[fred]

A few days ago I made a post announcing the initial release of a new program named Handviewer. You can read that post here:

Link to initial Handviewer post

That posts describes how the Handviewer program can be used to review the movies of deals that are available in our "myhands" archive. It also mentions that the Handviewer program has some other interesting uses. This post is meant to provide some details of some of these other uses.

These uses involve using the Handviewer program to generate various types of bridge-related presentations. It is relatively easy to do this (a lot easier than creating .lin files) and there are various things you can do with these presentations. For example:

1) Webmasters and blogwriters can use the Handviewer program to generate attractive pictures of bridge hands, deals, and auctions for their web sites.

2) The Handviewer program can be used to include links to these kinds of pictures in e-mails. This is a nice way to send out "you hold" type problems, show you friends interesting deals you played, etc...

3) Same goes for text messages provided that the recipient of such text messages has a mobile phone that can run a web browser (such as iPhone, G1, and Storm).

Here is an example of the type of presentations you can create (a problem from the recent Indian bidding contest in which I disagreed with the panel's judgment):

Link to Handviewer presentation of bidding problem?

If you look at the URL that is displayed when you click the above link, you will likely be able to figure out how it works. Try experimenting by editing that URL and then reloading the page. It won't take long for you to learn the language for defining various types of presentations.

Here is a link to detailed instructions:

Link to Handviewer documentation

Please note that this is still very much a work in progress - sorry in advance if you run into problems.

Feedback either by e-mail (fred@bridgebase.com) or Forums post would be appreciated.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com