[1eyedjack]

I know I have no right to the information, but it would be quite nice to know what are the management's priorities in implementing enhancements over the next year or so.

It would be nice also to have some input into that process. We all tend to make suggestions to go on the wish list, but many of them we know should be assigned a low priority (contrasted with other enhancements). Others we REALLY want, but we tend to get a wall of silence (from the management, at least) about how the suggestions are received and this can be a bit depressing. Perhaps when submitting suggestions we should add a self-assessment of priority on scale 1-10 or similar.

It was refreshing to know that you were concentrating on the language project over the last few months. Can we have more of the same?

Personally I have two high priority wants that may have been lost in all the noise. While I do not want the "noise" to be lost altogether, it would be nice to know if what I regard as high priorities are opinions shared by the management (and for that matter other users). So, with apologies for any repetition my two favourites:

1) Teams Matches - allow a teams match to be set up without a full complement of 8 players, so that players can join or apply to join an incomplete team similar to joining a table in the main playing area.

2) Some utility to search an entire folder/directory of .lin files for any files that contain certain search criteria, ie occasions in which a particular player was sitting.

[Deanrover]

Both of your software suggestions are very nice. Hopefully they both will be implemented.

Fred and Uday are not particularly secretive about the future of BBO. Unfortunately, there are only two of them, and Fred has to spend much time playing in tournaments, so progress can not be as fast as we like. They spend a lot of time dealing with technical support. If BBO was a pay site, we could afford to hire more programmers, but you pays your money and you takes your choice.

I have no inside information, but I think it very likely that they will re-write BBO from scratch some time in the near future. When it was originally written its intention was to be an online store for Bridge Base products only, and thus perhaps some of the fundamental building blocks were for the wrong kind of house. Hopefully this would help speed up any future enhancements.

[ack_hh]

1eyedjack, on Jul 24 2004, 11:14 AM, said:

2) Some utility to search an entire folder/directory of .lin files for any files that contain certain search criteria, ie occasions in which a particular player was sitting.

.lin files are simple text files, so you may use Windows' find utility
to search .lin files for, e.g., a certain player's name - use "containing text ...".

Other powerful search utilities exist - you may wish to visit
www.pricelessware.org / http://www.pricelessware.org/2004/PL2004FI...TIES.htm#Search

[fred]

Basic plan:

1) Languages

We are all for adding new languages but we depend on volunteers
to do the translation work for us. The next release of BBO will allow
for chat in Chinese, Japanese, Greek, and Arabic even if the
translations of these languages have not been done.

2) "Small things"

By this I mean things that likely would require no more than
a couple of hours for Uday and/or myself to do.

There are a million of these on our list of things to do one day.
We work through them as we have time and pay particular
attention to suggestions that we receive from more than
one person.

Some small things that will be in the next version:

- new sounds for friend logging in and for the dialog boxes
that appear when someone asks you to play in tourney

- mouse over of table in vugraph list will display the names
of the players at the table and the number of spectators

- list of tournaments has been reorganized

- no doubt several other things I have either not thought
of or we have not done yet

3) "Big things"

By these I mean projects that require weeks of time for Uday
and/or myself.

The work we had to do on language was our most recent big thing.
Other recent big things include pay tourneys, general rewrite of the
client interface with 1024x768 support, and several big things that
Uday has done on the server that you would not be aware of (things
designed to improve performance and lower our bandwidth costs).

Some big things you can expect to see before too long:

- All sorts of things for teachers. Teachers will be able to create ads
for their services, students will be able to sign up and pay in BB$,
teacher will be paid by our company (we keep a percentage). In
next version authorized members will be allowed to create "pay
tables" where people must pay a specified BB$ fee to join the table.
This is intended to be used by teachers, but if people are willing to
pay to kibitz 4 stars play, I see nothing wrong with that. It will also
be possible to charge a specified BB$ fee to access a chat room,
lecture, or partnership bidding table.

- Classified ad area in online store (including an area for personal ads)

- Ability to buy non-Bridge Base products (bridge books, bidding
boxes, bridge vacations, cars, houses, etc.) through online store

- Eventually the client program will either be rewritten or "refactored"
(more likely the later). Most likely at this time we will work with an
artist to select nice colors, fonts, etc. and create a much fancier UI
for playing online (old UI will still be available as option).

Keep the suggestions of small things coming. As for the big things,
our plan is hardly set in stone (in fact it changes all the time - we tend
to make up a lot of things as we go along).

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

PS To Dean: Uday and I both work far more than full time on BBO,
but not all of that time is spent programming.

[mink]

Thanks Fred!

All of your plans sound very nice. However, I would not change the layout of the user interface. Yes, it does not contain a lot of graphics, and yes, maybe there might be better colors. But for me the main thing is, that it serves its purpose very well, and it is fairly easy to introduce it to newcomers!

I can imagine that rewriting the client is necessary in order to ease maintenance of a then better-structured code. But If I would do it, the result would exactly _look_ like the current version from the users point of view.

As for 1024x768 support I think this is not really needed. I work with this resolution and everything is nice for me. But if you have a flat screen with a natural resolution of 1280x1024, the BBO window becomes rather small - this is worth to be improved. The problem with such displays is that they perform best with there natural resolution only.

Among the "big things" I missed any plans to ease the task of tourney directors. I have written some Ideas to this topic and shall post them in the tournament directors forum, as maybe this is not interesting for non-directors.

Karl

[kgr]

a little (?) thing that would be nice:
CTRL-W:
Add one more layout which is compared to current small layout:
not wider but longer.
=> allows to have more chat, but not a wider screen (I don't like the wide screen becaause cards too fare from each other).
(ctrl-w switches then between 3 layouts)

[fred]

Try using the "maximize" button near the X in the top
right corner of the BBO window.

You can use this to make the chat area fill the entire
vertical space of your monitor.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

PS If you are curious this feature has been around for
a year or so and it turned out to be not a "little thing" due
to poor early design by Uday (just kidding was my fault).

[kgr]

tx Fred (never tried it because I thought it would make it even wider then the Wide of ctrl-w).
..that was a fast answer.

[twcho]

One "little" thing that I have requested before but get no attention.

It would be nice if one can right click a player's name to have an option to join the player's table.

Thanks!

[fred]

Already on our list of things to do.

Harder to implement than you might think (might even qualify
as a big thing) which is why you have not seen this happen yet.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[1eyedjack]

I forgot one.

*Fairly* high up on *my* wish list is to get the %/IMP scores assigned in the MyHands listings to agree with those displayed in the tournament results. They are never far adrift. But adrift they usually are.

Is that a "biggie" or a "smallie"?

[fred]

If that is pretty high up on your priority list then we must
be doing a good job

Myhands is Uday's thing and I have no idea how it works,
why the numbers are different, or what it would take to
fix this.

I suspect that this is a small thing and that Uday has not
put it high on his list of small things to do (which seems
reasonable to me given all the other small things he has
done and continues to do instead).

I am not trying to make fun of your suggestion. This is
the sort of thing that we need feedback on. It would not
have occurred to me (or likely to Uday) that very many
people would care about this.

We could easily be wrong. If we are we would like to know
and it would then be likely that the fix you request is bumped
up in the priority list.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[1eyedjack]

For sure, if I am a lone voice in the wilderness on that one then forget it.