First Tech Support Call
After 600 downloads of Poker Copilot, I received my first support request. Although I’ve made Poker Copilot as bullet-proof as I can, there’s going to be some cases where things just don’t work, and this was one of them. As I started asking the user some questions in an e-mail to-and-fro, I realised:
- this is a painful way to solve a problem, for me and especially for the user
- this is going to happen often as more people download and install Poker Copilot
So I took a break from the computer, put on my thinking hat to make this process easier, then promptly forgot all about it. Some time later, while having a shower, my subconscious self came up with a solution to reduce the pain: a console.
Now I’ve added a simple console to which a continual flow of helpful information is dumped. For example, the files being parsed, the number of games found in each file, any parsing problems encountered, unsupported game types found, and so on. This console is normally hidden from view. To show it I’ve added a new menu item: Window -> Console. When the user has a problem, I can now ask them to copy the contents of the console into an e-mail and send it to me.