Improvements to ChalkySticks 2019
If you’re a fan of ChalkySticks, we appreciate you sticking around. There is a lot of depth to what we do, many moving parts, endless amounts of work, and very few hours in the day.
The idea for ChalkySticks occurred about 7 years ago when I was with a friend in Midtown looking to play a game of pool during some downtime. Neither of us knew of a nearby place, so I thought, “Why isn’t there a list of places to shoot pool in NY? In the US? Everywhere?” It took a while to get started on design, putting boots to the ground, and hammering things out. It started simply as a small index of places with pool tables that I traveled to one-by-one, then grew to all of NYC, then much further beyond New York.
After that, I wanted to connect players looking for games which became the beacon feature. The app started to evolve and the ecosystem started to exist. Later on, I noticed a popular online pool diagrammer went offline and saw that as an opportunity to make my own. I spent about 1–2 days making the first prototype and that has become the Pad we know today.
There have been many experiments that worked and plenty that didn’t work. We tried out Tournaments for a little while, but eventually decided that needed to go back to the drawing board. An experiment of displaying aiming lines on Pad evolved into Trainer. An experiment with creating a new pool league has been temporarily halted because of a need for management; but it’s not dead. Many experiments, ideas, and discussions have come and gone and eventually turned into what we have today.
A project of this size would ordinarily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but my philosophy as a developer is that some industries need help technologically even though you may not make that money back. We shouldn’t allow money to ransom less popular industries for attention; everything deserves a chance to exist in our new device driven age. It’s a tough pill to swallow knowing, going in, that you’re going to take a major loss.. but sometimes you have to do what you think is right . It helps when it’s an industry you care about personally, but you’re still dedicating hundreds of hours and even more money simply for the cause.
We’re not asking for much other than support and feedback. Eventually we’ll try to find a way to make money, but will do our best to never do it at the cost of the user. No one wants to play a game where a video-ad shows up after each rack. I wouldn’t put our users through that, but that means we’ll need to figure something else out. There are features that may come out in the future that we find intuitive and interesting enough to charge something light for, like $0.99, but that hasn’t happened yet. We’re hoping that when that time comes, our supporters will be able to see that a couple bucks is a very small price to pay for all of the man hours dedicated to making the game of pool a better place to be.
It’s 2019 now and the game of pool should join us.
Here’s a little breakdown of what we offer so far and a little bit of what’s involved:
ChalkySticks App for iOS, Android, and Web
This is the core application that merges news, beacons, locations, tv, and more. It does not include our new Trainer. Beacons broadcast your location which helps you find other players, but the bread and butter of this application is how it lets you find pool halls / bars near you. We have over confirmed 6,000 locations in over 2,000 cities around the world. (That’s a lot) When you get off the plane and want to play some pool, think ChalkySticks.
ChalkySticks Pad
An advanced diagramming tool that lets you layout balls, draw lines, add shapes, and more in a shareable image to either talk about with friends or shoot out on the Trainer.
ChalkySticks Map
The Map is a quick and easy reference that lets you explore the locations we have all over the world.
ChalkySticks TV
The TV is a 24/7 pool and billiards video channel that acts like a real life TV station. You open it up and pool should be playing. We have channels for: mixed, 8, 9, 10, straight, billiards, one pocket, banks, snooker, and trick shots. Note: Due to new changes in browsers that prevent auto-play, you may have to change your web browser settings or click-to-start the video.
ChalkySticks Trainer
This is the brand new training tool for Android, iOS, and web that everyone has been talking about. You can see more about it here.
While those are the current parts of the ChalkySticks ecosystem, there’s much more involved. A lot of time is spent on graphical work, design and programming experiments, new features, bug fixes, and updates to existing software.. in combination with content moderation, customer support, advertising, and general overhead. Also remember, this is a FREE product. We lose money for this. For example, here’s a commercial we spent a bit of time on for the Turning Stone Classic XXXI.
We encourage people to send us updates through the website or through the ChalkySticks App. The community is vital to help us keeping content up to date. Tell us if a new hall has opened, one has closed, or if there are details about it we don’t know yet. You’ll know sooner than we will. These submissions are curated into a moderation queue we take time to look at individually. Obviously, that takes a toll on our side but it’s the best way to ensure accurate information.
We have also been experimenting with a new thing tentatively called ChalkySticks Padcast which will be a type of video podcast where we are joined by professional pool players to talk about various situations that come up in the game of pool, how to read them, your options, and how to execute. This requires coordination between participants, coming up with topics to talk about, figuring out various situations to discuss, and shooting it. It’s like getting your own private lesson by some of the best in the business.
We’ve received some requests that we bring ChalkySticks Pad to mobile devices and you should be happy to hear that we are. There are some tough challenges with regards to the fact it’s a webapp and iOS devices don’t support all the features necessary. We’ve started to roll out features for Pad Mobile that work well on Android, but may not work as well on iOS yet. We’ll continue to update it as we go, but early versions look a bit like this:
If you’re curious about the nerdy reasons why, one reason is that screen space on mobile devices is limited and iOS browsers consume a lot of real estate (address bar, navigation bar). We try to use Fullscreen Mode to solve this, but iOS doesn’t support it. In addition, the whole app is based on dragging things around.. balls, lines, etc.. but dragging in iOS browsers is problematic because of the rubber band effect. Anyway, nerdy stuff aside, we’re working on it.
We spent a lot of the past couple years working on two really huge things that haven’t come out yet; one is an actual pool hall and the other is a TV show. We have a full treatment for a TV show we are looking to make at some point in the future, but also 100+ pages of research, designs, financial figures, business plans, food menus, staffing plans, etc for a pool hall. Both are tentatively halted as of now, but could come back in the future if the stars align financially.
There are a few new features planned for Pad and TV that we’re looking forward to. Insiders would say one feature for TV is a type of pop-up video fact display while you’re watching your favorite pros.
The big feature for Pad is a secret. :)
There are also plans to revamp the main ChalkySticks App that is still being designed, but will be faster and more efficient than our current app.
ChalkySticks Trainer was just released but a lot of work has already been done on subsequent releases which includes the ability to travel to different pool halls, earning rewards, buying new cues, challenging other players, player snooker and other games, and much more. We’ll be rolling out those updates as time goes on.
There’s even more, but we’ll stop…
This doesn’t even cover everything we’re doing, all the behind the scenes work (servers, databases, programming, maintenance, etc). There are a lot of pieces, a lot of features, a lot of experiments, a lot of designs, a lot of video, and a lot of everything.
All of this and somehow it’s still free. We’re not quite sure how that works, but get it while it’s hot I guess.
Anyway, stay with us! If you see a bug or an issue, let us know. If you want to see something that you don’t, let us know. If you’re a talented individual and want to help, we’ll see if that’s possible. But there’s clearly a lot going on and only so many hours in the day so… stay with us!
Signed,
Matt Kenefick
