Contributors needed: the killer free chess game for Maemo - Page 12 - maemo.org

geneven | # 111 | 2009-11-07, 14:46 | Report

Originally Posted by qgil View Post

Miniature is now in project names and code repository. We will need a concrete strong rival to even consider a change of name.

What problem do you see in Miniature?

What does Miniature mean? Eboard means something. Xboard means something. Scid means something. Blitzin means something. I don't get Miniature.

Addison | # 112 | 2009-11-07, 15:14 | Report

Yeah, I don't get it either but didn't want to come across as sounding offensive.

I wouldn't even mind going with something really simple like "Chess Cutie", a play off of the Qt language it will be written in.

Oh well, it's his call.

mikhas | # 113 | 2009-11-07, 15:31 | Report

To me "miniature" is a variation of "Problemschach" (sorry, I don't know a good translation for this), that is, "Problemschach" with only few figures.

mikhas | # 114 | 2009-11-07, 15:44 | Report

Originally Posted by qgil View Post

If you ask me, that perfect port could be the Scid engine with the Miniature UI. It would be nice to know whether engine and UI are well layered in Scid or not. The pragmatical proposal would be to concentrate on the current phases in order to have a first shot to the Miniature UI and them contact them with questions. Asking now while we are still vaporware...

If in the meantime someone wants to make an ugly but fully functional port (stylus UI etc) it might be relatively feasible (says me, a non-developer). See the dependencies: http://packages.debian.org/lenny/scid

If we use PGN as our generic adapter, we should be able to interface with whatever engine we want. Scid is certainly great as a engine, but looking at the code I wouldn't want to port it (it uses TCL for the UI)

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geneven | # 115 | 2009-11-07, 15:58 | Report

Originally Posted by mikhas View Post

To me "miniature" is a variation of "Problemschach" (sorry, I don't know a good translation for this), that is, "Problemschach" with only few figures.

Yes, I agree with that; we call them 'studies'; also, in chess we refer to miniatures, as in very short games.

But I still don't see how it refers to this program.

I don't care that much, either; I think it will be considered a weird, not so good of a name, but it's the program that counts more than the name.

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qgil | # 116 | 2009-11-07, 18:49 | Report

Yes, a miniature is a short chess games generally below 20 moves when a master makes a mistake falling into the trap prepared by another master. The original latin word means "something small". It's a reference to the pocketable format of this chess game.

see http://www.superajedrez.com/escuela/celadas/index.htm It's in Spanish but maybe you know an English squivalent. At least by the names and notations you should be able to see what are we talking about.

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mikhas | # 117 | 2009-11-08, 02:58 | Report

Just a quick status update: Using the QGraphicsScene framework I tried to recreate the latest mock-up. Sadly, I could not trigger the portrait mode yet. The currently available Qt4 packages for Maemo don't seem to have support for it, but I've seen relevant changes in the gitorious repos (perhaps we could get more regular releases please?). So yeah, the screenshot might not be too impressive, but it's a start.

The figures are actually QGraphicsItems, so fingertouch should be possible soon. Also, the board already understands FEN to draw itself.

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geneven | # 118 | 2009-11-08, 03:53 | Report

Originally Posted by qgil View Post

Yes, a miniature is a short chess games generally below 20 moves when a master makes a mistake falling into the trap prepared by another master. The original latin word means "something small". It's a reference to the pocketable format of this chess game.

see http://www.superajedrez.com/escuela/celadas/index.htm It's in Spanish but maybe you know an English squivalent. At least by the names and notations you should be able to see what are we talking about.

Let's see, "a game tactically decided in twenty moves or less". Yep, more or less exactly what I just said. It's good to have the Spanish reference, though. I think this is a site I checked daily when I had a site called ChessWatch for a number of years!

qgil | # 119 | 2009-11-08, 08:29 | Report

mikhas, this is excellent! So are you saying that this is based on the Qt 4.5 community port and can be run in the SDK?

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mikhas | # 120 | 2009-11-08, 11:45 | Report

Originally Posted by qgil View Post

mikhas, this is excellent! So are you saying that this is based on the Qt 4.5 community port and can be run in the SDK?

Yes, Miniature is using Qt. To be precise:

Code:

$ dpkg-query --show libqt4-dev
libqt4-dev	4.5.3~git20090723-0maemo4+0m5

For the device you also have to install it from the terminal (the version number there is 4.5.3~git20090, further instructions are here).

Also, the graphics look wierd in scratchbox/Xephyr, therefore I took the screenshot above directly from the device (SDK != N900

).

EDIT: If anyone can point me to a working example for activating portrait mode in Qt (I don't mind if I have to use the latest git version for now) I'd be very thankful.

Last edited by mikhas; 2009-11-08 at 12:00.

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