After two days and plenty of downloads, as well as some good feedback, I quietly moved Poker Copilot 2.12 into official release yesterday. It’s now the version that new users download. Poker Copilot users with “update notifications” enabled will be informed of this new update during the next week.
Here’s what’s new:
More filters: buy-in for tournaments and stake level for ring games
Faster retrieval of data
Database Console
Work-around for more PokerStars character encoding problems
Fixed the suit mix-up in the hand replayer
Auto-detection mode, where hand history folders are detected whenever you start Poker Copilot. This is disabled by default for existing users, enabled for new users
Work-around for Full Tilt language mix-up. (Full Tilt sometimes writes some non-English text into english tournament summaries)
Work-arounds for some Snow Leopard issues. To be precise, these are Java 6 issues, which Poker Copilot uses on Snow Leopard because Apple removed Java 5.
J, a would-be customer can’t run Poker Copilot. It crashes on start-up with an error message I haven’t encountered in Poker Copilot yet. I’m concerned. J reported this because he is keen to try Poker Copilot. There’s probably many others who had the same problem but gave up immediately.
I have no idea what is causing this problem. I ask J for a few minutes of remote access to his computer to look for clues. He generously obliges. Using Copilot (no relation to Poker Copilot), I connect across the Atlantic (the world is amazing) to his computer, check a few things, and find that on his computer Poker Copilot is loading the wrong copy of an essential file.
I investigate the erroneous lines of code on my own computer. It is a Java class loader problem, picking up an external file that has the same name as an internal Poker Copilot file. I never fully grokked the Java class loader. I post a question on Stack Overflow, with the misbehaving line of code.
Within 10 minutes, the solution to my problem is posted. The problem solver chides me lightly for using an anti-pattern.
I make the necessary changes to Poker Copilot. I create a new build. I send it to J.
An hour later J tells me it works.
I upload the fixed build to the Poker Copilot website, replacing the current unofficial latest build.
I break for coffee and reflect that a) even 10 years ago, all this could not have been accomplished in a day, and b) tools like Copilot and Stack Overflow and high-speed intercontinental internet make my job easy, and c) I’m lucky to have enthusiastic and helpful users and wonder if other indie software developers also have such users.
Coda: Later in the day, J switched from would-be customer to paying customer. We both gained. J got personal attention to solve the problem. I got a critical bug dealt with, which will almost certainly lead to an increase in sales.