Gift, What Gift?

It’s Christmas today, yay! In that spirit, I have two applications to share with the world. The first one I’ll talk about today, the other later this week.

My family loves to play games of all varieties, especially on holidays. An old favorite is Pinochle, which I first learned from my grandparents in Michigan (pretty sure card playing is the only thing to do in the Midwest in winter). Almost 3 years ago I first spoke about creating an online score tracking tool for Pinochle, and released in an initial form last year. Today it’s finally useable. Check it out at onlinescoresheet.net, scoresheet.info, scoresheet.mobi, or scoresheet.space (I do like lots of domain names). You can also find the source code on GitHub (completely AI-written).

What got it over the hump from “fiddly prototype” to “ready for prime time” wasn’t the choice of development tool or a eureka moment on my part. It was actual usage by real users others than myself. Putting it out there, and then convincing my family members (across a couple generations and device types) to try it. Got enough feedback to make a handful of critical improvements, and while it could certainly be better, it’s perfectly usable and doesn’t have any glaring functional bugs.

Usage is a gift. Seek it out, and don’t take it for granted.