The ability to take notes on your opponents has been a standard feature of online poker software since approximately the Dark Ages (also known as, the late 1990s/early 2000s.) If you're an online poker player, odds are you've typed up a few of these yourself.
I've invested heavily in player notes over the years. Even though robust hand history analyzers and real-time HUDs have relaxed the need for hardcore note-taking, I still find that player notes are useful for storing all the "other stuff".
- Player psychology and personality
- Records from Sharkscope, OPR, PTR, and PokerDB
- Blogs or websites found by Googling the player's handle
Unfortunately, if there's one thing all this squinting at player notes has done, it's convince me that the online poker note-authoring experience is tedious, uninspiring, and ergonomically broken.
The Full Tilt player notes dialog shown above is currently the state of the art (it's resizable, it floats, and it has that nifty color-coding feature). But let's take a look at how some of the other sites do it.
Exhibit A: Poker Stars.
Exhibit B: Cake Poker.
Exhibit C: Bodog.
Exhibit D: PokerTracker 3.
Does anybody else see a problem here? Wherever you look, the operative design philosophy seems to be:
- Cramped text boxes.
- Fonts only a Lilliputian could love.
- Rich text? We don't need no stinkin' rich text.
And it's a little bit of a disconnect, to me at least, because (warning: platitude forthcoming) nothing is more important in online poker than keeping book on your opponents. Right? Player notes are not a convenience feature. They should be accorded a first-class treatment in the UI, rather than the naked-text-and-duct-tape approach reserved for low-value cruft.
Fine and fair enough, you say. But what would a first-class treatment look like?
Well I hate to go all The Machine Is Us/ing Us on you, but digital text really can do better. In the year 2009, a player note should be a generic visual canvas capable of displaying and editing...anything. Anything at all.
Ambitious? Not really. This is a problem with an obvious solution. You've probably already guessed it. It's called:
Store and display player notes as HTML.
Note that I didn't say force the player to enter notes in HTML. What's needed is a format which is...
- Standard rather than proprietary
- Textual rather than binary
- Expressive enough to enable eye-popping player notes
...but also:
- Capable of being edited/manipulated by people with zero knowledge of HTML/programming/technology
HTML (or XHTML, or XML, or you know—markup) is the only format which fulfills all of these requirements. And once we cross the HTML Rubicon, it becomes possible to create declarative/interactive player writeups incorporating...
- Formatted text
- Images
- Tables, charts, and graphs
- Anything else that can be presented with HTML
...in an easy-to-use WYSIWYG authoring environment that requires zero actual knowledge of HTML. I should literally be able to write and format this entire post in an online poker player notes window. Without knowing a lick of HTML.
Literally.
Why not?
This is basic software development praxis after all; nothing fancy or ground-breaking. With the ubiquity of...
- Easy-to-use HTML rendering components such as the Microsoft WebBrowser and Mozilla ActiveX controls
- Open-source HTML rendering stacks such as Gecko and Webkit
- WYSIWYG HTML editors such as TinyMCE, FCK, Infragistics, and Telerik
....there's no reason to restrict players to lifeless, dull, dreary, monotonous, headache-inducing, plain-text-only notes. Isn't it time that the online poker note came of age?
Addendum
I had a friend review this post and he pointed out:
It's all well and good to have HTML player notes, but how does that make those notes more intelligent? I mean, you named the piece 'Online Poker and the Intelligent Note' right?
Very true. So allow me to elaborate, if anybody's still reading.
The really cool thing about HTML-centric player notes isn't the personal freedom they give you, the player, in your note-taking. It's the ability of third-party developers to build tools which generate interactive human-readable player notes data from repositories such as PokerTracker.
This is powerful.
For example, imagine a piece of software which analyzed each player in your PokerTracker 3 or Hold'em Manager database, incorporated your manual notes as well as various statistical/historical trends and details, and produced an interactive player summary on the fly:
(The above is a mockup. A competent visual designer could do a much better job with this, but you get the idea.)
The point is that by adding some simple HTML support we can transform the player note from a smear of arcane text into an interactive combination of human insight and computerized analysis, delivered to the player on request. And that, I think you'll agree, is about as intelligent as the humble player note has a right to be.
Posted by James Devlin 23 comment(s)
