The title of this software might make you think it's a "manage a football club" game. It isn't. What it is is a beautiifully-featured package for keeping track of the progress of teams and competitions throughout the season - statistics are presented for each round of a competition (even obsure things like "proportion of games won at home" – meat and drink to the true soccer fan); latest rounds are downloadable. All you need is a wireless network in your local pub to be the complete fount of all knowledge about a huge number of football competitions. "What did Millwall do in the first round of the UEFA cup?" The answer's here, in complete detail. Fantastic stuff – all respect to the author for making this available.
What it lacks is documentation. It's not immediately obvious how to use this package; for instance the "About" link takes you to a comprehensive list of downloadable match statistics, but there is no information on what to do when you get there (it turns out that all you need to do is download one, then click on it and it fires the app off with that result list downloaded, which is simplicity itself).
The README is presented in both French and (admittedly well-translated) English, but the dual languages in the same document make it hard to follow. This is not a gratuitous complaint - it's a real pity that this package might not be more widely-adopted simply because people can't find simple documentation on how to use it.
Might the author like to get in touch and discuss the documentation? My French is extremely poor but I do have experience in documenting software.
All in all 4/5 for this app though - it's a must for soccer fans. (Apologies for the word "soccer", by the way, but there are places in the world where "football" means something completely different to the Beautiful Game :-)
Re:Not what you think it is - jp.curcio
Thanks Tony for your feedback. As the author of SerieFoot, I can be joigned at seriefoot@free.fr email directly.Note that a complete on-line documentation exists on the Web site... but only in French language (my native language).
It would take too much time for me to translate it in "an admittedly well-translated" English (or even in Spanish since the three languages are available on the Web site).
I'd like to find some football enthusiasts able to spend hours to translate the documentation (or correct the program itself) for free, because SerieFoot is a freeware.
I cash in on the opportunity to thank publicly Patrick Marchini and Riccardo for the free Italian translation and Christian Froesch for the free German translation of the program.
Program development goes on, and the next major feature will provide even more statistics through a query-like language based on local menus.
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Sunday, December 05 2004 @ 03:50 AM PST