- “We’ve been working on brand new software for several months now and I suggest to the most curious among you to test it.”
- The French operator has taken the opportunity to rethink the entire online poker experience.
- The changes are immediate to the point that, without the logo, one might be hard-pressed to realize that they were still on Winamax.
In one of the most remarkable product updates in recent memory, French online poker leader Winamax has quietly unveiled an entirely new desktop client, rebuilt from the ground up, for real money public beta testing.
In its customary understated style, the operator has made no public announcements, issued no press release nor provided any roadmap. A single post on a popular French poker forum shared links to the new client downloads, available for both Windows and Mac.
“It’s been ten years since Winamax software for Mac/PC has undergone a complete overhaul, and it was time to do something about it,” wrote Aurélien “Guignol” Guiglini, poker product manager of Winamax, on the forums of poker community site Club Poker at the weekend.
“We’ve been working on brand new software for several months now and I suggest the most curious among you test it out,” he added.
In a way, the new desktop clients were built through necessity. The existing client is built on Adobe Air, a run-time system that makes it easy to develop apps that work across multiple platforms, making it fast to develop and support desktop apps on Windows and Mac from a single code base.
However, the technology has been deprecated for a while; a year ago, Adobe announced it would be ending support at the end of 2020. Flash, an archaic web technology which powers Air, will also be sunset, and all major browser manufacturers will disable the plugin at the end of the year.
Thus, Winamax knew that it had to rebuild its desktop offer on new tech. But rather than simply port their existing client to a new development platform, the French operator, known for its innovation in product development, has taken the opportunity to rethink many parts of the online poker experience.
