In between the weeklies

Alert: a breaking change

Hi, bridge pals.

I’m issuing a now-rare random post in between the 168-hourly Friday updates, because I made a change that requires users to reload the deal generator web page. If you don’t reload, your recipes might not work as expected.

So: Mac users shift-cmd-R, Windows users shift-ctrl-R, whatever you do to get a full reload. The browser’s swurvy-curvy reload button might not be enough to do the job.

In my subtitle I refer to a “breaking change”. I have always tried to avoid making any change that would invalidate existing recipes. Today is different.

While working on more convention recipes, I began listing the exact shape combinations I would need to add to the shaper selections. Things like the existing 4=4=4=1, 5=4=x-x, 4=5=x-x. The list goes on and on, and as you can imagine, if I were to add such shapes selectively, I would be sure to leave some out. This would doom me to forever be adding new exact shapes as the need arises.

Thinking quickly (it only took 4 years) I hit on a better solution: exact shapes for all suit lengths from 0 to 13, but only for one suit at a time. I do this with standard bridge notation, using equals signs (“=”) to denote the exact suit lengths.

The exact shapes, and how to combine them by selecting more than one within one shaper tab, are explained in this section of the Shape-ology user guide.

That same guide has a reference to what I called “legacy shapes” which were the few exact shape combinations I implemented early on. The reference remains, only to inform you: they’re gone.

I don’t like making work for others, but in the long run I think this change will make life easier for recipe designers. If you used the legacy exact shapes and you now have non-working recipes, please contact me for help with updating them to use the sleek, modern exact shapes.

Happy dealing!