I spent the easter weekend improving Poker Copilot’s app-updating. I wrote of this first here. As I developed the approach, technical issues steered me towards a two-part solution.
Part 1 is a notification within Poker Copilot of the update. This gives you a 1-click “get out of my way” or “update now” option:
Click “Update Now” and a separate application, the “Poker Copilot Updater” opens, Poker Copilot closes, and the updating happens:
At the end, the Updater closes itself, and relaunches Poker Copilot. This should help you keep Poker Copilot up-to-date on your computer. It will also reduce some of the support emails I get which say “I thought I updated but I still have the older version”. These occur due to the confusing update process up till now.
The new updater will be in the next Poker Copilot update. However, you’ll only see it in action on the subsequent update.
Wow. Yesterday, Carbon Poker announced their own HUD built into their poker client. That will certainly level the playing field somewhat. And give Carbon players an edge over other players on the Merge Network.
I spent some time today working on a better workflow for updating Poker Copilot from your computer. Currently it is a manual process and confusing for some people.
My semi-working experiment looks like this:
Click on “Update Now” and a progress bar appears at the bottom of the window and downloading starts:
Many Mac apps use a nice auto-update mechanism called “Sparkle“. For technical reasons Sparkle isn’t suitable for Poker Copilot. I wish it was; it would make this much easier.
I’m not sure yet if I’m be able to be make the whole process of downloading and updating happen with a single click; especially with the ongoing changes Apple is regarding applications and security. For example, the next update of OS X, called Mountain Lion, introduces something called Gatekeeper, which will limit which apps can be installed and possibly what they can do.
I stumbled upon an alternative approach to handling Mac OS X updates by Lennart Ziburksi. Check his blog post a lucid explanation of a well-thought-out process.
I think it is novel and worth considering too. It is less intrusive, not demanding your attention on startup. I wonder if it is too discreet, causing people to ignore the update. This would be bad for Poker Copilot customers, because you really need to keep using recent updates due to the ever-changing poker rooms. My support workload would then rise.
Apple has also introduced a clean, clear, and simple update mechanism in the OS X App Store:
I like the fully automated approach. If I could have Poker Copilot in the App Store (which I can’t), then I would get this update mechanism for free.
A strange Poker Copilot bug report arrived yesterday: for one user the cents part of bets, table stakes, and statistics were not being shown. A $0.05/$0.10 table was shown as $0/$0.
Fortunately the person who reported the bug discovered the source: if your Mac was set to run in Japanese, then this happened. The reason is that the Japanese Yen doesn’t get divided into hundredths, cents, centavos, kopecks, pennies, or fens. Therefore when you get the system currency formatter it doesn’t want to show that part of the currency.
I had mistakenly assumed that all currencies are split into hundredths. This may seem an obscure localisation problem to some, but must be faced by many companies large and small.
The next update will “fix” this: I’m now forcing the currency formatter to use two decimal places. Ideally though, I need a library that will allow me to format currency X as per the custom in locale Y.
0 decimal places: many, including Iraqi dinar, Icelandic króna, Japanese yen, South Korean won
0.7 decimal places: Malagasy ariary, Mauritanian ouguiya. Yes, 0.7. These two countries divide their unit of currency into five subunits, so Wikipedia wonks decided to get all mathematical and describe this as 10 ^ 0.7 which is approximately 5.
Thank goodness I don’t have to handle the UK’s pre-decimal pounds/shillings/pence.
Yesterday I accidentally flicked a switch on our eCommerce store that caused Poked Copilot to be free. If you tried to buy Poker Copilot from on online store yesterday you received a 100% discount.
Giving all customers a 100% discount is not a good business practice. Fortunately only a couple of people “bought” Poker Copilot before I realised what was happening.
You can now download an early access update of Poker Copilot with a working Zoom Poker HUD. Download now.
This is under development still, so expect possible problems. It works on one table at a time, on No Limit Hold’em, with real money.
How to use the Zoom Poker HUD:
1. From Poker Copilot’s menu, select “Head-up Display” -> “Zoom Poker HUD (Experimental)”
2. (Optional) If you want your already-played Zoom hands to be included in the HUD statistics, select “Tools” -> “Recalculate Statistics” and wait for it to finish.
3. Open PokerStars, and sit down at a Zoom Poker table.
4. Maximise the Zoom Poker table. If your monitor doesn’t have at least 1600 x 900 resolution, you won’t be able to make the window big enough. Sorry. I do intend to make Zoom Poker work at smaller window sizes eventually.
5. Make sure you’ve selected one of PokerStars’ “Nova” table themes.
6. All things going well, you should see your own statistics now:
Understanding the “Zoom Poker HUD” info window:
As you play more Zoom Poker hands, Poker Copilot will show statistics on a higher percentage of players. Here’s how to use the “Zoom Poker HUD” info window:
The first column is the seat number, starting from the upper-left hand seat and continuing clockwise.
The second column is Poker Copilot’s “normalised” name for each player, determine by screen-scraping. It is all caps, with spaces and punctuation removed, and letters with umlauts and other diacritical marks converted to their closest plain latin alphabet equivalent.
The third column is the matched name in Poker Copilot’s database, if any. If a match is found, then you’ll also see a “tick” symbol or checkmark. The tick means that Poker Copilot is showing statistics on that player.
The matching uses fuzzy logic, so that “Poker Copilot” will match “Poker Oopilot” and “Pker Copilot”. This allows for the difficult of 100% success with screen scraping.
How you can help:
If there is a player at your table which Poker Copilot seems to scrape erroneously, you can help me. After your session, you’ll find the following folder in Finder:
Documents/Poker Copilot Images/
This contains the scraped images from the most recent session. It is deleted and started anew when you restart Poker Copilot. Find the image in there for the player that Poker Copilot didn’t scrape successfully and email it to me at steve@pokercopilot.com.
In the next Poker Copilot update there will be two small but important changes to the hand formatter.
1. Players are now anonymised. This is in keeping with poker forum etiquette.
2. Stacks change throughout the hand. Each player’s revised stack is now shown at the beginning of each street. This gives you an idea of how much a player’s current stack they are betting.
Note that the second change is only in the “Formatted” view at the moment. I’ll introduce this to the “2+2” format in a future update.
Here’s an example of me being a calling station with KTo.
Thanks to loyal Poker Copilot customer Gregory for suggesting these changes.
Like the subject says. Last last night I played 100 hands or so of Zoom Poker with the new Poker Copilot Zoom Poker HUD. It was recognising an increasing number of people successfully, so that eventually I was seeing statistics on most players.
Now for some tidying up, further OCR “teaching”, and then I can release a early-access version.
