Steve McLeod of Poker Copilot has a new domain, which apparently fell into his lap, at macpokersoftware.com;  he’s (justifiably) using it to promote Poker Copilot, but he’s not trying to hide that at all and the site is already a good resource for novice poker players on the Mac.  Go check it out!

If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed that development of BlazingStars has slowed to a crawl in the last month or two.  As it turns out, I have some pretty good reasons for this.  First, I’m a graduate student, with a thesis calling my name, and second, I have an immediate family member dying of cancer.  Between these two things, my free time has dwindled away to nothing, and I haven’t had time to devote to BlazingStars recently.  I’ve also been working on other projects which are taking what remains of my time.  All together, things were looking grim for the development of BlazingStars.

So, I’ve made a decision:  BlazingStars is going open source!  The code is now hosted at Google Code, and you can go there right now to download and build it yourself.  I’m hoping that this development will help gather support for further work on BlazingStars, to make it the solution that the Mac poker community needs.

So please, head over to Google Code and have a gander, maybe give a guy a hand.  Let’s build a better tool set for Mac poker players!

Please note:  if you’re an Italian player updating to solve the problem with the release of the Italian client, you may need to re-download BlazingStars and install over the old version.  Get the new version here.

BlazingStars: 0.9.7b (build 16)

released October 27, 2009

As always, if you find a bug, please send the information to support@fullyfunctionalsoftware.com
or post at our forums.

What’s new?

• PokerStars has released a client for Italian players due to a new law on online gambling in that country (thanks for the heads up, Jonathan). This version adds provisional support for that client.

Known Issues

• Pot-sized betting is still buggy overall. I’m aware of this and am working on it. Any bug reports you can send me will help, though. My informal testing tells me that the best results for pot-sized betting are had with the Slick theme at most sizes (smallest sizes may still cause problems).
• Scroll wheel problems have been reported. Please let me know if you’re having them.

I hope that I’ve managed to eliminate the tournament lobby closer bugs with this one…

BlazingStars: 0.9.7b (build 15)

released October 27, 2009

As always, if you find a bug, please send the information to support@fullyfunctionalsoftware.com
or post at our forums.

What’s new?

• This release should solve the problems with the tournament lobby
  crashes (thanks to Adam and Andrew for the crash reports). Please, keep in mind that the lobby closer will work
  better if you increase the delay in the preferences (Open:Close,
  Delay for Window Scanner). I’ve found that a delay of 1.0 seconds
  works fairly reliably, but play with it for your own use.

Known Issues

• Pot-sized betting is still buggy overall. I’m aware of this and am working on it. Any bug reports you can send me will help, though. My informal testing tells me that the best results for pot-sized betting are had with the Slick theme at most sizes (smallest sizes may still cause problems).
• Scroll wheel problems have been reported. Please let me know if you’re having them.

Today’s my birthday, and I don’t have a lot of time, but I just wanted to get this out the door:  get the public beta of BlazingStars at the download page!

If you’ve left a comment on the blog and haven’t received any reply, it’s not because I’m ignoring you.  For some reason, I haven’t been getting notifications of new comments, but I’m going to try and fix that.

As I mention in the release notes, I am about ready to throw myself out the window with this bloody Leopard compiling problem I’ve been having.  I did manage to squeeze out some time (about 5 minutes!) on a Leopard machine to test a recompile, and things seemed to work all right, but I eagerly await any news of success or failure.

BlazingStars: 0.9.7b (build 14)

released October 1, 2009

As always, if you find a bug, please send the information to support@fullyfunctionalsoftware.com
or post at our forums.

What’s new?

• Please, God, let the Leopard compatibility be fixed with this release.

Known Issues

• Pot-sized betting is still buggy overall. I’m aware of this and am working on it. Any bug reports you can send me will help, though. My informal testing tells me that the best results for pot-sized betting are had with the Slick theme at most sizes (smallest sizes may still cause problems).
• Scroll wheel problems have been reported. Please let me know if you’re having them.

I’ve been working on the pot-sized betting code, and I threw in an small feature for free.

BlazingStars: 0.9.7b (build 13)

released October 1, 2009

As always, if you find a bug, please send the information to support@fullyfunctionalsoftware.com
or post at our forums.

What’s new?

• A bug report made it clear to me that improving the compatibility of the pot-sized betting toolchain with Snow Leopard had broken said compatibility with Leopard. Hopefully, this release should solve that problem. Please let me know if you see anything, improvement or not.
• Improvements have been made to the pot-sized betting code which should make it more robust on real-money tables (tables with a $ in the pot size).
• BlazingStars will now automagically quit when you quit the PokerStars client, stopping problems with hotkeys lingering after PS is closed.

Known Issues

• Pot-sized betting is still buggy overall. I’m aware of this and am working on it. Any bug reports you can send me will help, though. My informal testing tells me that the best results for pot-sized betting are had with the Slick theme at most sizes (smallest sizes may still cause problems).
• Scroll wheel problems have been reported. Please let me know if you’re having them.

On a suggestion by Chris, I’ve added a handler for the “Checking is free” popup that occurs if you click Fold when there’s been no bet or raise in front of you.  Please read the release notes re: delay times, though, since I am still at the mercy of the PokerStars client when it comes to popup windows.

Also, as I’ve mentioned on Twitter, I will be spending this week doing work on the pot-sized betting code and then releasing a public beta of the program.  So, if you’ve been waiting for your chance to use BlazingStars, stay tuned!

BlazingStars: 0.9.7b (build 12)

released September 28, 2009

As always, if you find a bug, please send the information to support@fullyfunctionalsoftware.com
or post at our forums.

What’s new?

• Added a “Checking is Free” popup handler. Note: like the other popup handlers, the delay for this is controlled by the preference in Preferences->Open:Close, and is set to a default of 0.5 seconds. If this value does not suit you, feel free to change it, but remember that the delay is necessary because window titles are transmitted over the internet, and any lag in sending the titles will confuse BlazingStars.
• Some bug fixes and improvements for the pot-sized betting code.

Known Issues

• Pot-sized betting is still buggy, and will often choke on real money table pot sizes. I’m aware of this and am working on it. Any bug reports you can send me will help, though.
• Scroll wheel problems have been reported. Please let me know if you’re having them.

Did some work, and there’s a new release out tonight!

BlazingStars: 0.9.7b (build 11)

released September 20, 2009

As always, if you find a bug, please send the information to support@fullyfunctionalsoftware.com
or post at our forums.

What’s new?

• Fixed a bug where using the right arrow key for bet increment / decrement would not work. This function should now be more robust.
• General code fixes and enhancements.

Known Issues

• Scroll wheel problems have been reported. Please let me know if you’re having them.