jcwren

It's a phone with large digits and a large display. See the video linked to above. I think he means they've embigified the font on more of the screens.

Did you press the word 'Next' on the screen, or the raised ridge on the bezel that the arrow points to? I realize now that for people who are unfamiliar with the NOOKs may not know the ridges are actually the buttons to push. A future release will provide text to indicate that. The four raised ridges are buttons. In Root'n-Score-It, the arrows point to the buttons to use for that function. Once it's rooted, and you're running Practiscore, the top buttons act as page-up keys, while the lower 2 act as page-down.

[snip] I had no real trouble doing this (once I got unconfused last year this time over which process to use) and applaud anyone who can make the process simpler. But hacking voids the warranty which is something that, by itself, is going to stop a lot of people in their tracks. [snip] While technically it probably does, as long as the unit is somewhat operational, you can restore it to factory defaults. If it's non-operational, hook 110V to the USB port, make SURE it's dead

This thread is (once again) diverging, but on the more or less original topic, but this is my take. The reality is that for ANY given technology, be it paper and an adding machine, paper and EZWS, Practiscore, PractiScore + EZWS, there's a point where you have to say "You must be this tall to use this technology". "But PractiScore is SO complicated! We understand EZWS!" -- Well, there's lots of people who have no clue on how to drive a PC and/or use EZWS. There's never going to be an idiot-proof, any-moron-can-use technology, at least, not until we start letting AI's run matches. "But paper was so easy!" -- EXCUSE ME?!? Maybe all YOUR people have perfect handwriting, and can add columns of numbers with no errors, but those people don't live in GA. And if you *really* like keying in scoresheets for 3 hours after a match, power to you. There's always going to be some level of complexity. Those who "grow up" with the technology understand it better than those who adopt it and adapt to it (assuming an average user base, and not the people pushing the techology). Shooters (THE CUSTOMERS) are starting to expect instant scoring more and more. And I sure as hell don't miss wasting the better part of a Sunday trying to decode poor handwriting, fixing bad math, and the multitude of other sins that go with a paper match. So the competitors have to work a *teensy* bit harder and tap buttons on a tablet to get those instant scores. I'm good with that.

Never going to happen, unless someone like CED or another major supplier of shooting equipment steps up. ANY device you pick, be it Android or iOS is going to fade away at some point. If you're closely coupled to ANY given piece of hardware, it's inevitable. I don't think Apple is going anywhere, and neither is Android, but the specific hardware platforms will. Right now, the most cost effective choice are the NOOKs, albeit with their drawbacks. We're not going to find an absolutely idea piece of hardware for this system unless it's custom designed, and we don't have a user base for the revenue to make that happen. So the the software needs to be adaptable (which it is), and the clubs just need to pick what they like and/or can afford and go with that. In 3 years or 5 years, when NSTs become totally unavailable, the whole electronic scoring will have been evolving in the meantime. What's important is that it never target high end hardware as a REQUIREMENT to run. It can never mandate a 3G modem, GPS, or that it have 64GB of memory. While most clubs could afford any SINGLE device, fielding a fleet of them makes it cost prohibitive. Remain flexible, be adaptable.

According to the reading I'm doing right now, the Kobo Touch does not run Android. It does have a Linux kernel, and someone has ported Android 2.3.4 to it, by taking the Android configuration from a Tolino Shine. It appears it's almost a plug-n-boot solution. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYf1cWPRcDc http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=225940 From a software perspective, it may be as simple as the Root'n-Score-It method, although there's a requirement to open the case. Haven't gotten through the video yet. The Kobo Touch is running a Linux-based application, as opposed to the NST's Android application. Reports are that, as an e-reader, the NST is a bit more responsive. But that's somewhat irrelevant for our purposes, since they'd both be running Android. There's also a lack of the page-turning buttons, which our users have largely become accustomed to for scrolling the squad lists and target scoring. The SD-card slot has no cover on the Kobo, but a piece of black tape would fix that (no need to let that magic range dust into the device...). It appears these are sold at Borders Books, and I think we have one around here. I may go down and pick one up to play with/destroy. This, of course, on top of the dozen+ other projects I have going on... Update: I guess not. Going to borders.com takes me to Barns & No-bells. Kobo is owned by Rakuten, who also owns buy.com. Interesting. Update II: There's two models, the N905B-KBO (from kobo.com and another store that I won't do business with) for $79, and the N905B-K3S-B that's going for all sorts of prices, from $120 to $200(!). The latter is "with special offers", but I can't figure out what they could possibly be, especially to drive the price up by $120.

The Kobo mini is only $59. It is slightly smaller than the nook, but lists the same e-Ink touchscreen display. The Kobo Touch is $79 and about the same size as the nook. Yeah, you're right. WIth the moving crap on the web page, I missed that there was a 'Tablets' and 'e-Reader' button under the picture. I prefer products comparisons in a table format. They don't make it easy to determine the differences. But tell you what... If these weren't so expensive, I'd outfit every device with one http://www.kobo.com/koboglo-hellokitty.html

The cheapest Kobo is the ARC, with a retail of $129, and I'm not seeing any significant discounting. I question how sunlight readable those are, too. I imagine there will be some less expensive solutions that don't need rooting. Also, based on what I've heard in some IRC channels and read in some forums, the "if Earl ships" is pretty much "if". Not very likely.

Check out http://rootnscoreit.com for the easiest and quickest way to root your NOOK and install Practiscore (note that the current version of RASI has 1.2.11, while the latest PS is 1.2.12. You'll likely want to upgrade your version of PS after using RASI, unless I generate a new version over the weekend).

We're heavily invested in the NOOKs because they're cheap, sunlight readable, have an incredible battery life, and are more rugged than a glass screen. They are not the fastest animals on the planet, and with 256MB of memory, there is an upper practical limit to the size of a match that could be run on one. I've written a utility to generate matches with varying sizes of stages and competitors. We know that if you have 400 competitors and 12 stages of data, it'll crash (but we run 250 shooter/10 stage state matches with no trouble). My *personal* feeling is there is some optimization that could be done there, because there's really no need to keep an entire match in memory. Using a database is the proper way to manage this, so you'd only ever need to keep the current stage, squad list and shooter being scored in memory. But it's not my code And it does feel like it could be a little snappier than it is... NOOKs do not operate in the rain well, even with screen protectors. This is because of the IR touch sensor. Putting something between your finger and the screen makes it think you're touching all over the place. We use a 2 gallon bag pulled over the NOOK, with your hand up inside to operate. Works well enough, but not as easy to use as a capacitive touch system (iPad, Nexus 7, whatever) or a resistive touch system (cheap Chinese knock-off tablets). As far as responsiveness, you don't have to wait for it to register. The screen is slow to update because it's e-Ink, but it's registering the touches as you go. So I just tap-tap, next target, tap-tap, and make sure it's registering. It only takes a 1/4 to 1/2 second to update, but some people find that lag off-putting. Given the advantages of the NOOK, it's a minor inconvenience. We recommend leaving the device at the stage. For us, we're hard-core about paper backups and frequent syncs. But it's not a perfect world out there, and if a NOOK goes casters-up, I'd rather lose a stage for 60 shooters than the entire match for one or more shooters. The only advantage to carrying the device with them is squad ordering. The downside is people *are* careless, and moving it around just presents more opportunity for damage. Plus, if the device goes off-line, I don't know where to find it. If it's at the stage, and CGC #4 isn't showing up, I can go to stage 4 and check on it. We give people little pieces of paper with lines on it to write the shooting order down. Some squads use them, some don't. For protection, there are a couple choices in silicone sleeves I've seen. One is a complete piece of crap, that fits loosely, covers the buttons, and feels like the NOOK is sliding around in it. The other is much nicer. They're about $3, and one of these days I'll remember to order a handful for the clubs. Some people like the styluses to tap the screen. You can buy 10 for $3 or something like that on Amazon and ePay. We have lots of them. I personally don't care for them, but some people insist on them. They're one more thing to get lost, keep up with, etc, in my book. But we try to cater to the competitors when we can. There are other choices than the NOOK. If you find a good one, we'd love to know. There are literally dozens of models of Android devices. The issues to consider are cost, ease of damage, battery life, and sunlight readability. Anything with a gig of memory and a 1GHz+ processor is going to run Practiscore well enough. The resistive touch systems are the suck. They just feel *wrong*. And usually there are little "lumps" where the buttons for Home, Back, etc are. I just wish someone would make an 7" eInk with a gig of memory, a 1GHz processor, capacitive touch, SD card slot, WiFi, and do it for $60

The major advantage is that if people aren't maintaining backup score sheets and regular syncing isn't being done, if you lose a device, you only throw out a stage instead of one or more of the shooters complete match. The only advantage I see from allowing the squad to carry the device with them is maintaining a shooting a order. But given the risk of damage to equipment by moving NOOKs around in the hands of people carrying shooting bags, coolers, etc, it's just not worth it. We enforce the device per stage model.

The way I shoot, I don't ever have to worry about that problem affecting me

What are you defining "Open Squadding" to mean exactly? Here's our use case: People sign up online (currently Shoot'n Score It). Online registration closes, match is exported to EZWS via ssi2ezws On the day of the match, walk-ups are added to squads with available space When registration closes, all online sign-up no-shows are moved to squad 98 Squads are rebalanced, if necessary Match is exported from EZWS to PS via ezws2ps Now, if we go eliminate the EZWS step, we'll still need to download our registration information (with squadding info) to PS. PS needs to be able to read the squads.txt file that EZWS currently uses to handle "online squadding". What I want is an iOS implementation of what the squadding facility in EZWS does. It needs to show a list of squads, the number of shooters in each, and have an easy way to move them from one squad to another. Drag and drop would be nice. Doesn't need to be fancy graphics, but the list of squads should be able to be expanded and contracted (ala EZWS) so I can get quick overviews. Locking a device to stage would be nice. I'm not sure how that would be handled, since each stage device has to be synced (sunk?) from the master device. The ability to move a person from one squad to another on each device is desirable, because of shoot-throughs and people who are confused about what squad they're on, or get moved at the last second after the NOOKs have been synced to the master iPad. For our matches, shooters don't "check in at stages". This seems to be some sort free-for-all model that's popular in your corner of the country. Here, people check in prior to the shooters briefing (nominally 5-10 minutes before start of the match). If you show up late, well, enjoy the drive home. We don't let people just show up at a stage, register, and start shooting. There's money to be taken and waivers to be signed. Another item that needs to be added to PS pronto is the ability to export the "master database" of the device. We have too many instances where a single device is not always what is used to register competitors. Some clubs have dedicated devices, and need to be able to move the master database to another device for when they upgrade, have a failure, whatever. Some clubs use personal devices for registration because they might prefer the iPads over the Android devices, so they'll use their personal iPads to register. That means they have a localized master database. That's not really on-topic here, and was added to Mantis some time ago.

I'd appreciate if you'd test-flight me a copy also, please.

I guess I'll have to restart the effort on the sign-up system I was working on. I'm going to call it PractiShootDirectorSignup.

That's actually less secure that you would think. The sync code is the low 16 bits of the IP address of the device. I don't know about other ranges, but most of us up here run with a DHCP server on the access point. And if you're using a NOOK, you HAVE to, because the IP address can't be assigned statically. Since that's the IP address assigned by the DHCP server, there's nothing to prevent a malicious Billy Bob from setting his iPhone or Android device with a static IP address that's the same as one of the stage devices. Usually if you have two devices at the same address, you'll get odd behavior. But that's not a guarantee, especially if the stage device has gone to sleep. So that method, while a good suggestion, just isn't really secure. Incidentally, that's why we also put the MAC address in the DHCP server, so the device always gets the same IP address. By doing this, we control the IP address, so when we have more than 9 devices, our sync codes don't go to 010A. Instead, device 9 has a sync code of 0109 (192.168.1.9), and device 10 has a sync code of 0110 (192.168.1.16). Now, we don't have to shift out of number mode to enter a sync code

I faced a similar problem at area 2 where the network was open. Dozens and dozens of devices were on the net. My view on this has been that scoring devices should be on a secure network limited to match devices. But I understand that passwords leak and that networks sometimes need to be shared. My intent here is to extend the existing Match password setting to be optionally required for synching. One successfully used that device would show up in a list of trusted devices. How does that sound? My apologies for writing terse replies, I'm recovering from hand surgery and have only the use of my left hand for a couple months. Yes that means no shooting but compared to the difficulties of being one-handed in day-to-day life that isn't a big deal. Unless you've something else in mind, not the model I'd want. I want competitors to be able to sync, I just don't want to see them in the sync list. I would prefer to pre-qualify the devices I can see. Something like when I sync the stage devices from the master, I can register their MAC address with the iPad (which is really the only direction I see going for sometime. Android stage devices, iOS master devices). I only see devices with the MAC addresses I've approved. Or perhaps instead of the MAC address, it's a magic word that doesn't get transferred as part of the sync. But whatever the case, I want the ability for competitors to sync from stage devices. I just don't want to see those competitors. OK. So having an option to show only trusted devices would suffice if I understand correctly. Then we just need to figure out an easy way to make them trusted. My thought was that they would enter the password on their device it would flow over in the pairing protocol showing trust and would be in the list. There are some complications in that the device could be on the network with a different match. I will discuss internally and make sure to Post what we come up with. So just winging this... The device has a name, password, magic word, whatever you want to call it that you manually enter. It's stored only on the device. In the match setup, a checkbox is added for "I only want to see matches that match my system secret word". So the secret word is entered on the Android devices and the iPad, and we see only those. Now, a second option in the match settings says "Do not sync unless the UUID of the match is the same as mine.". This prevents the iPad from pulling data from a stage device that somehow got it's match changed, and if you try to sync against that device, you get an error dialog. This allows the most flexibility in that if the match is changed on either the stage device or the master, and a sync is attempted, it won't happen. And the first option allows competitors to sync, but the master not to see those competitors. AND it's managed on a match by match basis, because most of the time I'm not too worried about seeing competitor devices in the list, but if I *should* need to sync with a competitors device to recover some stage data (outlier case, admittedly), I can still do that.

I faced a similar problem at area 2 where the network was open. Dozens and dozens of devices were on the net. My view on this has been that scoring devices should be on a secure network limited to match devices. But I understand that passwords leak and that networks sometimes need to be shared. My intent here is to extend the existing Match password setting to be optionally required for synching. One successfully used that device would show up in a list of trusted devices. How does that sound? My apologies for writing terse replies, I'm recovering from hand surgery and have only the use of my left hand for a couple months. Yes that means no shooting but compared to the difficulties of being one-handed in day-to-day life that isn't a big deal. Unless you've something else in mind, not the model I'd want. I want competitors to be able to sync, I just don't want to see them in the sync list. I would prefer to pre-qualify the devices I can see. Something like when I sync the stage devices from the master, I can register their MAC address with the iPad (which is really the only direction I see going for sometime. Android stage devices, iOS master devices). I only see devices with the MAC addresses I've approved. Or perhaps instead of the MAC address, it's a magic word that doesn't get transferred as part of the sync. But whatever the case, I want the ability for competitors to sync from stage devices. I just don't want to see those competitors.

Currently, the web page loads all the available matches, and then displays them in list, which can be filtered by typing in the box. This is annoying as hell It would be preferable to display the most recent 20 or so matches, but use AJAX to search for specific matches with real-time updating. Information should always be displayed newest to oldest when searching. USPSA club IDs should be searchable (no idea what IDPA and others do, but I want to find all matches for GA01, regardless of how people typed the header). Date formats should be ISO 8601, YYYY/MM/DD. Not sure why Android and iOS PS uploads the actual HTML that gets displayed, but that should be eliminated. Only data should be uploaded, and the site should be responsible for presentation. This has been proven to be a problem where the Android version was not uploading something correctly, and 'View Individual Results' links are not available as of 1.2.11. Matches with clearly illegal dates should be rejected when posting results. Why is there a match with a date of 2014/11/19? Matches should be able to be flagged for review/deletion. There should be no "my test match" or "Qqq" type names. Match names that are all capital letters should result in immediate and permanent disbarring from USPSA and using the intarweb In an ideal world, a competitor could create a PractiScore login. The competitor would have a profile, and allow filters to be specified so that when viewing results (and assuming they're logged in), they don't see IDPA, Steel Challenge, or whatever matches they don't care about. This could be a "Show me only" list or a "Don't show me" list. This could be refined to club code level, also. The profile would also allow them to specify the email address for when match scores are sent during a match, as some people may wish to send them to a different email address than what they use for their day-to-day email. A enable/disable should be provided for each notification type (email/SMS/carrier pigeon). It would be nice if a competitor could pull a list of all matches they've competed in, along with basic statistics on each match (club, date, #stages, #rounds, finish within division, finish overall). I'll bet I can come with a bunch more...

It's out now, in case you hadn't already been notified. FWIW, I run an auto-mailer program that can email you whenever the version changes. If you'd like to be added to the list, email me with the email address you'd like notifications sent to jcwren@jcwren.com and put 'Practiscore Notifier' in the subject.

+1 - I'd love an iOS version that supports Steel Challenge. Early to mid January is looking like when that might happen.

I've not seen that before. This in the 'Settings->About Device' (or whatever it is) display?

JC, let me clarify once more why it won't be happening. First of all, I don't have time or motivation to test features I will never use myself. The way I look at it, if users of the free app are not willing to participate in testing of a free software which saves them much more time than they would have to invest in testing of that app, I don't see why I should be doing that work for them. However I am here to help and I am doing all I can to fix issues reported by users as soon as I can. The sooner issues are reported, the sooner they will be fixed. Ah, so this is just a hobby for you. You obviously don't develop software for a living, or if you do, I sure hope it's not anything life or mission critical. You seem to think that because PractiScore is free, there's some gratitude owed, and users should be damn lucky that they get anything at all. You cut a release with what appears to absolute minimal testing, throw it over the wall, and expect users to test it. Because, hey, that part I just fixed? Well, it's not very interesting to me, because I don't use that feature. I have a hell of a lot of time and labor invested in PractiScore. I've gotten at least 5 clubs going on PS, written software to convert matches from EZWS to PS, created a rooting image for NOOKs to try to make it as easy as possible for clubs to get going on it, scored a huge number of matches on it, and provided endless feedback and bug reports. I've done all this because *I* believe that paper scoring is antiquated, and needs to be moved into the 90's. A large number of clubs are now dependent on PS, and abhor the idea of going back to paper. Competitors are enamored with getting nearly instant scores and comparing their performance with their friends. The fact that his is free software does NOT entitle you to a cavalier attitude of "It's free, so take what you get and be happy, and I work on the features that interest me". I've seen you continually suggest that people are wrong in the way they're trying to use it, push back on excellent ideas provided by others, and question people's basic competencies. If you can't get your act together and show some respect for the users, ENCOURAGE user feedback, recognize what the COMMUNITY wants and not just yourself, and actually TEST features before release, then you need to turn development over to someone else. I've tried to gloss over these issues personal issues you seem to have, tell certain people "just let it go", and try to ignore your abrasiveness, but I AM DONE. If this was a personal product of yours, and not owned by NiftyBytes, I'd ditch this so fast, your head would spin. As it is, I'm seriously rethinking my commitment to the NOOKs, in spite of their low cost, fantastic battery life, and sunlight readability. The bug count in the iOS release is far lower than what it is in the Android release, and that's not just because iOS is a closed-source, limited platform operating system. I may have just burned (nay, nuked) any bridges with you, but I simply cannot condone this type of attitude from a software developer.

I think *we* have testing pretty well nailed down. More extensive testing before a release is what *you* need to work on.

Well, no, because we're still running 1.2.5. But with all the reports here and in Mantis, I'm letting other people be the guinea pigs for a bit. I'm trying to write some docs for Root'n-Score-It.