Mainly you need to loosen up your restrictions on your import routines with regards to dates of draws and order of draws!
For example the Italian lotteries don't do draws on holidays! So any draw that should be done on that date you be done on the next available working date and the draw date on the history will be that one;
interesting point. so far we haven't encountered any lottery like this. most lotterie just 'skip' holiday draws.
but there's a workaround in expert lotto for this. modify your lottery definition to say that winning numbers are drawn daily and you'll be able to import any lottery record. then you can mark empty entries (mondays, tuesdays, thursdays, fridays, sundays) as 'skipped' in expert lotto's database.
Next the history of the Italian Gioco Del Lotto games (there are 10 different wheels and you can play/bet on any of those) is in draw order, you program will only import the draws where the numbers by chance where drawned sorted!
i'm not really sure on this, i'd have to check the source code.
but there are no problems with the order of drawn numbers when using the 'import wizard'. so i suggest try importing winning numbers that way.
we can also provide a plugin for online winning numbers update directly from lottery's official website. but the lottery operator must publish the complete winning numbers history in some standard format (dbf, cvs etc).
My greatest issue is that I really don't understand what is the ultimate goal of the program... is it a predictor? a wheel generator? a wheel optimizer? an analyser? All of them? None of them?
actually it's all of them. with expert lotto you can wheel new numbers, optimize them, analyze previous winning numbers and much more.
we tried to include all features any lottery player needs since expert lotto is the only software we use for playing our lotteries. and of course, we're continuously adding new features.
I also would like to congratulate you on the good use of java widgets, they really look nice... problem is that the whole program eats up 40MB of memory just with 700draws of SuperEnalotto, I can 't imagine what it will require for the 3800 of a "Gioco Del Lotto" wheel during processing... (if there is any!)
3800 draws is a piece of cake for expert lotto! there's a similar keno lottery in the czech republic with 3400+ draws that we play with no problems. actually it's the widgets (tables, charts etc) that take most of the memory (try minimizing the application to system tray and check how much memory it takes then).
and of course you can work with full wheels as well, e.g. all 14 mills combinations for a 6/49 lottery and the application will still take only 40 megs of memory.
My inital opinion is... interesting, but I wouldn't buy it!
Your problem is that LottoStatistics is free, WinHunter is free, covermaster is free and there are bunch of other free tools around that can do alsmost all the studd as your program (I say almost because I don't know all the features yet!)!
In my opinion you don't provide a feature that someone should pay US$60 for!
yes, we hear that quite often.
but expert lotto does have a lot of features, some of them connected with each other and it's not easy to understand how these can be exploited.
get your free license (e.g. submit your italian lottery) and i'm pretty sure that you'll change your opinion once you get more familiar with our exper lotto.
Now I could be interested in it for free,
I can help you with setting things up for the italian lotteries plus the portuguese lottery and perhaps localization for portuguese. Let me know if you are interested!
all help is very welcome and portuguese translation would be great. pls contact us via our website for more details.
So don't push it.. 