Not long before I got into online poker I gave up, once and for all, the addictive habit known as playing World of Warcraft, made by the company Blizzard. I enjoyed this brief Tim Harford column on the real world economic impact of World of Warcraft on sweatshops in developing countries, and how updates in World of Warcraft might destroy many people’s real world income.
Dear Apple,
Please make the iTunes Store and the App Store respect my Mac OS X language settings. Yes, I reside in Germany and use a German credit card for online purchases. However my computer is set to English. That means I want my software to be in English, not in German. Every piece of software I use, be it Apple software or third party, is in English. Except the App Store and the iTunes Store.
Fly often? Have you discovered hipmunk yet?
I have a side interest in data visualisation. So I’m always keen to see innovative ways to present hard-to-visualise data. Hipmunk has done soooo many things right – and much better than the big companies in their field.
Let’s start with the hipmunk search form:
No need to manually select a “return” or “one-way” radio button or tab. Simply leave the return date empty for a one-way flight.
No need to click on a calendar pop-up icon – the calendar is always there, showing the current month and the next month – the two most likely months when you want to fly.
The defaults make sense – 1 person on coach on any airline is probably by far the most common search.
Click search and then hit the back button, and it actually works, bringing you back to the form the way you expect with web forms. Lots of similar sites manage to break the back button. Web users depend on the back button. Jakob Nielsen has long been telling us that “the Back button is the lifeline of the Web user and the second-most used navigation feature (after following hypertext links).”
Now the search results:
Wow! That’s what I thought when I first saw this. Finally, a way to quickly assess the options. The beige colour represents stop-overs. Each airline gets its own colour so I can see, for example, that for $541 I can fly with Egyptair to Dubia (DXB), wait for about two hours, then continue with Emirates.
I don’t handle mornings well. Nor do I like stop-overs. So can I see this data prioritising direct flights that leave in the afternoon? You betcha – all the browser side, with no server refresh:
And it is all so easy. Click on any flight to see the details:
There’s a principle in web application user-interface design: if the end result seems far too simple for the amount of work you have put into it, then you have succeeded. Simple user interfaces are hard. Complicated user interfaces are simple. Hipmunk succeeded.
Having trouble getting your username and license key into Poker Copilot? Here’s a video showing you exactly how it is done:
The latest update of Poker Copilot has some extra smarts in this area:
This is all about reducing the amount of support emails I receive.
I had some hours to kill in Cairo airport yesterday. Luckily I had my MacBook Pro with me so I got stuck into another of those little Poker Copilot enhancements that has been on my to-do list for a long time.
As ever, a screenshot says more than words:
This filter applies to all screens, but not to the HUD. It can be useful to see your recent performance. 10,000 hands is large enough to give useful trends but small enough to ensure all charts and summaries generate quickly.
I’ve added player icons to the Player Summary. A screenshot should explain this:
Many people write asking what the icons mean. So I’ve given the icons in the Player Summary tooltips with definitions of the icons.
If either the Table Size filter is set to “All Table Sizes” OR the Game Type filter is set to “All Game Types”, Poker Copilot uses the default rules to determine which player icons to use. If both the Table Size filter AND the Game Type filter are set, then the rules for that combination is used to generate the icons.
Hi everybody who has been helping translate Poker Copilot. There are 15 or 20 new strings that I’ve added to the translation spreadsheets in Google Docs. It’d be great if you could take a look and translate them.
Many thanks! Danke schön. Merci beaucoup. Muchas gracias. Shumë falemnderit.
PS: We still need more volunteers for several languages. In particular: Polish, Russian, Portuguese (Brasil), Portuguese (Portugal), and Spanish (Spain)
Poker Copilot 2.75 is now available to download.
What’s changed:
What’s fixed:
Update Instructions:
Now you are done and ready to hit the tables.
You’ve long had the choice in the Poker Copilot HUD whether stats should be either for the current session and table; or for all time. Many people have requested that for tournaments the stats can be for the current tournament. I’ve finally added this:
Now as you move between tables in a tournament and reencounter players who were on your table earlier in the tournament, you’ll see their total stats for the current tournament.
Not only will you be able to disable the Poker Copilot HUD in the next update, you’ll also be able to turn off just the hero HUD:
