Re: about using winboard
Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2018 10:33 pm
"You seem to have grave objections against text as as a handle for discoverability. Why is that?"
Maybe because G=Graphical in GUI?
Maybe because G=Graphical in GUI?
When I click on "winboard.exe", that contraption comes up. I've yet to see another GUI where such nonsense is even possible. See Arena how to do that one right. The items in the Winboard folder of the Windows start menu are overloaded with tons of random stuff anyway. Even the start menu entries are badly designed.hgm wrote:when you start WinBoard through the Windows start menu item specifying what you want to do
Yeah, so why is the option "play against A chess engine", which is SINGULAR, and then there are two engines? And if singular suggests "A" chess engine, why can't I actually do that but have to choose TWO engines? Do they both play? But chess is a game for TWO players. So with two engines, that suggests one for White and one for Black - leaves me with playing the Ninja pieces or what?That is "play against an engine", right? It doesn't say "Play against two engines"...
In order to get the stupid dialogue to do what it announces, to play against ONE chess engine.Why the heck would you do that???
No, the right way would be not to mingle two exclusive options into one radio button selection. Play against A chess engine requires ONE chess engine, matching TWO engines requires TWO engines, and that doesn't make sense.But I guess it would be very easy to make it more idiot-proof here, by simply using the first engine also as second engine, when the user doesn't specify one.
Then it doesn't make sense to include it on that menu level. See Arena how to do it right, where you also can reorder the list of installed engines.This item is just for deleting or re-ordering the list. Otherwise you should never need it.
Only if one has no idea how to implement functionality in a GRAPHIC user interface. Resorting to text editing is unconditional capitulation.Standard text-editing functions are actually a very efficient way to do this.
Then call it somehow else, but accessing the same functionality (putting in a new engine) via two different menu items is nonsense. On top of that, it makes me wonder why installing a new engine 1 is different from installing a new engine 2 or not.In my experience, people would have no clue what it meant if you provided a menu item "register engine".
Next broken feature that shows complete lack of understanding even basic GUI principles. This kind of effect should not have to be detected by the user after repeated use. It should have an obvious feedback directly after the action. See Arena how to do that right.that engines they used before appears in a list
LOL. Winboard is the most broken one, and I'm far from the only who tells you this over the years.It seems you have been so much exposed to the crummy way it tends to work in other Chess GUIs
It's at least better than clumping two different functionalities into the same dialogue.that you consider it normal that engines have to be 'registered' before you can use them, and get confused when this silliness is abolished.
The G in GUI, what do you think it stands for, hm? For pasting the position via text data? That understanding is so broken that it's no wonder why Winboard is such a bad GUI.And of course they would never paste a FEN.
Giving user feedback is essential. The "feedback" is a nonsensical text string in a place where it doesn't make sense (the clocks).Funny that you expect anything to open.
If a GUI comes up with total nonsense like clicking the clock for emptying the board, which has NOTHING to do with each other, than I can expect the rest of the GUI to be the same kind of randomly duct taped hotch-potch. Means, it is disqualified because I'm not willing to spend time to learn a bad GUI.That is an interesting point of view. For me, as a user, it is not so much important what I can do with a GUI in the first minute, but rather what I can do in the 20 years after that.
If you have to look up the manual, that's because the GUI is bad. The manual is not the appropriate place to patch up lack of usability.heaven forbid, would require me to look in the man**l
That's because I was using Linux as only system over 9 years, and I know that Winboard is an Xboard port, so I could reasonably expect it to be riddled with usability bugs. And I was right, of course.You write a nice comedy act, but in fact you did discover that you had to click the clock, eve though it was the absolutely crazy thing to do.
Don't try to defend this garbage. It IS garbage. OK, you can argue that you don't care because the garbage works for you and you don't mind. Which also is why you will keep the garbage as is since anyone who objects could repair it himself, given that Winboard is GPL'ed.It seems you are trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill here.
Google what the G in GUI means.You seem to have grave objections against text as as a handle for discoverability. Why is that? Are we supposed to design for dyslectics?
Also nonsense. GUIs are supposed to lead the user, and by design. This isn't design, this is patching up the lack of proper GUI design.Every time XBoard starts, it prints in large letters over the board "Right-clicking menu item or dialog text pops up help on it".
XBoard was never designed to be a chess GUI, of course. It was made to provide a graphical board for gnuchess, nothing more or less. That's also why there are a bunch of weird idiosyncrasies in CECP. Any functionality additional to that original goal was added later, by a diverse group of programmers.Ras wrote: Xboard is the product of capable programmers without even the faintest competence in GUI design, probably not even knowing what it is and mixing it up with pretty or fancy display effects.
Which is also a red flag in itself, see the link I gave earlier in the thread. The resulting mess is exactly what you can expect from that kind of development process. Process becomes product, as an industry saying goes.Any functionality additional to that original goal was added later, by a diverse group of programmers.
That seems a fallacious argument. Text is a subset of graphics, and GUIs typically have text-based menus, and print their error messages as text. I don't see anything wrong in that; we are not designing for the MacDonalds here.gbtami wrote:"You seem to have grave objections against text as as a handle for discoverability. Why is that?"
Maybe because G=Graphical in GUI?
Going to the installation folder and clicking .exe files there would already be considered 'hacking' by the average Windows user. This is not what they do to start FireFox, MS Word, MS Paint... It seems an awful lot like you use your expert knowledge to seek out situations where you can wreck havoc once you magically turn into an idiot user after the situation is reached.Ras wrote:When I click on "winboard.exe", that contraption comes up.
Well, so one more reason for me to prefer WinBoard over other GUIs. The latter apparently are missing a feature that I often use, and allow me to do the same thing only in a cumbersome way.I've yet to see another GUI where such nonsense is even possible.
"Tons of random stuff". Not really criticism that I can work with. I did not throw any dice to create menu items; there are items to connect to various ICS, to start in game-viewer mode (normally done by clicking on a PGN file, so not needed very often), and several items to start with a specific engine (in a sub-group). And, yes, one to explicitly summon the Startup Dialog, for those who like it. So far not very random, but carefully chosen as tasks that might be the sole reason why people want to use WinBoard in the first place. Then there is an 'Uninstall' item, which I believe is also pretty common in any software package.See Arena how to do that one right. The items in the Winboard folder of the Windows start menu are overloaded with tons of random stuff anyway. Even the start menu entries are badly designed.
It doesn't seem true if you keep defending absurd design choice like clicking on the clock to clear the board.hgm wrote:Let me first say that I very much appreciate any feedback.
Also, the source is online. Anyone can just grab the source andFulvio wrote:It doesn't seem true if you keep defending absurd design choice like clicking on the clock to clear the board.hgm wrote:Let me first say that I very much appreciate any feedback.
The problem is well known: programmers have a tendency to think how a feature can be implemented, which contrasts with the GUI's purpose to hide technicalities.
That been said, I think this thread is a little bit ungrateful. It's free software and I'm sure that a lot of time was spent in its development. With limited time and resources it is reasonable to prioritize functionality over easy of use, and indeed the result is that many free software have usability problems. However many people can cope with that, they are free to decide if it's worth spending time to learn how to use it and if the occasional quirks are a deal breaker.
But that is a totally wrong diagnosis. This design choice was not made at all because I wouldn't know another way to implement it. I know many other ways to implement it. In fact it was implemented in another way (which can still be activated by changing a configure option), namely by having to right-click the board to summon a context menu, and then select white/black to move there. But this, and most more conventional alternative ways were quite annoying to me as a user.Fulvio wrote:It doesn't seem true if you keep defending absurd design choice like clicking on the clock to clear the board.
The problem is well known: programmers have a tendency to think how a feature can be implemented, which contrasts with the GUI's purpose to hide technicalities.
That would be a starter, yes. However, that doesn't solve the problem that editing a position still is not possible because you can only move pieces, but you cannot add new ones. That is why the Shredder GUI opens an "edit board" along with piece icons at the side. And side to move. And castling rights.hgm wrote:So instead of displaying the time in the 'clock fields' above the board, they could be made to display the texts 'Clear Board' and 'Set White/Black to move', so that they visibly turn from clocks into buttons.