hgm wrote:All the pieces you need are usually there, if you start from the standard opening position.
Oh, great. So the intended workflow how to add a new piece type to a positon seems to be:
- hitting crtl-alt-print.
- firing up MS Paint.
- hit crtl-v.
- back to Winboard, choose "new game".
- menu->edit.
- shuffle the pieces into the positions from the screenshot while taking care to temporarily place pieces to squares unused in the target position.
This is the most ridiculous way of editing a position I've ever seen.
And you can summon that position as a result of the 'clear board' clock-click cycle, as you apparently had not much difficulty discovering.
Unless that feature is also broken in that it does something other than it tells, the reason why I got the initial position was exactly that the un-edited position
was the initial one.
But this boils down to an issue of discoverability, rather than an ease-of-use issue.
That is the same. If a GUI is only useful once you fully know it, then it has failed as a GUI. I already mentioned that you can expect domain knowledge, everything else must be self-explaining. Unless, and that seems the case, you want a really crappy GUI.
And there is the possibility to summon up a context menu by right-clicking, if WinBoard is configured for that
Which it isn't. Having to configure Winboard to do basic things like a context menu is just another way in that Winboard is broken.
Alternatively, there is a mode where the right-click places a Pawn (the piece that is needed most frequently), which can be changed into any other piece by moving the mouse pointer vertically before you release the button.
*LOL* How sick is this one?! It's actually funny that in trying to explain why Winboard isn't insane, even more insanity pops up.
What matters is the quality of the way that the user likes best.
Insane default are a hallmark of bad software. You as programmer know the software best, and if you are unable to come up with sane defaults, then the result is a bug, it's as simple as that.
You think that the fact that people need lessons to drive a car is because all existing cars are poorly designed?
The reason why driving lessons are necessary is that cars are quite dangerous machines. It is easy to kill oneself or others with them if you use cars in the wrong way. Bad as Winboard is, but it doesn't reach that level, if only because it's physically impossible. So the comparison is nonsense.
Well, that is exactly how it works, in WinBoard and XBoard, right?
It was
yourargument that discoveribility would hinder power users. But I'm fine if you agree now that this argument is nonsense.
I must admit there isn't any keyboard shortcut for that
Uncombined shift keys are rare, effectively 11 (F1 is help - hopefully also uner Winboard). So the decision whether or not increasing/decreasing the number of PVs depends on whether this operation is assumed to be used often or not. I'm using it often, but I wouldn't generalise from here. Anyway, this was just an example how to enable power users while still providing discoveribility.
Uhm, btw., I forgot to mention some other items. The windows are separate, and I didn't see an easy option how to "combine" them so that collective movement or easy rescaling works.
And the chat. Well most chess GUIs don't have that feature at all, so that's difficult to compare. Still, on the monthly tourneys, I found the chat awkward. No participant list displayed, which is also why clicking on a participant for the /msg equivalent didn't work. Maybe somehow configuring a better external chat program would solve that one without much programming that wouldn't really be chess related.
