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Subject: Re: Speaking of GUI innovation (part II -- existing GUIs that innovate)

Author: Gerd Isenberg

Date: 03:44:14 09/07/05

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On September 06, 2005 at 22:14:55, Dann Corbit wrote:

>1.  Chessmaster has the "Human description of analysis" that is nicely done
>2.  SCID has a very nice "opening report" generator
>3.  Arena has an excellent tournament manager and engine configuration
>4.  Winboard has the best online connection manager (what nitwit could not
>figure it out?)
>5.  ChessBase has a good Elo recalculation feature
>6.  ChessAssistant can READ AND WRITE EPD records and you can run all sorts of
>engines inside of it (MCS, ChessAssistant, Winboard, UCI and others)
>7.  ChessGenius (my least favorite interface) has floating windows where every
>piece can be moved around and sized how you want it separately.
>
>More?
>
>What are your favorite features of chess GUIs that are fairly unique to one or
>two GUIs and that ought to be found in all of them?

Hi Dann,

what i still miss, is a real sophisticated MDI/MVC-chess gui, something like a
eclipse for chess. Multiple Chess documents, where each document may be
associated with multiple views and controllers. One chess-document may be
created by two engines playing each other, or by human-engine match or of course
by loading games from databases to analyze.

A chess-document, associated with one (or more) engine(s) might have a shared
hash-table and one or more views (chess-board-windows, including game notation)
associated with it. Each window is able to analyze a local position of the game,
multiple views of the chess document are able to analyze several positions of
the same game, same engine might share transposition table. Some analyze windows
may have move-filters or may work in some k-best move mode.

Multiple chess-docs may also be created inside a dedicated simultanious
workbench controller - similar to my old Dos-IsiChess.

Dedicated none-modal MVCs for chess-database and opening editor support.
An opening-book editor should have at least three control-window components as a
combined view/controller of the whole book:

1. A single selection list control with all available book moves from the
current root position (which might be changed by interaction with the mentioned)
together with some kind of probability of play (may be altered) and/or
annotations. Make/unmake the current selected move by interaction.

2. A tree control with further book moves of the current selected book move of
listcontrol (1). The tree control is able to expand/shrink nodes individually or
by move nesting level. Local Transpositions are indicated by some arrows to some
enumerated, colored tags.

3. A multi column list control with all (transposed) book-lines, leading to this
current root position. It must be able to handle/indicate mirrored positions
like 1.e3 e5. 2. e4 and transpositions played with other number of moves like in
the sveshnikov, where the same postions occurs after e6 Bf4 e5 Bg5 or immediate
e5 Bg5 etc..

All three controls allow a complex traversion of the opening book, with
"unlimited" undo/redo. Lines from other views/window may be immediatly added by
drag/drop. Additional search features of positions and move sequences is also
nice to have.

Cheers,
Gerd



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