Here’s how adding tournament results to Winamax went:
Me: “Hey Winamax, could you add auto-saving of tournament results?”
Winamax: “Sure, Steve, any ideas on what they should include?”
Me: “Yes!” [pours forth copious info]
Winamax: “Hey Steve we did that tournament results thing.” [And it was almost exactly how I requested it.]
Me: “Hey Winamax, there’s some problems with the new tournament results. Here’s a list.”
Winamax: “Hey Steve, we’ve fixed those problems you listed.”
Why do I include this dialog? To demonstrate this: online poker rooms developers, listen up. If you want feedback, suggestions, info, on how you can make your Mac OS X software great, I’m willing to enthusiastically contribute. If it helps to make Poker Copilot better, I’ll give you all the feedback you need to make your software easy to integrate with Mac OS X poker tracking software like Poker Copilot.
So Winamax players, no longer will you need to manually enter your tournament buy-ins, placings, and winnings.
These screenshots show you that some Winamax player out there was handed an easy tournament win! I often play online poker to test specific Poker Copilot issues and not to win, leading to some erratic playing behaviour.
There’s a new kid on the block of Mac OS X poker rooms. The Merge Network has released a native Mac OS X client. It seems to be a small network so far, with less than 3,000 players currently online at the time of writing. As a comparison, PokerStars, the biggest online poker room, has just over 100,000 players currently inline.
I tried to sign up to Carbon Poker, which uses Merge Network’s software. I tried to test it out but I got nowhere. I got stuck in an infinite sign-up loop with no feedback on why my sign-up process failed.
I’ll wait a week or two and try signing up again. With such a small number of players, it is not worthwhile for me to spend much time working with a broken site, when there are many things I can do to improve Poker Copilot for current customers.
Interestingly, Merge Network uses XML in its hand history files, whereas all poker rooms currently supported by Poker Copilot use a plain text format. Normally I work with XML with distaste but in this case it seems it will make parsing the hand history files somewhat easier.
The next update of Poker Copilot will have a new filter in the “More” drop-down menu: the ability to filter by hands where a specific player was at the table:
So, for example, I can filter for all hands where player XYZ was sitting in at the table. It doesn’t matter if XYZ folded pre-flop, took down the hand, or anything in between. As long as the player is at the table for the hand, the hand will be included in the filter.
This filter is for ring games only for now. If feasible I may add it for tournaments later.
If the player filter is used, screen updates will take much longer than usual. That’s because what Poker Copilot does to make this feature available is quite complex.
You’ll need to be a computer programmer to appreciate this. IntelliJ IDEA 10, the best dang programmer’s editor there ever was, has witty “Drag to install” artwork:
A great product largely because they understand the importance of the getting the small things right.
Some users – perhaps all using Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) – have reported unusual rendering problems in Poker Copilot. Here’s a couple of example screenshots:
I believe I’ve located the problem and hope to have an update with a fix available tomorrow.
I didn’t want to release already because there are a couple of rendering issues some people have been having with 2.70 that I haven’t tracked down yet. And the player icons are sill not ready for prime-time. But Full Tilt Poker has forced me into action. Expect another update in the next few days.
What’s Changed:
Fix for changed Full Tilt Poker hand history format
Player Icons, in experimental form. By default this is turned off, (unless you have already tried the unofficial 2.70 release). You can turn it on in the Head-up Display Preferences.
The tournament “Buy-in” filter now splits into multiple menus if you have played in more than 20 different buy-ins. This resolves a long-standing issue where you couldn’t select some buy-ins if you had too many in the list.
PokerStars Cap Limit tables are supported
Fix for long-running tournaments where players are betting tens of millions of chips at a time.
The latest update of Full Tilt Poker has changed the way dates and times are stored in the hand history files. They now show the user’s time and timezone, rather than Full Tilt’s servers’ time and timezone.
This should be a straight-forward fix. I’m working on a fix and hope to release it later today.
