Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 17:08:30 11/25/05
Go up one level in this thread
On November 25, 2005 at 19:40:15, Andreas Guettinger wrote: >On November 25, 2005 at 19:19:10, Tord Romstad wrote: > >>Scatha is now mature enough to satisfy most of my own chess >>GUI needs, but it is still far behind the competition. Mac OS X still >>lacks a free, full-featured and user-friendly chess GUI with a >>native look and feel, which is a great pity (the best thing we have >>is probably Jose, but it looks and feels more like a cross-platform >>Java program compiled for OS X than a native OS X application). > >What about Sigma Chess, the GUI Hiarcs 9.6 UCI is connected to ? It comes as a >registered and a free (light) version. I still find it the best GUI for UCI >engines on OS X. Sigma Chess Lite might be the best free option, but that says more about the sad state of current OS X chess GUIs than about Sigma Chess. There are a number of reasons why I don't like Sigma Chess. First of all, the free version is so crippled that I find it hard to regard it as more than a trial version of a shareware program. Sigma Chess Lite doesn't even have an analysis mode, which makes it completely unusable to me. The GUI is ugly to look at, with the clutter of tiny icons scattered everywhere (even in the menus!). It has a very Mac OS 9-like look and feel, which makes it look completely out of place on an OS X desktop. I also find it extremely annoying that the program uses a single, non-resizable window with very limited ways to customise the layout. Vektor is much better, but is not free, has a pathetically weak chess engine, and no UCI support. For the record, I am not trying to say that my program is better than either Sigma Chess or Vektor. As I wrote in the first paragraph above, Scatha is still far behind the competition. I hope future versions will be better, though. Tord
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.