I’ve put together a little HTML5 experiment in a web page that uses the canvas and local storage. If you are using Chrome 11 or Safari 5, try it here. Add a shape, drag the shapes around, close your browser, open it again, and return to the page. You should see the shapes exactly where you left them.
In the month since Online Poker’s Black Friday, Poker Copilot sales have plummeted. Until there is some clarity in the online poker situation, I’ve switched into “maintenance” mood for Poker Copilot. That means I’m doing just enough work to fix significant issues and to help customers and potential customers solve problems. I’ve halted further development of new features.
This has given me some time to look into HTML5. I’ve seen some interesting HTML5 demos but I’ve always assumed they involved a mass of unreadable, unmaintainable JavaScript. Then last week I saw the Chrome-only browser-based version of Angry Birds and decided it was time to see exactly what HTML5 can do.
HTML5 leaves me flabbergasted. Amazed. Astonished.
You have a full drawing canvas with well-thought out graphics primitives. You can draw lines and rectangles, arbitrary shapes, Bézier curves, all with a range of strokes, fills, and shadows.
HTML5 also has “local storage”, meaning a web page can store stuff on your computer, and load it again when you return to the same web page another day. To save a object graph to local storage, you can do this:
localStorage["myData"] = JSON.stringify(myData);
To restore it, you do the following:
var item = localStorage["myData"]; if (!item) { myData = ... make new stuff ... } else { myData = JSON.parse(item); }
Sometimes a German word just can’t be replace with an English one that has the same effect. From an email today:
it seems you verschlimmbessert it 😉
It is the German words for “to make better” and “to make worse” combined into one. It seems to mean that in trying to improve something you make it worse.
Did you ever have some success starting a business? Then you may identify with this problem.
Often an acquaintance or a friend offers me an “idea”.
Them: “Hey, I have this great idea for a website. I’m so generous, I’ll give you the idea and I only want 50% of the millions you’ll make with it.” This happened three times last week alone.
Me (a little too snarkily): “I get to spend 18 months of my life bringing your off-the-cuff idea to life, refining it, reworking it, marketing it, selling it. An idea which may already have been turned into a successful website so often the market is crowded. Or is actually an unworkable idea. Or has no wide market appeal. And in return I give you 50% of the profits? Or is it 50% of the turnover that you desire? Have you done market research? A feasibility study? You _have_ googled to see if it is already available, right?”
Them: “Um, no, I just thought about it while waiting at the doctor’s yesterday. But I’m sure it will be very successful. Jeez, you didn’t have to be so negative.”
The reality: I’m not short of ideas. I have lots of ideas for software products and web applications. I have half-a-dozen small software prototypes on my computer. Ideas are nothing without a lot of dedicated hard work executing them. And even then, they may not work. I heard that at a certain software payments processor, the majority of all their clients never sell a single copy of their software.
PokerCruncher – a popular iPhone app for calculating poker odds – is now available for Mac OS X. Awful user interface, but powerful software.
Clearly this competes directly with PokerZebra, a side project of mine. PokerCruncher does far more than PokerZebra and is priced higher. Choice is good for consumers, right? 🙂
Many thanks to the people who download the current Poker Copilot update, tried it with the various Merge Network poker rooms, and sent feedback. I’ve fixed some problems, and you can download an unreleased pre-release semi-release unofficial update with the fixes. It is here: http://pokercopilot.com/downloads/pokercopilot2.88_rc4.dmg
If all is well with the non-release, I’ll make it an official release in a couple of days.
What’s fixed:
You can now set your preferred seat for 10-max tables. Silly oversight on my part.
The HUD should now with with MTT’s. It was only working if you were only table 1. A Merge Network bug also reports you as being on table 1 in the hand history files, which confused Poker Copilot.
The correct table size is determined for most SNG’s and MTT’s.
The HUD works in Players Only. If only they let me open an account, I would have been able to test this properly myself!
You’ll most probably need to reset your database for the table size detection to work properly.
I’m quite impressed with MacUpdate. Every time I release a Poker Copilot update, within a few hours, they update the Poker Copilot profile on MacUpdate with the relevant information and send me a courtesy email. I’m not sure how they detect the updates but they do a good job.
Much better support for Merge Network poker rooms, including Carbon Poker, Lock Poker, Players Only, RPM Poker, Black Chip Poker, OverBet, and Poker Host
You can set your preferred seat for Merge Network poker rooms in the Poker Copilot Preferences, “Poker Rooms” panel
Note: The Merge Network initial HUD layouts are optimised for Lock Poker. For other rooms, you may still need to initially move the HUD panels to the correct place. Once set, they should stay in place, as long as your preferred seat settings in the poker room match what you set in Poker Copilot
Merge Network table sizes for cash games are auto-detected. Note: for this to work, you’ll need to reset your database.
What’s fixed:
Merge Network – all-in bets are now recognised correctly for all-in equity calculations.
Some Winamax tournaments were not displaying the HUD
The next Poker Copilot will have some improvements for Merge Network rooms such as Lock Poker, Carbon Poker, and RPM Poker.
The first important improvement is letting you tell Poker Copilot what your “preferred seat” setting is in Merge.
Ideally Poker Copilot would auto-determine this. But Merge Network stores the info in a file whose format I’ve been unable to reverse-engineer.
The second important improvement is finding way to detect the table size:
I solved this one by hard-coding a list of Merge Network table names in Poker Copilot, each with a pre-defined size. So, for example, if you play on any of the “Santiago” tables, Poker Copilot knows this is a 6-player table. Again, not an ideal solution, because when Merge introduces new tables, I’ll need to update Poker Copilot. But until Merge add this information to hand history files it is the best solution I’ve thought of.
There are limits to this approach; so far it only works for real money ring games. Play money and tournaments will need other solutions.
