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) :)