I’ve had a few sales in Japan, but today I had my first sale to someone who entered their name and address in a Japanese script. I’m somewhat surprised that this was possible. It seems my third-party payment processor, FastSpring, can handle this and my automated license key generator can handle this. This was especially surprising as my first Cyrillic sale required me to do some recoding.
It makes me even more satisfied that I outsourced payment processing to FastSpring from day one. If I had coded a payment processor module myself, it would require way too much work in design, development, testing, and maintenance to make it handle various scripts. I’m also happy with FastSpring’s fraud detection. E-commerce fraud is a major headache for anyone who primarily sells their wares or services online. With FastSpring It is very rare that I have a fraudulent sale. In the last 2 years or so that I’ve been selling Poker Copilot, only four fraudulent sales have got ”past the keeper”.
Loyal Poker Copilot customer Moritz pointed out that I broke my own “not too much choice” rule with the colour chooser in the Poker Copilot HUD preferences screen:
That’s the default colour chooser offered by Java and it is pretty nasty.
The next update will have a much better colour chooser that takes into account what you are using the colours for – the Poker Copilot HUD. Each colour is hand-picked for strong brightness and variety:
Over on the Poker Copilot Translation Project page, you can download a special build of Poker Copilot that includes the coming improvements, such as M-Ratio, recently seen opponent cards in the HUD popup panel, taking into account Winamax preferred seat, and – most importantly – the new language packs.
The trial build includes a full German translation, Dutch translation, and Italian translation. These are all ready for review. French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hungarian are all partly done and coming along well. Many thanks again to all who are helping with this.
I gave the German translation (Thanks Christian!) a test drive this morning and discovered that I overlooked some parts of Poker Copilot when setting it up for translation. So at the moment, even with the full translations, there are few places where English rears its ugly head. Somebody told me that this was going to be an iterative process – and he was right!
You can set a preferred seat in Winamax. The options are top, right, bottom, or left. Currently if you set one of these, Poker Copilot will put the HUD panels on incorrect players. The next update fixes this.
And now the unfortunate complication: I haven’t found a way for Poker Copilot to automatically determine your preferred seat from the Winamax settings. The Winamax settings seem to be in a binary format, whereas the other Mac poker rooms use easy-to-read text format. So you’ll need to manually tell Poker Copilot what your Winamax preferred seat is. You can do this in the Poker Copilot preferences.
Using the built-in search for poker forums can be a frustrating experience. So I’ve created a custom Google search engine for poker forums. It shows results from ten of the top poker forums.
It’s long been a popular request for Poker Copilot: Adding the M-ratio to the HUD. It’s a statistic that is particularly useful when a tournament approaches the bubble.
Here’s a screenshot showing it in action:
It’s an odd example of M because this hand was in a cash game. But you get the point I hope.
From Wikipedia on the topic of M-ratio:
In no-limit or pot-limit poker, a player’s M-ratio (also called “M number”, “M factor”[1] or just “M”) is a measure of the health of his chip stack as a function of the cost to play each round. In simple terms, a player can sit passively in the game, making only compulsory bets, for M laps of the dealer button before running out of chips. A high M means the player can afford to wait a number of rounds before making a move. The concept applies primarily in tournament poker; in a cash game, a player can in principle manipulate his M at will, simply by purchasing more chips.
A player with a low M must act soon or be weakened by the inability to force other players to fold with aggressive raises.
It’s amazing how quickly people have joined in the effort to translate Poker Copilot. Here’s a few screenshots to show you what has been achieved already.
French:
German:
Italian:
Dutch:
Spanish:
On the Poker Copilot Translation Project page, you can download a special development build of Poker Copilot which contains all the up-to-date translations.
Last week I announced that Poker Copilot is going multi-lingual. The response was enthusiastic and several people volunteered to help with the translation.
I spent a few days seeking advice and trying different ways to manage the translation project. The best approach I found was to use Google Docs. It is easy to use, it is free, it is online, it has advanced sharing options, it has auto-versioning, and all you need to participate is a free Google account. I can also auto-fetch the translation efforts with a few lines of code.
Translating to a specific language is a significant effort. Therefore we need as many volunteers as possible. So don’t be shy!
Jon at MacPokerTools has put together some interesting table modifications (mods) for Full Tilt Poker on Mac OS X. He also wrote a comprehensive guide to installing them or creating your own mods.
You’d have to be a programmer to want to read this post.
People sometimes are surprised to find that I spend money on IntelliJ IDEA, a commercial Java IDE. Why not use good free alternatives like Eclipse or NetBeans?
It’s the smooth edges of IntelliJ that keeps me purchasing an upgrade each year. It seems almost every feature is well-designed and makes my programming easier, better, and faster.
Here’s yet another example I found this week: To localise Poker Copilot in different languages I first need to internationalise it. That mostly means, stripping out all strings into a resource bundle. This could be an arduous task, with plenty of potential for screw-ups. But not with IntelliJ IDEA. Watch in this video how it guesses exactly what I want to do when I move the cursor to a string and press the hotkey I’ve defined for the “Internationalise” refactoring.
It auto-locates the resource bundle, auto-suggests a resource bundle key, moves the string into all language versions of the file, and inserts the relevant code to find the string.
(Note: this video is blurry at small resolution: view directly on YouTube in full-screen HD mode for best results)
