Author: Richard A. Fowell (fowell@netcom.com)
Date: 10:44:06 04/10/99
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On April 10, 1999 at 11:39:05, ERIQ wrote: >I am surprised to see how little software is written for macs!! Hmmm. Here are some - did you know about them? Chess Chess Chess Internet Playing Databases Tutorial Interface ------------------------------------------------------------------ HIARCS 7.0 ChessBase1.1 Chess Mentor Internet Chess for Macintosh ChsMstr 4000 ExaChess Dr. Schiller Fixation SigmaChess 4 BookUp Maurice Ashley PowerICS-Z Crafty 16.3 SmartChess Chess Mates MacChess 5.0 Essentia Mac Think Like a King CheckMate For information and availability on the above, see: http://dmoz.org/Games/Board_Games/Chess/Software/Macintosh/ Certainly, there is less chess software for the Mac than the PC, and when a package is available on both the Mac and the PC, the Mac version is often older, or with less features. And I would like to see that difference reduced. However, there is much more good, "native" chess software available on the Mac than I can usefully use, (I'm way behind on just reviewing the available packages) so the fact that there is "way much more" chess software available on the PC than I can usefully use doesn't strike me as a major drawback for the Mac computer chess user, especially when the Mac user has the option of running the PC packages under emulation with Virtual PC/Softwindows. (note - this will weaken the Elo of chess engines considerably, due to the slower speed of emulated software). I'm as greedy as the next person - I'd like to see Chessmaster 6000 and Fritz running native on my Mac, even though I have HIARCS 7. >why wouldn't chessbase 7, genius 6,rebel 10 or fritz 5.32 be availible. >I would think if for no other reason to compete with hiarcs. [ My conjecture is ...] Quite simply, because they don't think they will sell enough copies to make the profit they want. At one point, Chessbase was developing for the Mac - they still sell Chessbase 1.1 for the Mac, and funded the development of SigmaChess. However, when Apple's market share went down, they stopped. I think that a profit could be had with clever marketing - they fact that there are fewer Mac owners should be balanced by the fact that there is less competition - the "bigger share of a smaller pie" approach. If you want to see more (and better) chess software available on the Mac, you can do what I do (note - these are sorted from the easy to the obsessive). 1) Support the publishers that do sell Mac chess software by buying their products. 2) Let your Mac-owning friends that are interested in chess about the packages available (so they can do #1). 3) When you see a retailer that sells chess software, ask them about the Mac packages, and if they didn't know about them, give them the publisher's information. (So that people you don't know can do #1) 4) When you find areas in a Mac product that can be improved, send a constructive suggestion to the author/publisher, so the next version can be even better. 5) Save this message on your disk, and use it to help answer any questions you see on the Net about the availability of Mac chess software. 6) When you see a chess site with chess links, suggest that they add some links to Mac chess software (like the link I gave above, or the links in the link I gave above). 7) Write reviews of Macintosh chess software for print and online chess magazines. 8) Create and maintain Macintosh chess software sites on the Web. 9) Beta test Macintosh chess software ( a good way to get on the beta lists is to do a thorough job on #4). Richard A. Fowell (fowell@netcom.com)
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