PokerStars Update Breaks Poker Copilot: Fix is Ready

PokerStars updated their software today. If you want Poker Copilot to work with the new PokerStars update, you’ll need to update to Poker Copilot 2.29.

Update Instructions:

1. Download the latest version here: http://pokercopilot.com/downloads/pokercopilot2.29.dmg

2. Open the downloaded file.

3. Drag the Poker Copilot icon to the Applications icon. If prompted to replace an existing version, confirm that you do want to replace.

Now you’re done and ready to hit the tables.

Note: This is a rushed release that I have to do to prevent an overwhelming deluge of support emails. I’ve run through my battery of test cases, I’ve imported 1 million hands, and tested on Leopard and Snow Leopard. However there may be some problems. If so, I’ll deal with them immediately.

Technical details:

PokerStars hand history files use UTF-8 encoding. Until today they had no UTF-8 Byte order mark (BOM). Now they do.

Java has a known bug where it can’t read UTF-8 text files if they have a BOM. Sun knows about this. They decided not to fix it so as not to break existing Java-based software that relies on this bug.

Fortunately someone made UnicodeReader, a work-around class that I can use as a drop-in replacement for the offending Java class.