Your game, your history, your legacy.

The title might be a little too much, but even if the subject is not the most interesting, it’s definitely one of the most important, that’s why we’ve decided to write a post about data in our favorite app.

Becoming a Poker Analytics Pro user is most of the time a sign that you are a very serious poker player. You care about the game, about tracking your results, and analyzing your data, and you chose Poker Analytics to build the data about your sessions, and we thank you again for that.

Your data is very precious, and need to be safe. In our space, multiple parties are involved: you, the people around you, us, and Apple. Each is fallible, everyone can make a mistake, or be unlucky, and your data can be lost. You can erase the app, someone can delete your data by accident, Poker Analytics might have a bug or lightnings could hit Apple data centers.

These unfortunate stories are rare but they do happen, and you don’t want to be sorry when your data is lost. So it is important to take action to avoid such events.

There are multiple ways to do that:

File Export in Poker Analytics:

  • XML files that contains everything but custom reports, filters and hand histories. These files can be imported back into Poker Analytics.
  • As a reminder, the exported CSV files only contains your sessions and they cannot be imported back into Poker Analytics.

iCloud backup in Poker Analytics:

  • You can enable iCloud synchronization by going in the More tab, then Settings > iCloud synchronization. This will send your data to Apple servers and allow you to retrieve it if something happens to your phone.

iOS iCloud Backup

  • Very useful, you don’t need to connect to iTunes, the backup is done automatically whenever your iPhone’s is plugged to the charger. You won’t need iTunes to restore from iCloud either, everything will be available through the device.

iTunes backups:

  • By plugging your iPhone to your computer you can activate automatic backups.

We recommend you to regularly save data exports. You simply can send yourself a “bug report” from Poker Analytics using the so-called option in the More tab > Settings. It will export your data in XML and open a mail. Just add your email in place of ours and you’ve got a quick way to save your data.

You can also export to your computer and save it on some cloud of your preference, and to use automatic iTunes backups. Every opportunity to save your data should be taken. Anything can happen to your phone, your computer, or to some data centers so you should limit all the risks.

Ask yourself what would happen if you lost your data now and take action, and then have lots of fun at the tables!

The Twitch Revolution

Poker is undergoing a major change. Players have started streaming while playing. Twitch, the gaming streaming platform, is the go to choice for players wanting to showcase their skills.

We’ve selected for you the biggest names and their twitch accounts if you are craving to watch poker, so here are some of the best streams:

  • Greg Merson, 2012 WSOP Main Event Champion
  • Jason Somerville, nominee for Poker’s Best Ambassador at the 2015 American Poker Awards
  • Elky, triple crown winner

Some other notable accounts:

Also note that 2+2  also displays live streams in the right column of its pages.

If you are aware of other great streams, please notify us!

A couple of news

This is a quick post to tell you about a few things going around in the Poker Analytics galaxy.

We’ve published “The New Face of Poker”, an article about how the industry is changing for the good. We hope you will enjoy the read and tell us about it.

Also, we’re currently thinking about the roadmap of the app, so we are all ears for your input. You can choose the medium of your choice to contact us.

A few month ago we’ve made a price change on the App Store, currently at $27.99 for the US. We’ve been doing this obviously to increase our income, but also because we definitely believe that Poker Analytics is by far the best poker tracking app of the market. We want to app to stay that way.

However, we still need your help, so please tell your love of the app at the poker tables and tell everybody how you couldn’t live without it. Your comments on the App Store are always greatly appreciated by everybody in the team! It is a real pleasure to read them all.

Thanks for reading us!

 

 

Poker Analytics and Data safety

Hi everyone,

We’ve decided to explain everything that happened in the last week about the iCloud Sync critical bug which went live with 3.1, hot fixed in 3.1.1 and cleaned up in 3.2

In Bamboo, we wanted to add iCloud Sync. For multiple reasons:
– xml export/import is a nice way to keep your data safe but it implies an update each time we update the data base. For exemple, Hand History gets a bunch of new fields in the data base and if we want to have them handled by the xml system, we had to write some code.
– xml export/import is not the way to sync data between multiple devices
– xml files can be lost
– xml export was not automated

For all of that, and because technically, Apple mades a great step forward between the first release of iCloud and iOS 7’s version of iCloud, we’ve said: ok let’s add this feature.

Everything went well from the release of bamboo until end of June. iCloud Sync was able to maintain your data in a safe place, let’s you have your data up to date on a new device or multiple devices at the same time. It was giving us the possibility to not update XML export/import to handle our data base updates.

Then 3.1 brought a data base update and did create a situation we didn’t seen before. iCloud Sync had a specific way to handle data base update and by a combination of two different bugs, the terrible “popup” started to appear. Telling you a iCloud back-up was found and asking you if you want to use it or not although you had your data up to date and didn’t need to see that popup.

If you answered “yes use it”, the popup keeps spamming you, and if you answered “no”, the app started to move your data in local and delete your iCloud data. Because this popup wasn’t planned to be displayed in this situation, any of the answer weren’t good for your data.

We discovered the bug a couple of hours after the 3.1 went live, due to a bug report. After another couple of hours, this “isolated bug”, as we thought in the beginning, was reproduced by another user. And finally we discovered it could be a general one.

We removed the app from the store 24 hours after the 3.1 release and submitted a 3.1.1 at the same time, asking Apple an “expedite review” for the first time. Normally, a review is 5 business day. An expedite review took 24h. So 48 hours after 3.1, a 3.1.1 went live avoiding any data deletion.

Then we worked a week to understand better what was wrong and discovered the bug combination: data base update and popup display at the wrong time. We corrected that situation in 3.2

Now iCloud Sync is working well and were able to retrieve the data to all (except two) the lost data from the users which contacted us.

This situation helped us to better understand the value of Poker Analytics data for our users and let us thought about what we can do to avoid any data deletion (and not just from our bugs).

So we will bring in the next release an automatic xml export of your data after ending a new session. This backup will be done in the background and will be another good protection for your data. This feature should be live with 3.2.1 version.

Poker Analytics’ Team

Bamboo Other New Features

Hey there, this is the fifth and final post introducing the new features of Poker Analytics 3.0 Bamboo. We still have a few in the basket so here they are:

Tabs reorganization
We were getting a bit frustrated from the lack of width on the main screens, so we have adopted the more standard horizontal tabs that you can find in many iOS apps. With hands histories, we weren’t sure which four tabs you would like to have at all times in Poker Analytics, so we have added the ability to reorganize the tabs the way that best suits you. You can do that in the More tab and then press Edit, the app will automatically save the new order.

Poker Analytics tabs

Best performances
There is a new tab called Top 10, which shows you your 10 best performances in cash and tournament. Take on the world and make a new entry!

Poker Analytics best performances

Monthly net result
In your sessions history, you’ll be able to look at your performance month by month. As simple as that!

Now you know everything about all the new features of Poker Analytics Bamboo! We hope you love it as much as we do! We still have a lot of pleasure hearing from you so give us your feedback.

See you!