Author: Pete R.
Date: 09:13:48 06/14/00
Go up one level in this thread
On June 14, 2000 at 02:36:19, pete wrote: >>> >>>>>I truly don't understand the people who like Blitzin - the last time I tried it >>>>>out, I thought it was absolutely putrid. I'd never willingly choose to use it >>>>>as a GUI! >>> >>>I haven't tried FICS, so like many I suppose I use ICC because I stumbled on it >>>first. But I fail to see what could be wrong with Blitzin. The chessboard looks >>>fine, the seek display is fine, and playing a game is quite comfortable. What >>>else do I need? Perhaps I need to check out FICS to see all the wonderful >>>GUIs?? I can't imagine something that is so much better that Blitzin would >>>fairly be called "putrid" by comparison. >> >>Whoops, I was following up to Adrien, not Pete of course. In any case I looked >>at the screenshots for the various interfaces shown at FICS. Fugly!! ;) Didn't >>see one for Freak, and could not access the web site given here. Anyway the >>default board for Winboard is ugly as sin, for example. Sickly green and yellow >>tones for the squares, and the pieces look like what you would find on old DOS >>programs. > >I understand your opinion about the different interfaces very well and follow >most of them ( but again , matter of taste ) , but Winboard isn't judged fairly >; the default colours are really bad but it is very useable as an ICS interface >; try it again after editing your winboard.ini with these colours : > >/whitePieceColor=#ffffff >/blackPieceColor=#1d1d1d >/lightSquareColor=#ccbda4 >/darkSquareColor=#a88964 > >Feels much better , doesn't it ? Yes of course, but this whole thing makes me laugh. ;) Programmers typically lack in artistic talent and/or aesthetic sense, or else they would probably be artists and not programmers. So here for all I know WinBoard may be the best chess front end in the universe in terms of elegant code, feature sets, access to those features, flexibility, etc. This is what gives programming types a hard-on. But at the end of the day the main purpose of WinBoard is to serve as a graphical front end for playing chess...and the board looks like crap!! :) It's so typical. The *one* thing that the user is going to look at most gets the least effort. It's a game! Games can look very good nowadays. People are used to 3D shooters with millions of colors, yet when you start up WinBoard you feel transported back to the 80's like you're playing on an Atari or Intellivision console. At least Blitzin looks like a modern windows program with nicely detailed pieces and a simulated wood board. There have probably been 50 minor version upgrades to WinBoard over time, representing hundreds of hours of effort, and no one thought to get a graphic artist to design some nice pieces and a good looking board. All it takes is one person to do it, and it should become the default in the latest version. Even a non-artist could probably do it with digital photographs of nice wood pieces. Instead you will get to where this program is so sophisticated that it can read your mind to play chess, and by default it will *still* have DOS-style pieces and a puke yellow-and-green board. It's just too classic. :)
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