Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 13:31:32 11/12/03
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On November 12, 2003 at 16:06:28, Mogens Larsen wrote: >That is more or less my opinion as well. WinBoard isn't as fully featured as >Arena and the gap is widening by the hour. However, it is very trustworthy. The >most important feature of a GUI - in my view - is reliability. It takes a long >time for an old dog like myself to trust a different option like Arena. My early >experiences didn't really help. Too many bugs made simple use cumbersome and >timeconsuming. The same can be said about the abundance of features. So unless >you're ready to devote a lot of time on checking and double checking, it >outgrows the gradual increase of reliability experienced by the user. At least >this user :-). > >I'm quite sure that most intents and purposes Arena is a reliable product and I >do use it for analysis. For everything else there's no substitute for WinBoard >as far as I'm concerned. Features aren't everything. Reliability and trust is >IMHO. I have to agree with both of you also. I've never had Winboard crash on me, but Arena occasionally does (still only rarely). Aside from that, there are a few things that bug me about Arena. If you make an illegal move, you get a message box that you are forced to close before you can continue with the game. That's no good in blitz. Winboard just tells me in the caption bar. There are other little things like that which have annoyed me in the past that indicate to me that Winboard was written by someone who knew how to make good decisions for even things that seem insignificant. Also, for some reason Arena takes way too much time to communicate with the engines (or maybe it's some other problem). If I run a game between two programs at 1/0 time control, it will somtimes take 4 minutes for that game to finish. That's either inefficient communication with the engines or Arena isn't really giving each engine 1 minute per game. Winboard is really good about this from my experience. Arena does have some nice features though, but I would prefer thoughtful implementations of very basic things (IE not a popup window if I make an illegal move) rather than 100 great features implemented in a less than optimal way.
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