of rewrites will make these process problems go away. Software quality is a mostly solved problem today, at least on the small and medium-sized projects I have experience with. We know the solution, although too often it is not applied.

Second, today's great refactoring tools make it easy to turn bad code into good code. This is especially true in the Java world, where our IDEs runneth over with refactoring goodness. A codebase might seem to have tremendous quality problems, but normally most of the problems lie in a few concentrated areas. Once the biggest problems are identified they can be rectified.

A good refactoring process might go like this:
1. Break up that large, confusing method that keeps crashing into a number of smaller methods, which can be tested individually.
2. Write unit tests for those new smaller methods.
3. Add precondition checks for the methods. For example, check for null inputs or out-of-range values
4. Repeat from step 1 until the problem spot has become clear and simple
5. Repeat entire process with another problem spot

Once you've improved these trouble spots, you can claim what Microsoft claims with each new release of Windows: That the latest release is a "new, improved update, more stable than ever"