Version 3.9.4 Available for Testing

IMPORTANT!!! You must exit the BBO program COMPLETELY before you begin the update process!

You can upgrade your BBO to the latest version:

http://www.bridgebas.../bbo_update.exe

or download everything (including the latest files) from scratch:

http://www.bridgebas...4/bbo_setup.exe

I suggest you use the first method, but however you do this, please make sure that you exit the BBO program COMPLETELY before you start the download.

Uday and I continue to focus most of our efforts on performance issues (decreasing login times and server response and improving connectivity). 3.9.4 contains some new major improvements in these areas, but some of them may not be apparent until we release a new "official" version to the general membership. The 2nd and subsequent login experiences with 3.9.4 on a given PC should be significantly improved and you will notice that you don't have to wait for profiles to appear anymore (as it was pre-3.9.2) after your 2nd 3.9.4 login.

We have added a couple of new minor features:

- The Partnership Desk of pay tourneys now has an option to exclude people who will not pay their own entry fees. This option is saved when you exit the program.

- In a team match, a vugraph broadcast, or when you open a .lin file of a team match, holding your mouse over the "other table result" will display the player names and auctions from the other table.

Sorry there are not more new features, but I hope you can appreciate why it is so important for us to keep on top of the performance issues. The continuing rapid growth of BBO has caused all sorts of challenges for us in this area. Those of you who have been around for a while know how bad it is for our site during times in which system performance is poor.

Flag news:

Palestine flag added. No doubt this will be a controversial decision, but we have rules in this area and Palestine clearly qualifies (because there was a Palestine team in the 2000 World Teams Olympiad and since I now know that we have at least one BBO member from Palestine).

I expect that a few idiots will threaten to boycott BBO if we don't remove this flag and that a few non-Palestinian idiots will change their flag to Palestine in an attempt to make a clever political statement. I have found that the regulars who read and contribute to Forums are a lot more sensible than our "average member" when it comes to things like this. Anything that any of you can do to help control the anticipated storm would be greatly appreciated.

Language news:

Russian language added as an option, but only for the purposes of chatting using the Cyrillic alphabet. I don't speak Russian so it is hard for me to know if we are handling this properly. It is likely that a full Russian translation of the BBO interface will be available with the next month or 2.

A full Japanese translation of BBO is part of 3.9.4. This has been by far our most challenging translation project to date (for those of you who are programmers, this is due to the fact that computers represent Japanese characters as 2 bytes instead of 1 and because the Japanese fonts that come with Windows seem to change all the time).

A big round of applause to 2 friends of mine from Japan (who also happen to be among that nation's leading players), Bob Geller (geller on BBO) and Setsuko Ogihara (izumi on BBO). These two volunteers were also responsible for the Japanese translation of our two Learn to Play Bridge programs. The pride they take in their work and their dedication to increasing the number of bridge players in Japan is truly inspiring. Thanks Setsuko and Bob - as usual it has been a pleasure to work with you despite all the challenges!

Thanks also to BBO member howl who helped me with some of the technical aspects of programming for Japanese and to Tadayoshi Nakatani and the Japan Contract Bridge League for their ongoing support of the work we do.

If you speak Japanese, we could really use your help with testing (especially if you have a pre-XP version of Windows). Our main concern right now is that some of the translations won't quite fit in the space that is available on the screen (or that they won't fit under only specific versions of Windows).

Other concerns are that there may be Japanese characters that interact with control characters to give complete garbage on the screen (can be easily fixed once we know about it), or that some of the translations (there are 1534 messages, some long!) may not be quite correct.

If you find any problems relating to the Japanese version, please e-mail Bob (geller@nifty.com) and cc me (fred@bridgebase.com). It's OK to write in Japanese--Bob will translate it for me. Make sure to let us know what version of Windows you are running. If you know how to make a screen capture (Print-Screen, open "Paint" accessory program, CNTRL-V, save to file) please do so and send it to us as a bitmap (.bmp) file. One note: the translations have to fit into the available space. We welcome suggestions for improvments in translations but please make sure it will fit on the screen. (In many cases the translations now being used had to be heavily abbreviated to fit into the available space.)

The Japanese language option will work properly only if you have fonts for the Japanese language installed on your PC (the MS PGothic font specifically). Even if you have that font, some aspects of the software (such as the title bars of dialog boxes) may not look right unless you are using a Japanese version of Windows. We've tested the program only on XP machines, so it's possible there will may more problems we don't know about on older machines.

We are hoping to release a new official version of BBO by automatic download in the next couple of weeks, but we really need some help from our members in terms of testing. Besides the Japanese issues, some of the performance improvements involve some very delicate programming and these things have been difficult for us to test on a large scale. Please give 3.9.4 a try and let me know (either by posting here or by e-mailing fred@bridgebase.com) if you run into any problems.

Thanks in advance to those of you who are willing to help us.

Happy 2005!

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

BBO Discussion Forums: Version 3.9.4 Available for Testing - BBO Discussion Forums

Version 3.9.4 Available for Testing We need your help!

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