Nashville

[fred]

Hi Fred!

 

I don't know if it's asking too much, but those of us with feeble memories (or is it only me?) would really appreciate if you put an advertisement in the Bridge Bulletin that Wednesday, and a notice on BBO.

 

Thanks! Looking forward to seeing you again, if I actually manage to remember on Wednesday (which I'm hoping that I will).

I will make sure there are some reminders in the Daily Bulletin.

 

I am looking forward to seeing you again too, Elianna ;)

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com

[Gerben42]

I can't make it (by 5000 miles) so please share any photographs of the party in some way. Thanks ;)

[keylime]

Hmmm I wonder if my hotel has kitchen facilities for piemaking....

[Aberlour10]

I can't make it (by 5000 miles) so please share any photographs of the party in some way. Thanks :)

a small video movie (on youtube) from the party & software presentation would be great for the absent part of the bbo community :)

 

Robert

[fred]

The BBO party will be in room 108 of the Nashville Convention Center starting around 5PM on Wednesday, July 25.

 

Hope to see you there :)

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com

[jdonn]

I left until the second weekend, but I left my poker chips in the hands of some jokers in Nashville. Use them wisely.

[Dwingo]

- There is a good chance that some exciting new BBO software will be shown to the public for the first time at this party.

 

For those of you who cannot attend, there is a good chance that we will announce the exciting new BBO software in Forums shortly after the end of the Nashville tournament.

 

I will post more details as I receive them.

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com

Did anyone get to see the private preview of the exciting new BBO software?

 

Can't hold the suspense any longer. Can someone post the details.

[keylime]

I was at the get-together today - the demo was unable to be performed due to the poor, shaky internet at the Convention Center.

 

He did not get to go into the major details, but from what we were told, BBO is going to be offered in both the client form and the web interface form in the next few weeks. It will use the Flash engine.

[mike777]

I was at the get-together today - the demo was unable to be performed due to the poor, shaky internet at the Convention Center.

 

He did not get to go into the major details, but from what we were told, BBO is going to be offered in both the client form and the web interface form in the next few weeks. It will use the Flash engine.

English please *sigh* :)

 

We could care less about functions, tell us benefits :)

[helene_t]

Which Flash version will it require? Currently Adobe Flash for Linux is only available through version 7.0 AFAIK. In any case this is great news for the Mac users.

[rbforster]

I'll be dropping in for this coming weekend, Fri-Sun, to play in the big swiss teams event.

[fred]

I was at the get-together today - the demo was unable to be performed due to the poor, shaky internet at the Convention Center.

 

He did not get to go into the major details, but from what we were told, BBO is going to be offered in both the client form and the web interface form in the next few weeks. It will use the Flash engine.

English please *sigh* :D

 

We could care less about functions, tell us benefits :blink:

Benefits include (in no particular order):

 

1) New BBO members will be able to log in for the first time and play or watch in a matter of seconds. Painless downloads (for most people), no software to install (for most people), no firewall issues (for most people). You don't even need to sign up for a user ID (there will be a mode for "anonymous login").

 

2) The user interface will be greatly simplified.

 

3) The quality of the graphics will be greatly improved.

 

4) It will be very easy for us to release new versions whenever we feel like it (it is very hard for us to do this with the current BBO software). Upgrading will be completely painless for our members.

 

5) It will be much easier for us to work with 3rd party programmers to develop modules that can be integrated into BBO.

 

6) Much faster logins and connections in general (especially important for people with dialup).

 

7) People will be able to access BBO on non-Windows machines. For now that might mean only Macs, but the time will likely come when other types of devices (various handheld gadgets and TVs for example) will be able to run BBO.

 

8) The existing BBO software has a limit of 25K simultaneous logins, but we are not sure our servers can really handle that much traffic. We expect the new software will allow many more people to log in at the same time.

 

9) Something that I think is a "big idea" which I am not ready to discuss in public just yet.

 

I am hoping that we will announce the release of a demo version within a week or so after the end of the Nashville tournament.

 

Thanks to the many people who came to our party :)

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com

[ArcLight]

>2) The user interface will be greatly simplified.

 

Maybe I'm missing something, but what needs to be simplified?

What do users find confusing? Edit Profile?

 

>6) Much faster logins and connections in general (especially important for people with dialup).

 

With my 5 1/2 year old PC using a 358K DSL, it takes about 2 minutes for the BBO connection to complete.

 

 

What I'd love is a feature where I can mark players not as enemy, but as someone I dont want to play with. :blink:

 

Another NEAT feature I'd LOVE would be color the players in the main room based on their skill level. :D :)

Example - I'm looking for a game to play in. I see a vacancy, I look at the pards profile. Beginner. ok, next ... Here is a spot GOOD 2/1 Advanced , I sit, DRAT , someone beat me to it.

 

If insted there was a color spectrum, Pink/Red = Novice, Orange = Beginner, Green = Intermediate, Blue - Advanced, Purple = Expert

 

WC get their star. Enemies are black. People you makr as "Dont play with" can be Gray.

[keylime]

I eagerly look forward to playing BBO on a Mac.

 

BTW Fred, REALLY nice spread you had for the get-together, and thanks a million for your kind words to me.

[Free]

Will it be playable on mobile phones? :)

[helene_t]

5) It will be much easier for us to work with 3rd party programmers to develop modules that can be integrated into BBO.

Interesting. Like we now have a group of volunteers maintaining standard FD files, just a broader scope? What kind of kits would I need to make plug-ins for BBO? JavaBeans? Applets? Corba? Or is it some Flash-thing?

[jillybean]

I like BBO just the way it is, I just want to play bridge. However, I am sure the changes will be great.

These events sound like a lot of fun, not to mention great bridge. I am looking forward to one day being able to attend and not just watch on VuG and read about it afterwards.

 

Moreover, Fred you are a remarkable guy, not everyone could find something kind to say to Limey. :)

[fred]

5) It will be much easier for us to work with 3rd party programmers to develop modules that can be integrated into BBO.

Interesting. Like we now have a group of volunteers maintaining standard FD files, just a broader scope? What kind of kits would I need to make plug-ins for BBO? JavaBeans? Applets? Corba? Or is it some Flash-thing?

Some Flash-thing would be best.

 

Good that you bring up the subject of convention cards since this is a perfect example of what I was referring to. The new BBO does not have a convention card facility yet and I have to admit that this is one part of the program that I am not exactly eager or interested in writing myself. Perhaps we will hire someone to do this for us or perhaps we will have a contest in which developers are invited to create a convention card facility for us (with the winner being paid for their efforts).

 

If any programmers out there think they might be interested in getting involved in this sort of thing, I suggest they look into something called Flex (by Adobe). Please don't spend too much time on this right now - I am not in a position to promise that we will actually be willing to do something like what I described in the paragraph above.

 

Those of you who are looking for powerful new functionality may be disappointed with what we are working on. The new BBO is not geared toward "power users". It is meant for the much, much larger population of people who lack strong computer skills and basically just want to play online bridge.

 

Forums regulars are typically long time BBO members who have strong computer skills so some of you may find the following hard to believe, but we know it is true:

 

There are many people out there who have great difficulty getting started on BBO and never really become comfortable using our software. They find our site to be overwhelming. These are the people we are trying to reach with the new BBO.

 

Eventually I suspect that almost all of the functionality that exists in the current BBO client will be available in the new BBO. No doubt we (and you!) will think of cool new functions and features that we will eventually support as well.

 

But that is not our main priority right now.

 

Sorry in advance if you are disappointed in the direction we are heading, but I hope you can at least sympathize with our reasoning.

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com

[hrothgar]

Some Flash-thing would be best.

 

Good that you bring up the subject of convention cards since this is a perfect example of what I was referring to. The new BBO does not have a convention card facility yet and I have to admit that this is one part of the program that I am not exactly eager or interested in writing myself. Perhaps we will hire someone to do this for us or perhaps we will have a contest in which developers are invited to create a convention card facility for us (with the winner being paid for their efforts).

Hi Fred:

 

This sounds somewhat intriguing. There’s a very real chance that I might be able to convince a couple friends to work on a project to try to “solve” the whole Convention Card issue once and for all. I suspect that the most important factor in convincing folks to sign up will be the quality of the interface to the rest of the BBO code. Making it easy for a developer to add new features/functions will mean a lot more than the compensation model. Seeing a product used/enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of people often means more than a few dineros...

 

With this said and done, I’d appreciate a bit of guidance regarding where you see the product going in the long term. Personally, I think that it would be suicidal to try to support two different BBO GUIs for any length of time. With luck, even the “power Users” will see real value in the new GUI and accept it as a platform for future development. In turn, this would allow you to deprecate the existing interface that we all know and love.

[pbleighton]

Those of you who are looking for powerful new functionality may be disappointed with what we are working on. The new BBO is not geared toward "power users". It is meant for the much, much larger population of people who lack strong computer skills and basically just want to play online bridge.

 

Speaking as a software professional and a BBO regular, I have to say that this is a smart move.

 

One word of advice: try as hard as you can to minimize takeaways. In my experience, if you give users 10 things they have been asking for and take away two, they notice the two <_<

 

Personally, I think that it would be suicidal to try to support two different BBO GUIs for any length of time.

 

I agree completely.

 

Peter

[pclayton]

Kibbed the Spingold - so was about an hour late for the reception. Met a few of you - not as many as I would have liked.

[cherdano]

If I understand correctly that the new BBO will be based on Flash, I very much hope it is more responsive than all other Flash applications I have used so far.

 

(And personally I hope that either a Flash version old enough to run on Linux is used, or the old client is supported long enough until Linux Flash support has caught up.)

[fred]

If I understand correctly that the new BBO will be based on Flash, I very much hope it is more responsive than all other Flash applications I have used so far.

 

(And personally I hope that either a Flash version old enough to run on Linux is used, or the old client is supported long enough until Linux Flash support has caught up.)

I would guess that people will be able to use the existing Windows client for at least another year. It is not unlikely that we will let people use it "forever" if they want.

 

Currently we are not planning on making any major improvements to the Windows client, but if any serious bugs are found we will have to fix them.

 

Maintaining 2 clients is not going to be much fun (as other posters have pointed out), but since the Windows client is relatively stable and since we are not planning on changing it, I don't think it will be that big a deal.

 

I am not concerned about performance issues with the Flash client.

 

But very little of anything I have posted about in this thread is written is stone. We are entering a whole new world here and there are still a lot of things we are unsure of.

 

One thing is for sure: the Flash client will require version 9 of Flash.

 

Another thing that is almost for sure: we are not going to leave Linux people with no way to log in to BBO so don't worry about that.

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com

[cherdano]

Thanks for the reply, Fred (and it was great to meet you, I am sure you don't mind me saying that any forum regular who hasn't met Fred should go and say hi when he/she is at the same tournament as you).

 

Btw, contrary to what Helene said above, there is a an Adober Flashplayer 9 for Linux since January, so this isn't even an issue now.

[hrothgar]

Hi Fred

 

Quick question about the new client:

 

I was curious whether the new Flash based client will still leverage any kind of embedded browser? I'm not sure whether it makes sense to try to design a "one size fits all" convention card.

 

As an obvious example, the ACBL might very much want its convention card to look identical to the ones used for face-to-face play in ACBL events while the EBU would prefer something very different.

 

In an ideal world, it would be great if there was a standardized interface describing how a third party could specify a convention card. You could then push responsibility for developing and maintaining said cards onto the Sponsoring Orgs. My guess is that this might fly a bit easier if the the language used was something simple like HTML rather than some kind of Flash object.