Author: Gerd Isenberg
Date: 09:14:51 10/07/05
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On October 07, 2005 at 05:47:25, Tord Romstad wrote: >My GUI is currently in bad need of a major overhaul. Because I lack >even the most basic knowledge in GUI design, I would appreciate >some input on the following questions: > >Some GUIs (e.g. Shredder 9 for Macintosh) use multiple windows >for the same game. There is a board window, a move list window, >an analysis window, and so on. Other GUIs (e.g. Sigma Chess and >my own Scatha) put everything in a single window, usually with the >board on the left side, the move list on the right side, and the >analysis output at the bottom. > >Which of these two ways to organise a chess GUI do you prefer, >and why? Personally I have a slight preference for the multi-window >solution, as long as only a single game is being played. Multiple >windows give me much more flexibility. I can organise the windows >any way I want, and I can bring one window to the foreground >without bringing the whole application to the forground. On the >other hand, when more than one game is being played, using >several windows could easily create a terrible mess. What is the >best way to avoid this problem? > >Tord Hi Tord, the topic is the MVC pattern or (ms terminology?) single or multiple docment interface (SDI, MDI) and/or the more advanced eclipse like ui with workspaces and perspectives. Usually in chess-guis we have a relativ simple relation between a model (document, game, position), views (windows) and controller (engine, chess-server, userinteraction). For a ususal single document interface (SDI), multiple windows (and window classes) for board, movelist, captured pieces, clock, game-history charts and search-information as (grand) child of one Frame-window is easy to implement and flexible. It is a matter of providing some default window-layouts and docking features, beside the obligatory window arrangement features to tile windows vertically/horizontally and to cascade windows. Also to store/load individual layouts (probably in conjunction with color, piece set and other board and notation properties as well). More sophisticated is an SDI-approach (one chess game), with multiple board windows, eg. to simultanious analyze different positions of the same game, probably with multiple and different engines per position, eventually providing k-best mode. Even more sophisticated is an MDI-appraoch with multiple heterogeneous documents or meta documents, like chess games, sets of chess-games currently produced by simultanious- or auto-play, pgn-archives e.g. merged to an opening book tree, multimedia related chess docs, where each document may have multiple views ;-) Gerd
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