New WinBoard beta

[JoshPettus]

Personally i would really like to see this. Just so you can stop maintaining 2 separate programs and and focus on the one. Tim Mann always said xboard was the main focus and that winboard became the tail that wagged the dog.

My only issue is opening up a terminal and typing "xboard fics" is great and all, but i still feel Xboard needs a good gui method to load its prepared list of icss. People would miss that from the old winboard opening dialog. Aside from that, i feel xboard is very much on par with winboard as of now, (Disregarding the new themes menu and book features which hasn't been ported over yet.)

[hgm]

The point is that the list of ICS is terribly small. So it is perfectly feasible to prepare a separate desktop icon or menu item for every ICS. And this is probably much easier for the user than choosing ICS through the GUI after startup.

[hgm]

OK, I uploaded a corrected version, both to

http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-4.7.beta.zip (bare winboard.exe)
http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-Portable.zip (portable complete (but modest) configuration)

The version in these downloads corresponds to the latest snapshot in my on-line source repository (master branch). The .exe is now 1.3MB, as before. I fixed the problem with the highlights on computer moves (which turned out to be only a problem when animation was switched off). Multi-color external bitmaps are now all drawn on a bright white background, so there is no interference between square color/texture and the pieces. The browse dialogs open in a more useful folder of the file system.

[JoshPettus]

I don't know, personally I never liked launching thorough shortcuts. They can break when you reorganize things. Not to say that they aren't a convenient way of doing things. But they require the user to know the commands on how they work, when the purpose of any good GUI is to make things up front and intuitive (by which i mean one can learn the system just by looking at it).

Winboard is such a versatile program we can have all sorts of settings in a shortcut ranging from how the board looks, the varient, to what engine to use, and virtually everything else imaginable. But you and Arun (mostly you ) have worked so hard to put all that stuff into nice easy to use menus. I say why draw the line at the ics? But what do others think? In linux world xboard is perfect as is, but i say that may change if you were to make it as a replacement for the current winboard.

Anyway just my two cents..

[JoshPettus]

Personally I would like to see one more top menu called ICS where it has all the ics related stuff. Launch ICS, List ICS, ICS Options, perhaps chat window - though I guess that does make sense in the view menu.

Speaking of ambiguity, intuitively I would like to see Common Engine under 1st and 2nd engine settings. Though I do understand why its under options as it technically has to do with polyglot being a part of xboard and not directly with the engines. But it effects how the engine behaves, particularly the book stuff. So idk...

[hgm]

This is all very problematic. For one, WB is not written in a way that allows changing ICS during a session: interpretation of the ICS options is only done during initialization, interspersed with other initialization code. That code would have to be isolated, to be made callable at any time, when people click the menu. And it would also have to be supplemented with code to terminate aprevious connection if the user tries to connect to a new ICS when he was already connected to one.

Even worse, you would have to decide in general how to handle mode switches, because the user could also click the ICS item in -ncp or engine mode. Logical would be to switch to normal ICS mode when you were in -ncp mode, and to -zippy mode when there already was an engine loaded. But then you would have to redo the zippy initialization as well, etc. So it requires juggling lots of code around, and also write lots of new code. Making the engine changeable through the menu was also such a horrible thing, and it still doesn't work completely flawlessly.

As to new top-level menus: we already have so many that space in the menu bar has become a severe problem, and the smaller board sizes no longer work because the bar would not fit. That makes it seem unwise to add separate ICS (and Book?) menus.

Redistribution over existing menus is of course always possible; the Engine menu is not entirely logical anyway, because I discovered that 'Retract Move' also functions in ICS mode, and thus really belongs in the Action menu. Note that the GUI book has nothing to do with Polyglot, other than that it happens tobe in a format that would also be understood by Polyglot. XBoard handles the GUI book, and Polyglot is not involved. Polyglot can also handle a book, and you indeed have to specify that in the Engine Settings dialogs.

But I agree that Common Engine would not really be out-of-place in the Engine menu, and that conservatism played a large role in keeping it in the Options menu. Perhaps we should consider reorganizing the menu a bit between 4.6 and 4.7. I already split the Load Engine into Load 1st Engine and Load 2nd Engine. And now that we have the 'Themes' menu, the name 'Board' no longer covers well what it does. So perhaps I should change that to 'Colors', and change 'Themes' to 'Textures and Themes'.

[JoshPettus]

Well thank-you for the reply anyway. Yah, that would be problimatic. I agree some renaming and reclassification of menus would probably be a good idea. I had no idea that the gui understood .bin books directly that's good to know.

[hgm]

It had to, because only UCI engines use Polyglot. So unless WinBoard handles book itself, WB engines could not use it.