BBOFlash Comments Thread3

[Dwingo]

Tournaments. Partnership Desk. Before inviting, when I click on a palyers name for checking profile, the Pop up blocks the Player list making it necessary to move the Pop up box to the side ( left or right). If the Pop Up appears to the left or right without obstructing the player list, it will enable us to click on the player list one after the other to find a suitable partner for the tournament.

[akhare]

How about adding proxy settings? Hopefully flash an just tunnel on top of HTTP, making a cinch for those who are behind firewalls...

[barmar]

One -- in hand diagram mode, can you show the ten-spot as "T" instead of "10," as the latter looks like two cards at a quick glance? Or, if possible, please make this a configurable option. This isn't a big deal in pictures-of-cards mode as there is a visual cue from the corners of the cards how long each suit it. But as a long-time text client user on another service, I strongly prefer hand diagram mode.

I'm pretty sure this has been requested in the past, both for BBOWin and BBO Flash, and the answer was no. Most bridge books, magazines, and newspaper columns use "10", not "T".

 

One thing I noticed about those printed hand diagrams is that there's a noticeable difference in the spacing between the cards and the digits in "10", i.e. it looks something like:

 

A K 10 9

 

(not quite this extreme, but this gets the idea). BBO seems to cram everything together, like:

 

AK109

 

However, increasing the spacing between cards would exacerbate the problem with suits longer than 6 characters, where the additional cards are not shown. BTW, in my earlier message about this, I said that you can infer the length of a long suit from the distribution of the rest of the suits. I just realized one case where you can't: a 7600 hand. You can tell that you have a 7-6 from the two voids, but you don't know which suit is 7!

[slior]

Minor point: I moved from playing at a table (where I was chatting to "Table") to kibitzing a table where kibitzer couldn't chat to players. The arrow at the bottom left wasn't updated and so continued to read "-> Table". Chats correctly went to the other kibitzers though.

 

Cheers,

Lior

[slior]

Font issue (running Mozilla 1.5, adobe flash 9 on Linux): the suit symbols are not appearing in chats (they are replaced by blank spaces). Since I don't know how to debug flash myself, could someone tell me which font the application is requesting for displaying the suit symbols? Given that it should be no problem to set an alias.

[fred]

Font issue (running Mozilla 1.5, adobe flash 9 on Linux): the suit symbols are not appearing in chats (they are replaced by blank spaces).  Since I don't know how to debug flash myself, could someone tell me which font the application is requesting for displaying the suit symbols?  Given that it should be no problem to set an alias.

What you need is a Unicode Arial font.

 

There might be more to than that. For example you might have to tell your computer that your Unicode Arial font is the default Arial font on your system. I know almost nothing about Linux so I really have no idea what else (if anything) will be involved.

 

But if you can't figure it out from here I think there is a good chance you will be able to find whatever answers you need through Forums. Both Uday and (especially) Gerardo have a lot more Linux experience than I do (as do many regular Forums posters).

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com

[keylime]

On the Ubuntu distro, there is a package that if memory serves called Microsoft Core Fonts (mstcorefonts or something similar) - this allowed me to get my preferred Arial and Georgia fonts.

[uday]

There is a lot of linux knowledge here. Our official answer-man for linux issues is gerardo@

[Patapon]

Two things I noticed:

 

1)It is still possible to chat with people playing in a team match.(that is nice!:P

 

 

2)When you click right on a ID in the chat area,then click on 'show this person's profile" , you sometimes get another profile that the one you asked..

This happens when you don't click "perfectly in the middle of the name" you wish to see the profile.If you click between 2 different ID's you get the profile of the other ID, the one under the person you wanted to look at.

 

Not sure I am very clear but I can try to explain better if needed!

[Patapon]

Playing money bridge:

 

1)There are no movies, not even for the previous hand.

 

2)I can't see my account balance.

 

3)When I am declarer the dummy 'doesn't move' and stay like it was.The trump suit isn't on the left.

[Gerardo]

For .deb based distros (including Ubuntu): package is named msttcorefonts.

 

For .rpm based distros, check http://corefonts.sourceforge.net' target='_blank'>, there are instructions to create a package.

 

Or just dpwnload the fonts, from the same page.

 

The issue is the license for them doesn't allow redistribution so a package with the fonts would violate it. The Debian package actually downloads the fonts at installation time.

[akhare]

Does anyone else think that it's easy to make mistakes with the bidding box? I can't explain it exactly, but it seems to happen most often while trying to alert a bid and type in the explanation.

 

I have passed a couple of times doing it when I meant to bid and never had any such problem with the BBO Windows client...

[keylime]

Fred,

 

I do agree in principle about the bidding box - is it possible to have the box slightly taller to help differentiate the pass versus a bid?

[ng:)]

Nice work, Fred.

 

After a short test I have noticed only one thing: team colors are badly missing.

 

Gabor

[awm]

There is still an occasional claim problem. It seems to occur most often when my machine is otherwise slow and the window pauses for a moment.

 

What happens is, someone claims, and the little window for the claim (either the window asking how many tricks if I am the one claiming, or the window asking if I accept when an opponent claims) does not appear. This is particularly bad if I am the one trying to claim, since I am also unable to play a card (the software is waiting for me to complete my claim, but I cannot because there is no claim window).

 

I have also noticed that the old version of BBOFlash (prior to this release) worked very well on Mac using Internet Explorer, but did not work on Mac using Safari. The new version does not seem to work on Mac using Internet Explorer -- the login prompt never actually appears (I just get a page with shades of gray). It does work on Mac using Safari, but it seems to be quite slow (especially when logging in).

[keylime]

Adam,

 

Using the latest Safari on Windows, I had to reinstall Flash from scratch and then it worked, but rather slowly. I do confirm that on my Mac, the load time took almost 2 minutes on a 15Mbps connection to get to the login prompt.

[fred]

There is still an occasional claim problem. It seems to occur most often when my machine is otherwise slow and the window pauses for a moment.

 

What happens is, someone claims, and the little window for the claim (either the window asking how many tricks if I am the one claiming, or the window asking if I accept when an opponent claims) does not appear. This is particularly bad if I am the one trying to claim, since I am also unable to play a card (the software is waiting for me to complete my claim, but I cannot because there is no claim window).

 

I have also noticed that the old version of BBOFlash (prior to this release) worked very well on Mac using Internet Explorer, but did not work on Mac using Safari. The new version does not seem to work on Mac using Internet Explorer -- the login prompt never actually appears (I just get a page with shades of gray). It does work on Mac using Safari, but it seems to be quite slow (especially when logging in).

Thanks for letting me know about this. I have some questions that might help me figure out what is going on:

 

How do you recover from the claim problem? Are you able to leave the table and return? Do you log off and log in? Do you have to refresh your browser?

 

Does BBOFlash seem to continue to work normally other than your inability to play cards?

 

If you don't mind doing a bit of expermenting the next time you see this happen I would appreciate it. I realize that might further disrupt your bridge game :unsure:

 

The slow loading time in Safari is the result of an unfortunate bug in that browser which prevents that caching of files over a certain size (even more unfortunately this size is not very big - something like 100K). The result is that, when BBO Flash launches, Safari makes something like 12 requests for the same 1MB file (plus a bunch of smaller files).

 

Hopefully Apple will do something about this rather serious bug...

 

Hopefully Uday will be able to figure out how to get BBOFlash to work on Macs running IE...

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com

[hotShot]

I'm not a Mac user, but if Safari has this cache issue, perhaps there is a local proxy server advanced user could install on their system to prevent that behavior.

[awm]

The claim situation works as follows:

 

(1) Opponent claims. I simply cannot see the claim box in order to accept/reject or see how many tricks are being claimed. However, I can see all four hands at the table. I can still talk to table, leave the table if I want, etc. Typically I ask the person claiming to claim again and everything works (the software does tell me that the claim has been cancelled).

 

(2) I claim. The menu asking how many tricks I am claiming never appears. I cannot play a card, but I am still able to chat to table and am also able to leave the table. None of the opponents can play a card either (it is normally my play) and they do not see any claim to accept/reject (logical since I have not specified a number of tricks). Normally I fix this by leaving the table and then joining again.

 

Neither of these problems happens "all the time" -- they are both occasional. They seem to be lag related (although I think most "lag" that I experience has to do with memory and/or CPU activity on my machine; my connection is actually quite fast).

 

I'll experiment with this more next time it happens.

[barmar]

I have also noticed that the old version of BBOFlash (prior to this release) worked very well on Mac using Internet Explorer, but did not work on Mac using Safari. The new version does not seem to work on Mac using Internet Explorer -- the login prompt never actually appears (I just get a page with shades of gray). It does work on Mac using Safari, but it seems to be quite slow (especially when logging in).

A Mac using IE? MS stopped supporting IE on the Mac several years ago. I'm surprised it ever worked, since the latest version of Flash for OS 9.x is 7,0,73,0, compared with 9,0,124,0 for more recent OS releases.

 

I use it in Safari all the time, and the only slowness I notice is when it's initially loading, prior to the login prompt.

[barmar]

The blurring you do when a confirmation window pops (e.g. confirming payment to register for a tourney) is a clever effect, but I've decided I don't like it. It makes my eyes squint whenever it happens.

[keylime]

I've had a couple of Mac users email me and ask what they should do about getting to BBO.

 

In Safari, I've had to reset the browser each and every time a new BBO Flash comes down. I don't know if it's due to the Flash or if it's the upgrade of the browser. I did also install the latest Flash plugin.

 

Has anyone using a Mac, tried this through Firefox yet?

[keylime]

Fred,

 

When privately messaging someone, it truncates the first letter of their name, and when sending the message - it fails to send. This is happening with Safari in Windows, latest version.

[barmar]

IIn Safari, I've had to reset the browser each and every time a new BBO Flash comes down. I don't know if it's due to the Flash or if it's the upgrade of the browser. I did also install the latest Flash plugin.

I've never had to do this. With some of the new versions I got an error the first time I tried to connect, but when I tried again it succeeded, and never failed again (until a new version came out).

 

I haven't tried Firefox, since other than these glitches when first upgrading to the newest version it has worked pretty flawlessly.

[andych]

Prefer the b/g colour at the table area not to be white. It was too bridght. Some previous version of BBOFLASH was using brown which was far much better than white, in my view .... :unsure: B)