3-cushion practice tool

T

techman

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Good morning fellow players,

as a 3-cushion-player I always wanted to have the chance to store positions found on the table on the iPhone, so I developed a tool for it.

You can check it on www.dreiband.net

I would love to hear some opinions or enhancement wishes from you!

(This is no advertising since its not yet available - thanks)
 
I went ahead and purchased your app and I'll say it works as advertised. One problem is more with the iPod than the software. Its hard to position the balls since they are so small. Sometimes they simply don't move at all. Sometimes the buttons don't work.

Here's some suggestions.
1) Maybe a zoom feature for ball positioning. Or maybe up/down and right/left arrows.
2) Shot categories for filing purposes.
3) Suggested solutions. This one I know could take a lifetime but basic solutions would be nice as a teaching aid for beginners.
 
Hey, thanks for the feedback. Some of your wishes are NOW in the update (available via Itunes or the AppStore-Link, Update is free of course)

- enhanced positioning of the balls
- smoother movement
- minor bugs fixed

to your suggestions:

- good idea with the arrows, I will at least try to do it (but I have to keep the correct size of the table and the balls, and thats why there maybe isnt enough space on the right side to do it)

- Categories are planned

- Online Data Exchange with solution suggests are planned

More feedback appreciated! Everyone can also reach me via mail: icarom@dreiband.net for more feedback

(But guys - its hard to keep this thing going while practicing for the european 3cushion-cup in 2 weeks :) But i will try to manage the gap between playing 1 average and having lines of code sorted :))
 
techman said:
Good morning fellow players,

as a 3-cushion-player I always wanted to have the chance to store positions found on the table on the iPhone, so I developed a tool for it.

You can check it on www.dreiband.net

I would love to hear some opinions or enhancement wishes from you!

(This is no advertising since its not yet available - thanks)
Click to expand...

Ausgezeichnet! Toll, dass du diese schwerige Aufgabe unternommen hast!

Since the iPhone has a built-in camera, had you considered allowing the user to take a photo of the table and then processing that photo so that the balls could be automatically located? Although this could mean more coding work than you'd originally intended, it could enhance the usability of the application.

A year or two ago I talked to a pro billiard player about this idea of taking photos and automatically generating a 2D layout, and he thought it could be useful.

I could help out with the image processing. If you're interested, send me a PM. At the very least I could write up an outline of the key steps and identify some of the potential difficulties. If I get enthusiastic I could put together some sample code (although it'd be much easier for me to write a WPF application using C#).

What accuracy of ball placement would be satisfactory?
 
Hey,

I planned to use the camera, but due to the different angles a photo can be made it seems to be almost impossible to do an exact positioning of the balls. Since we are all perfect players :) we wont accept when the balls are not on their perfect spots so at the end it didn´t make sense.
 
techman said:
Hey,

I planned to use the camera, but due to the different angles a photo can be made it seems to be almost impossible to do an exact positioning of the balls. Since we are all perfect players :) we wont accept when the balls are not on their perfect spots so at the end it didn´t make sense.
Click to expand...

I guess I should be more clear and say that the image processing would include a spatial transform that would map the image coordinates to the table coordinates automatically. This is similar to a project I've worked on for my day job.

To determine whether the it's worth prototyping I'd just need to know the accuracy of placement required: 1/8th of a diamond? 1/10th of a diamond? one centimer? If anyone wants to comment on that I could look at the feasibility of performing the processing. If it's not of interest, then no worries.
 
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