User Profile for g21_dotmac

Ignatius Chess Client 1.0b (Mac OS X)

Good start!  

Though unfortunately I couldn't actually get it to connect to ICC. I really look forward to trying this, as it has a few promising innovations. [alert admin]

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Saturday, February 12 2005 @ 03:38 PM PST

Jin 2.12.1 (Mac OS X)

hmmmm....  

While I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from developing new chess clients for OS X, this one needs a bit of work, particularly when we already have the lovely Chessic 2.0. This client seems to willfuly ignore conventions of Mac software, which are freely available to any developer, and looks more like something ported from a PC. Note to the wise, Mac lovers hate nothing more than things which make their macs look like PCs. The windows-within-a-window thing is frankly bizarre (and unprecidented in OSX software), and I found it hard to resize the individual windows. The underlining of letters in menus is very PCish and a real turn-off. Frankly, I can't say I found the board and piece graphics too pretty either - Chessic with a custom chess font, or Vektor3 would be the benchmarks in terms of presentation, I think it would be necessary for any new client to try to match this level of graphical flair. I don't want to come off sounding too negative as obviously this a work in progress, and developing is no doubt hard. But I won't be giving up Chessic too soon! At the very least the windows would have to just be normal windows, the board and pieces look more appealing, and the menus work like normal mac menus before I would think of trying this again. [alert admin]

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Saturday, February 12 2005 @ 03:15 PM PST

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