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Subject: Re: Chess GUI design

Author: Gerd Isenberg

Date: 11:06:31 10/07/05

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On October 07, 2005 at 13:01:17, Tord Romstad wrote:

>On October 07, 2005 at 11:24:09, Fernando Villegas wrote:
>
>>What about multiwindows BUT any of them as a total screen for the same data?
>>So, if you are playing two games, the list of moves of the two goes in the same
>>moves window; the engine Evals goes together in the eval windows and so and
>>so...
>
>Fernando,
>
>This is actually a great idea!  For instance, I could use several tabs in the
>board window, one tab for each running game.  Switching to a different
>tab would automatically change the contents of all auxiliary windows.
>This should also be reasonably simple to implement.
>
>Thanks for the idea!
>
>Tord

Yes, but that's already a "waste" product if you implement mdi.
Whether you implement a shared view on an active document - or you have multiple
views associated with different documents, but only the active and maximized top
view overlaps others - has the same pragmatical effect. The latter needs a bit
more memory, but is more flexible because you have the option to size or arrange
board-windows inside a board-workspace tiled, cascaded or individual sized.

Implementation effort is almost the same, considering appropriate classes/libs
for window management, like awt/swing for java or QT, MFC or X/motiv for C/C++.

One further aspect for 2-D board windows - you like to keep the pure board
anisotropy (quadratic). So a free sizable, isotropic game-window, eventuelly
with similar aspect ratio than the desktop usually leaves some space for a
movelist.

So i suggest a separate game/analyze-frame window class with some
layout-management for child windows like board, movelist, two clock-windows and
others. Those frame windows may share a workspace area inside the application
frame-window, containing several (docking) areas of tabbed none game-windows,
associated with the active board-window and associated controller (engine), e.g.
search-info, statistics etc..

Gerd



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