[Tom Saxton]

Hi Branden,

Thanks for the great comments!

Originally Posted by engunneer

I'm not quite sure (you are more familiar with the match software than I am), but what info is missing to compute Rank? The only thing I can think of is the pre-penalty score of the losing alliance, but that can be derived from the twitter feed.

There are three issues.

You are correct that the Twitter feed has enough info to reconstruct the unpenalized score, but the Twitter feed isn't official and doesn't reflect any changes made to the scoring after the end of the match, such as the head ref changing a penalty or correcting a scoring error. Fortunately, I saw a lot of that happen at the Oregon regional, so I'm really aware of how it can change things.

I also need to know where all of the surrogate appearances needed to fill out the schedule are located. I could assume that, knowing how MatchMaker works and that they are all supposed to be in the third round, but that could be problematic.

Finally, the big one is DQs. The Twitter scoring data doesn't say anything about DQs, and neither does the data on FIRST's site. Without that information, any attempt to calculate rankings could yield really large errors, especially for teams that have already been punished with a DQ. I really don't want to get involved with that at all.

Originally Posted by engunneer

Thanks again for the updates. I updated it in the hotel in Atlanta and was using it when I could.

Cathy and I were following the matches very carefully from home, and watching you folks do well motivated me to add the match detail view so I could preview the upcoming matches.

Originally Posted by engunneer

Random idea - ask the user what team number they are from, and if there is no picture in the database for that team yet, nag them to upload one to TBA. It's not good for the users, but it's good for the scouts

I definitely want to add the ability to add robot photos (and maybe also team uniform photos) and it would be awesome to be able to share those photos, either through a web site like TBA or directly using the iPhone 3.0 peer-to-peer networking enhancements. That won't be in version 1.2, but I do hope to add it for the 2010 season.