Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

First N900 specific bug!

Bug 12419 - About Miniature dialog: "i" button is hiding a part of a link

Thank you for reporting! Will be fixed in 0.5.

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

In fact there is another one but I'm not sure it's a Miniature bug...

Bug 12418 - Show task switch button in the upper left corner

Feedback from those of you following the QtComponents development for Maemo is welcome.

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

Hi everyone.

I'm the one behind qt-components port to fremantle. It seems like there are some problems with on-click-installs with Miniature and Butaca repos. Problem is that dropbox can't handle catalog files the way we need to get it properly working on N900s. Said that, please those who could store catalogs on a decent web server, please feel free to update wiki links so new users could install miniature and dependences as easy as possible.

Besides that, there's one problem with orientation when application is minimized from keyboard. It will be fixed ASAP but I take holidays tomorrow \o/. As a workaround, minimize tapping on the top left corner of the screen. That works.

To reduce dispersion, I will open two wiki pages:

• http://wiki.maemo.org/QtComponents/UserFAQ for User questions. Installation, CSSU interaction, etc whatever.
  
• http://wiki.maemo.org/QtComponents/DevelFAQ for Developer questions.

Those wikis are OPEN. I'm bit better writing code than docs. So, feel free to use/update these wiki pages.

Salu2.

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

Nice! : )
first of all great work inean!
and thanks for taking up that keyboard minimize bug!
this is why i love this community!

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

Why not simply extras-devel?

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

I still waiting for kate to allow me to override extras devel qt-components...

Beleive me: I don't want to maintain my own repo...

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

every one will be waiting for this to happen cuz dropbox.com doesnt work for me as i am residing in china ,these monks are blocking it .Anyhow ,hope kate allows you to do that as soon as possible ,cuz i dont think that will hurt her N900 meego CE requirements .nice to see you here ,finally !!
Edit : any garage account holder may start editing the wiki page for feasible installation of the packages & of course the one who knows how to do it .

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

nice work!!!!

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

Use a different package name?

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

https://www.transifex.net/projects/p/miniature/ !!!

We still don't have string freeze for the 0.5 release but if you are adventurous you can start translating Miniature to your preferred languages. The current strings will probably stay as they are now, but we will add some new strings - not much.

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

Anyone tested if it works with Qt4.7.4 (which comes with CSSU?). I am asking so if something is KO, by reporting it, I will be able to try to find the bug in Qt and hopefully fix it before the next CSSU update.

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

Are you planning to add the option for Playing chess against a computer. Because i like the GUI of this version!

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

First batch of translation teams: Chinese (China), Dutch, Finish, French, German and Polish. Welcome everybody!

https://www.transifex.net/projects/p/miniature/teams/

Yes, it is in the wishlist. :)

http://miniature-chess.org/wiki/Wishlist

mikhas actually did something already with GNU Chess as an engine but I don't know how far he went. According to him, the Miniature architecture is completely pluggable allowing the addition of backends that can interact seamlessly with the frontend/UI.

There is actually some code in place already:

https://www.gitorious.org/miniature/...ame/gnuchess.h
https://www.gitorious.org/miniature/...me/gnuchess.cc

If someone wants to try out developing the GNU Chess integration s/he will get all the help from mikhas and me.

Personally I'm still hesitating whether the next major feature should be computer chess or asynchronous chess (play via email / sms / tweet...)

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

@freemangordon
Yes, it works great with the latest CSSU, although i had to put it in a blacklist, so it stays in a portrait
@qgil
Please add a Russian language over there, i would like to contribute too.

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

qgil, many thanks for this. I remember watching the miniature development many years ago (just seems like it) and now so pleased to have this finally working. You are my hero of the week.

For info, I have cssu installed and have no orientation issue, but then I lock my N900 in landscape. I think I may well be the only user on here that doesn't want portrait (except for MeBook).

Thanks again, I'm off to play some Chess :-)

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

The response of translations has been impressive so far.

Watch it in one single image:
https://www.transifex.net/projects/p...all-resources/

Languages looking for translators:

• Arabic (also very useful to make Miniature work on right-to-left)
• Czech
• Danish
• English (yes, we want to have native speakers in charge of the English strings)
• Hungarian
• Malay (Indonesia, Malaysia)
• Norwegian
• Portuguese
• Slovak
• Spanish (a few strings exist for testing but a team still needs to be formed)
• Swedish
• Turkish
• Ukrainian

More:
https://plus.google.com/100920064738...ts/PGkZ5cnXth4
http://miniature-chess.org/wiki/Translations

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

To be honest, many thanks for mikhas. Without him we would be looking at nice mockups, at best.

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

The package is no optified. It takes about 2Mb of rootfs space (most of it because of qtComponents) and there are even header files installed in /usr/include/miniature.

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

no icon on desktop:confused:

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

^ You mean no icon for the icon on desktop? right?

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

I got the game going, with the apt-get method mentioned on the Wiki. My board says 42. Rc1 always, which might have been played once upon a time.

As far as I can tell, this is useless for playing a game out of a book, normally the simplest thing a chess game should be able to do. There is no way to go back to earlier moves in the game, the minimum one would need to be able to use this thing for any normal chess activities including looking at moves that have been played. I am currently going through the excellent Tarrasch's Best Games of Chess, with a lot of games played in 1895 and thereabouts; it would have been nice to use Miniature for that. The interface is pretty -- if that's all someone cares about, this is fine.

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

So you need a "dumb" board which allows you to move as written in a book or (chess) magazine?

Get involved by creating feature requests or adding features to the wish list! This is a good starting point:
http://www.miniature-chess.org/wiki/Get_involved

The main goal of Miniature at the moment is to make online games against foreign players possible. Most of these games are rated so it's unusual to take back a move so this is not implemented yet.

The first question for example is: How to implement the forward/backward move function? I could imagine a swipe gesture for this... but as written a good place to deiscuss this more concrete would be a filled bug report/enhancement request in the Bug tracker

Ciao jukey

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

everything should work fine even better, but there should be problems with some CSSU extensions like portait task manager and orientation stuff. The fact is that a qt-components specifically targeted to CSSU wold be great. Maybe we could discuss this on CSSU maillist.

Salu2

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

This is a very good point. QTComponents are a common library, not part of Miniature. The app itself is relatively thin (the package uploaded to the Nokia Store for the N9 has 221.2 KB).

All this goes down to the root of the problem: Miniature in Maemo is experimental at least while there is no Maintainer for it. inean was kind enough to package a build from the master version some day, I guess to test "his" QtComponents, and that's it. If you ask me, I'd prefer that he keeps putting his time in the complex task of porting Qt Quick Components to Maemo & the CSSU. Ideally, someone could take the relatively easier task of packaging properly the stable Miniature version (once every 6 weeks or so, not a huge amount of work).

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

Miniature 0.3 showed a red square in the N9 app grid and the problem was fixed by rebooting the device. This is because a static URL was expected. We fixed this for MeeGo Harmattan in 0.4, but perhaps the solution is not cross-compatible with Maemo?

What do you see exactly and does it get fixed after rebooting? You are invited to file a bug at http://bugs.maemo.org - the best way not to forget about the problem (same for the packaging issues reported by ivgalvez above).

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

I suggested this in more or less the beginning of the original Miniature thread and that wasn't the last time. All one has to see is Xboard or Eboard or Scid or Blitzen or practically any of the non-N900 chess games in existence on FICS or ICC or any of the chess sites out there.

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

geneven, I'm *very* happy to see you here (even if still not satisfied) :)

As jukey explains, our approach this time was to build the minimum set of features to start and grow our user base (a good way to potentially increase your contributor base too). We decided to go for online games at FICS, and there is still some work to do there for the 0.5 release.

After 0.5 we will probably start looking to another type of chess activity from the wishlist. I personally have also a big interest in using Miniature to learn and review games but there are two candidates that look more urgent (as explained few posts above):

- Asynchronous chess (e.g. via email)
- Computer chess (mikhas did some work already to integrate GNU Chess)

Then again, if someone wants to take his preferred features and work to implement them he will get all our support. mikhas and me are the only developers at the moment (getting plenty of help from jukey finding bugs in our code under the stones). We want to keep our hobby time in very focused work.

This is weird, though. The only thing Miniature can do now is start games from scratch?

By the way, if you have a chance to run a version from master (unstable) there you will find a "Testing mode" button. When enabled Miniature doesn't play real games (not to bother real FICS players) and there you can move pieces at will for both sides. Not optimal at all but my kids have used it as "offline board" already.

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

Yes, and we took your advice seriously. This is actually one of the reasons why mikhas and I focused on making Miniature play FICS games and forget about the rest while this first goal is not achieved.

As discussed many times, we believe that no Linux desktop alternative is suitable for a mobile device. "Keep the engine of XYZ and rebuild the UI" is easier said than done if you look the toolkits these great desktop apps are using. We decided to go for a contemporary Qt backend and a Qt Quick frontend opening the possibility to reach several mobile OS while keeping all the chances in the desktop too.

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

I would like to look at the game I just played in Miniature. Is 23 moves to checkmate a miniature?

Move geneven FohlenEcho
---- ---------------- ----------------
1. e4 (0:02) e5 (0:02)
2. Bc4 (0:01) Nf6 (0:03)
3. d3 (0:03) Bc5 (0:08)
4. Nf3 (0:01) d6 (0:01)
5. O-O (0:02) O-O (0:01)
6. Nbd2 (0:02) a6 (0:03)
7. c3 (0:03) Qe7 (0:01)
8. Re1 (0:03) Be6 (0:01)
9. Bxe6 (0:04) Qxe6 (0:02)
10. Nf1 (0:01) Nbd7 (0:09)
11. Ng3 (0:03) Ne8 (0:08)
12. d4 (0:06) Ba7 (0:05)
13. Ng5 (0:08) Qe7 (0:02)
14. Nf5 (0:06) Qd8 (0:03)
15. Nxh7 (0:07) Kxh7 (0:02)
16. Qh5+ (0:02) Kg8 (0:02)
17. Re3 (0:02) g6 (0:12)
18. Qh6 (0:07) Qf6 (0:02)
19. Ne7+ (0:12) Qxe7 (0:04)
20. Rh3 (0:01) f5 (0:05)
21. Qh8+ (0:07) Kf7 (0:09)
22. Rh7+ (0:03) Ke6 (0:05)
23. d5# (0:02)
{Black checkmated} 1-0

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

I suspect that the devel files are also distributed on Harmattan version :D. By the way, Quim, create a fremantle branch on gitorious and i will send patches to it so someone could work on the fremantle port. Right now, a git rebase is enough (Not too much work IMHO) :)

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

Old enhancement request, in our backlog:

Chess games logs need to be stored somewhere
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8142

I will add there more details of what would need to be done to include this feature. Any help planning and doing the actual work is welcome. Not everything is programming, for instance we need to define the UI to browse through games, the actions available when looking at a specific game...

If someone brings the brilliant workflow then I don't expect difficulties from the backend point of view or the UI (although it is still work, but less when it's crystal clear what needs to be done).

Any takers?

Only when a player doesn't do an obvious flop. ;) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_chess#M

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

I rather leave this to mikhas, who should come from holidays one of these days. He is the git & deb master. :)

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

nice! Yes, it is, since miniature called a game within 20-30 moves

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

Here:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8142#c6

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

can we do this with checkers?

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

Out of scope for Miniature as of today. The only thing they share is a svg file for a board and the fact of having two users playing against each other. If someone wants to reuse Miniature code or UI ideas you're welcome.

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

Off topic, but coincidentally I saw this today: http://store.ovi.com/content/178384?...e=search&pos=1

No idea about the quality, I haven't tried it.

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

Miniature 0.5 planning meeting

On #miniature IRC channel @ freenode.net

UTC: Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 15:00:00
Berlin: Wed 5:00 PM
San Francisco: Wed 8:00 AM
More: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldcloc...15&min=0&sec=0

There is an initial proposal at
http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature/Deve...re_0.5_release -
more bugs/features in the backlog. In order to save time we will start
from that proposal, telling what is missing or what should be taken
away.

If you want to propose an unlisted feature for 0.5 make sure there is
a report filed with all the details before the meeting. You can also
leave your feedback in this list before the meeting and it will be
considered.

No matter what, we will have a 0.5 plan decided at the end of the meeting.

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

Miniature 0.5 London 1851 will bring official support for Maemo, among other features and improvements like new languages supported, last move highlighting and draw handling.

See the full plan at http://miniature-chess.org/wiki/Mini....5_London_1851

The bug Maemo users interested in chess should follow: https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12456

Meeting log: http://miniature-chess.org/wiki/2011...anning_for_0.5

Re: [Announce] Miniature chess for Maemo
 

I am currently trying to do exactly that, but man, this Qt Components mess is giving me headaches …