Hand Animator

[mickmackusa]

Okay, I'll admit it is a little tedious to copy/paste the notation from a thread into the Hand Animator.  I tried the other day from my iPhone4 and the tap-prompted copy-all feature didn't let me easily select only the notation text from a thread post, so I gave up on it.

Despite the inconvenience, I don't want to soak a lot of time into developing the Hand Animator, because I plan on rewriting it when the new, official Pinochle Notation is completed.

...BUT... I'll cave in this time...
I've upgraded the Hand Animator program slightly so that there are two sample notations that can be selected -- one from WoCG and one from PlayOK.

The default sample notation is a real game record from WoCG (which is a mixture of human and bot players), and it is the subject of discussion in the following threads:

• Critiquing a Real Double-deck Pinochle Hand
  
• Critiquing a Stuck-Dealer Hand
  
• Hand Analysis
  

The sample PlayOK hand history (an all-human game record) is inserted into the textarea by selecting "playok.com" from the Preloaded Samples droplist.  At this point, there is only one thread discussing it:

• A Complete PlayOK Game For Scrutiny
  

Regardless of if you want to animate a preloaded sample or a manually inserted hand history, YOU MUST CLICK/TAP "Submit" to activate the Hand Animator display.

If you have any questions or feedback, contact me.

[mickmackusa]

Just out of curiosity, I ran the Hand Animator through my Samsung SmartTV's "WebBrowser" and it ran beautifully.

If I was to use it to teach people in my house, the big TV would be a great way to present Pinochle to a group.  It was nice and big, and not blurry from scaling or anything.
The remote control's cursor movements were a bit jerky, but that is not an issue with the Hand Animator.  After I loaded the Hand History, I was just sitting the cursor on the Step button anyhow.

After having a short play with it, I became sufficiently disappointed with the "Step" button not kicking me to the next successive Hand after the Result Frame...  so, I fixed that bit up.

Now when you click Step while viewing the last Frame of a Hand, the Hand Animator will load the first Frame of the next Hand.
If you are viewing the last Frame of the last Hand, the Step button does nothing; it doesn't not load the first Frame of the first Hand or say "The End".

Enjoy!

p.s. For anyone who doesn't know, the Hand History area (where the text goes) can be expanded/collapsed to offer more space for the Animation area.  To the far right of the red area saying "Power Pinochle Notation" there is a small square with a minus sign in it.  Click the minus to collapse the area, and click the plus to expand the area.  I'm not sure how helpful that feature is, but it is part of the forum software so I decided to include it.

Oh, and the Animator can be collapsed/expanded too.

And the white textarea box can be resized, by dragging the bottom right corner of the white box to a new position.