Notices

I'm sorry to interrupt you, but what about top down figures with shadows? They can solve your paradox with rotated figures I suppose.

The thing that baffles me, is tons of open source chess software has already been written, so why as it not been recompiled for Maemo 5?

I have tried to install a SDK for Maemo 5 in Mandriva and it sent me nuts and it seems like Debian is a must be, if you want to port stuff for Maemo.

Getting Debian working via a USB HD is not easy if you have an older mother board that does not load the USB drivers off the bios instead of off the HD before the OS is in RAM.

Now I have to spend dollar buying hardware with USB drivers in bios, thanks Nokia for helping me empty my wallet.

Trying to write a chess engine for Minature is a serious case of trying to reinvent the wheel.

Crafty is open source and plays at GM strength, why not recompile it to work on Maemo 5?

I make no idle claim, I ran Crafty as a chess engine on ICC, my last game in my account on ICC as kismet, was in the year 2004 and my account using crafty reached the dizzying height of 2676, most definitely GM territory and I have the games to prove it.

No, give me the ability to log into FICS follow GM matches and chat to other FICsers and analyze GM matches with Crafty and I for one will be happy. maybe Eboard would be a good candidate.

Spend 2 years developing a chess engine for Maemo and Crafty will still kick it's but.

wazd, I looked for zenital graphics for chess pieces with no luck. If you or someone finds or creates something we can use I'm sure we will give it a try.

Dollyknot, welcome to the discussion! Rest assure that we are not creatig new free software for no reason, overlapping or in vain:

- We are well aware of the chess related alternatives in Maemo. See http://wiki.maemo.org/Chess . Also search for Crafty or Eboard in this forum and you will find active thread about ongoing and somewhat functional ports for Maemo 5. I have Eboard installed in my N900 and play on a daily basis. It works, but is far from an optimal mobile experience.

- We haven't found source code written in Qt (or anything else, I think) that is finger friendly and works well in 800x480. This is one of the main focuses of Miniature.

- We are not trying to write a chess engine! We are happy teaching Miniature the simple rules of chess. Then Scid/Crafty can work in the backend as a pure chess engine, but they alone don't solve the problem of the optimized UI based on Qt.

Check http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature to see the overall plan.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature/Development#Roadmap goes into more details on the current and next steps.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature/Development#References might be also interesting for you to see that we have done our homework looking for useful references.

Ukki found this online.
Scid vs PC

Who knows, but it might be worth looking into a little.

It looks to be more lightweight than it's monster of a father.

Anyway, I thought it deserved a mention here.

Very nice. Still, the old problem remains: Scid vs PC is still Tk/Tcl-based so I have no clue how that would ever become properly hildonized. Also, the FICS integration requires you to have a separate FICS client opened?! Anyway, perhaps contacting the author of Scid vs PC to help us with the Scid/Miniature interfacing is a good idea

On his webpage, he makes mention of ChessX.

This could be interesting.

Last update was in October and it also uses the QT library.

ChessX looks nice. I just want something to display online games with; I really don't understand the objections to Scid because I guess I don't care about cool graphics.

Mock up will be done by Wednesday! Sorry for the delays, yet again!

There is nothing really wrong with a stylus UI as long as you have a stylus friendly display, that's all. Miniature focuses on 100% finger friendly UI that works with displays not suitable for stylus e.g. capacitivde.

Started working on this thing, from the sketch i see that the other players status and buttons are available on the top. Is there a reason for this? Shouldn't only "your" buttons/info be displayed?