We are expecting to launch the Draft Analyzer for Fantasy Football 2009 on June 12th. The Draft Analyzer is now a web-based application (finally!!). We will continue to have a desktop version available if you do not have internet access during your draft.

The Draft Analyzer was launched as part of the ESPN Insider on Monday, March 9th.  If you are an ESPN Insider, you can access the Draft Analyzer here.

This is the first year the Draft Analyzer is available as a web-based application (vs. a downloadable application).  You don’t need to download, install or activate any software, but you do need internet access during your draft.  I could be wrong on this (let me know if I am), but I believe this is the first advanced draft software program to work on Macs natively (i.e. without requiring an installation of Windows).

Ted

If you are about to purchase a license to the Draft Analyzer, please leave unchecked the option to “Keep my email address confidential“.  If you check this option, we will have to manually create your license.

We have switched our shopping cart to Google this year, which has been great with one critical exception.  On the first page of Google Checkout, Google includes a checkbox to “Keep my email address confidential”.  This feature prohibits us from automatically creating a license to our web application for you as we use your email address as your User Name.  If you check this box, Google encrypts your email address so it appears to us as “Ted-bjfej8espbhj@checkout.google.com”.  Unless you can guess what that assigned email address is, you won’t be able to immediately sign-in to the Draft Analyzer Web.

Leave this unchecked for automated licensing

I understand the thought behind this as I don’t like getting spammed, even from on-line retailers that I purchase from frequently…but that is what the second check box is for.  This feature is intended to improve lives, but in this case and many similar cases it doesn’t.  I am a huge fan of Google and the tools they provide, but they need to provide more flexibility to trusted merchants on this one.

If this has affected your purchase, please send an email to support at draftanalyzer.com with your purchase details and prefered email address to use as your User Name.

Sorry for the hassle.  Depending on how much pain this causes, we may or may not continue using the Google checkout service.

Ted

We have just launched our brand new web-based Draft Analyzer for Fantasy Baseball 2009.  This is a major shift from our desktop applications and we couldn’t be more excited about it!  No more downloads, installs, firewalls, outdated Java or nasty Windows Vista security issues to deal with…oh, and the application also works on Macs!!  We imagine you will also be excited as the Draft Analyzer is incredibly easy to use, has a richer user-interface and more powerful analytics that will help you draft a better overall team.  As always, please let us know (support at draftanalyzer.com or ted at advsportsmedia.com) if you have any feedback or feature requests as we are always looking to improve the Draft Analyzer.

Enjoy!

We are launching the Draft Analyzer Web today.  We still have a few clean-up items to work on, but expect to get most of these completed in the next 24-48 hours.  The great thing about the application now being web-based is that software updates are seamless to users, so making incremental updates (which we will do on a daily basis) won’t interrupt the user experience.  You can certainly wait to buy a license until this to do list is empty, but if you want to play around with the new software now you certainly can (we will obviously refund any purchases if we can’t finalize these features).

Here are the features we are currently working on (we will remove them as they are completed):

• Support for Keepers (Added; Left click player name and select “Add to Roster” from context menu…)
• One-click import of leagues from ESPN (ESPN and Ultimate licenses only)
• Various bug fixes reported by early users (doing daily uploads at this point to fix all reported issues)

Let me know if you see anything else that clearly needs fixing.

Thank you,

Ted

The 2008 Draft Analyzer Launch (Version 5.0) is now available for download from here.