Sunday, January 08, 2006

EZChalk Rocks

I would like to call everyone attention to an awesome online service available to darters everywhere. It is www.ezchalk.com First, you should know that I have no affiliation with it other than that I use it. There are a lot of good utilities out there for us dwellers in dart forums to get together and duke it out with tungsten and silver. Unfortunately most of them are not websites, but programs written to download to PC's. PC's running Windows, that is.

But there are those of us who hold their computers to much higher standards. We run Unix, or Unix varients, such as Linux and Mac OSX. I run a Mac and I love it. Everything is easy and everything is safe (well, more safe). So things like DartPro, and CricketScorer are awesome utilities but do me no good. Thus websites that offer these services are the answer. Websites, when well made, are cross platform and cross browser. So people like me can run Firefox on a Mac and still play darts online. So I encourage all you people reading this to go there and sign up and find a sparring partner. Here is aa pic of the game play interface:


It isn't obvious from the pic (which you can click to embiggen) but you can either enter your scores by clicking on the dartboard or you can just type the numbers in at the bottom. But in either case the scores are not official until you hit submit, which is a cool feature, especially when you are entering by clicking on the dartboard. From the pic below you can also see that ezchalk will keep track of your stats too, to some degree. I have aan inkling thaat I have lost more than I have won but who cares about that. The important stat is points per turn. Mine is sitting at a humble 58.08 but maybe that will encourage people to challenge me.



It is a nice site. It has been much improved from it's old version and I think that if more people were to use it we would have a game anytime we felt darty. And do me one more favor. Once you sign up at the site (it is free by the way), send an email to the admin of the site asking for these additions and improvements:

1. Add Cricket as a game option. (I wrote some perl code for cricket and offered it to him.)
2. Add an option for 1 Set of 5 Legs. (right now it is only 5x5 and 1x1.)

You can email him here: webmaster@ezchalk.com

UPDATE: He has already added the second feature so you can now play a 1x5 match. Also, you can now post suggestions at this location within the Steve Coote site: EZchalk Forum Section

5 comments:

Tommo said...

That's a superb average you have there. As soon as I get a wireless router I'll be trying my hand at these online game.

Zeeple said...

I'm afraid it was based on one evening's play and I was hot that night. I had to be to keep up with Barn. I am sure that it will decrease some over time (infact I just looked and it is down to 57.xx)

Anonymous said...

I'm glad they fixed the sets X legs feature. That will make things a lot smoother there.

I still like dartpro better, but they seem to be on the right track.

You were shooting pretty well the night we tried it too Rob.

jsobo119 said...

When I did check it out there was nobody to play with... Quite some time ago... Cool... If they add cricket I would be happy. Thanks for mentioning my CricketScorer...

Zeeple said...

Seahag: I like it that they fixed that too. 5x5 was way too much and one leg was too short. Dartpro is a good app, my only prob with it is that I cannot use it on my Mac, and booting the windows computer just to play darts is such a pain.

jsobo: No problem. CricketScorer is a killer app and it is an awesome contribution the the ODC. Very frequently there is no one there to play against but we need to get more people aware of it, and used to it so there will always be games there waiting for us.