I receive quite a lot of emails from users of Hattrick Manager and over time it is easy to see how easily most of the issues may be prevented. Here are some helpful tips that will make your overall computer experience a lot more smooth (and secure).

Quick summary of helpful links:

• Mozy - Free automated 2 GB online backup
• AVG - Free Anti Virus client
• F-Secure Online Virus Scanner - Virus check without installing anything
• F-Secure Online Health Check - Make sure all your programs are up to date
• Gmail - Get a long lasting email address

Backup
More or less every day I receive an email from somone who’s computer harddisk crashes, losing everything from family photos to your Hattrick team data. Make sure to backup your most important data, and make sure it is backed up automatically (otherwise you won’t do it often enough).

I’ve recommended it before and still do, try out Mozy (free 2 GB online remote backup, unlimited for $4.95). I’ve installed it, told it what to backup and now everything is taken care of. Make sure to select the most important stuff to backup (My Documents, Hattrick Manager data, etc) then those free 2 GB goes a long way. Download, install and you’re ready to go. Take 5 minutes to prevent disaster.

Note: The link include my referrral code (EAQV45). What it means is that if you sign up I get some additional extra space for free, nothing else. Once you have your own account you could recommend your friends and get some additional free space yourself.

Anti Virus
Get an antivirus program. AVG is completely free and does a nice job. If you don’t want to permanently install anything, use F-Secure Online Virus Scanner on a regular basis. While you’re at it, us F-Secure Online Health Check to make sure all your installed programs are up to date and doesn’t contain any known security exploits. And of course, make sure your Windows Updates are set to update your computer automatically.

Get a long lasting email address
By far the most common question I receive is that someone cannot retrieve their registration key because they’ve changed email address. Sooner or later you will change your internet service provider, and if you’ve got your email address there you will lose it to.

Solution is as simply as it is self-evident, get yourself a Gmail account. Powerful mail search, everything free, almost 7 GB of storage and most importantly - it will be there wherever you are and you won’t lose it.

If you don’t like using a webbased client, you may use POP or IMAP with Gmail and use your normal mail client as usual (like Thunderbird). If you got yourself your own domain name, you may still use Gmail, it does support that too.

There have recently been some problems with the automatic sending of registration keys for PayPal payments. If you have paid using PayPal and not received a key, try entering your team ID on the support page. If it says your team is not found, please email me at stefpet (at) gmail (dot) com and include the transaction ID.

Somewhat ironically, because of yesterdays post, a new version is now available.

The only change is that it fixes the download of the world details file that broke because of a change of URL on Hattrick. This in turned caused the currency settings to be empty in Hattrick Manager.

Some translation updates and other minor changes are also included.

I’ve lately received some questions regarding the current state of development and the future of Hattrick Manager.

It’s been a while since the last version and during this time several changes have occurred on Hattrick itself.

There are many reasons for this, but it all has to do with lack of time and prioritizing. Got two kids now (one and three years old) and I’m also doing the last semester at the technical university and will start working on my master thesis this summer.

Therefore development has been slow, and honestly, I cannot say or promise a date when development speed will pick up again. At the same time, I don’t feel like simply throwing in the towel and quit development of Hattrick Manager entirely. I still hope and intend to, at minimum, release new versions so Hattrick Manager it doesn’t stop working entirely due to changes on Hattrick.

In about a month it is exactly 10 years since the first version of Hattrick Manager was released. I’m 30 years old now, that means that HM has more or less been a significant part of my whole life as a grown up. Countless of nights, evenings and weekends have been put into designing and programming this application, so it is not something I give up lightly.

So the conclusion is… Hattrick Manager is not dead, but currently not developed in such a pace that it implements and support new features of Hattrick as they are introduced. I hope this will change to the better, but I cannot promise and I cannot say when.

I’m very happy for the support of the current users of Hattrick Manager and all those telling me it is a great application. I’m very sorry if this disappoints some of you, however, this is the situation as it is now and in the end it is up to you, the user, to decide which or what manager application to use.

Finally I would like to clarify that I’m always answering emails and managing new user registrations as quickly as I can, so that you don’t have to worry about. If you decide to register as a new user of Hattrick Manager I’m infinitely grateful, if you decide to use another application, then I understand and thank you for the good times.

I just would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year!

Due to some undocumented changes, and a couple of bugs, introduced by Hattrick during their latest maintenance downtime there are a couple of issues in Hattrick Manager.

Most visible is the appearance of weird characters in the Match Analyze window due to a change in the way characters are encoded. Another issue is some players doesn’t have their star rating retrieved correctly.

I just wanted to inform that I’m aware of these issues and hope to address them soon.