Hi,
The issue here is the usual disparate pulls of time, quality and cost
The time factor is we need to have the calc within the next couple of weeks
Cost is that it shouldn't be prohibitively expensive - free would be great.
Quality is that it's not a pig to use, it does the job and does it well enough for enough people to use regularly.
We have to meet all these factors and surpassing any of them will be a bonus, but we can't miss any of them.
Writing one from scratch can be done but will blow the time element out of the water. A delivery date will be affected by design decisions, coding, implementation and testing time all occurring beforehand -and probably more than once.
Open source is great, particularly if there's a good community around it, but we don't have the time to make the twodimes one look nice. If the decision is to implement as-is and work on improving the interface as a separate project later then that's another matter. However, my guess is that typical behaviour will be to click on the the blonde-calc link see the text based interface, say 'oh' and not bother to click it again. A re-launch of it later would have missed the boat for most users. A PHP version of it might be better but it's still text based and the same argument could apply. We could do with a flash or javascript interface.
I acknowledge though that I don't know poker and you may tell me this is a well-known and well used calc that the general poker community (not just a few hard-core individuals) make use of it over other rivals. Please let me know if this is the case or I've missed the point.
To meet all 3 factors, we need to come up with something that's as quick to sort out as the bluffmagazine.com one (which is the pokulator calc with a bluff skin on top), i.e. take a couple of days of our time and/or a couple of weeks of their time. Design, dev and testing have all been done and we just supply logo elements for the skin.
So any suggestions?
PHP would be the quickest method to implement from scratch. It would not be text based, as the output from the script would be in HTML and therefore the same rules as to writing a webpage will apply. Your input form would be picture based.
Having said that, I couldn't write one from scratch within two weeks.
A javascript interface? That wouldn't work as javascript is client side..... hmm, hang on, thats actually better but it does mean that the code for the calculator is downloaded to anyone who uses it and therefore any interlectual property right and copyright is dangling freely for anyone to steal and re-use. Not a problem if you find an opensource script though. Still, its not very professional.
A java applet would be the best way to go, as again this would run client side but java byte code is not readable by your every day net user. Picture information would be compiled within the applet so its not like someone could distribute it and remove the blonde badging.
Flash is possibly and could potentially be the most sexy. However, I'm crap at flash. I know flash developers but they would probably have work commitments to try and do something like this in the time frame.
Looks like searching for obscure links on google is going to be your friend...
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