Contributors needed: the killer free chess game for Maemo - Page 14 - maemo.org

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	joshua.maverick	2009-11-10 , 08:49
	Posts: 805 \| Thanked: 440 times \| Joined on Aug 2009 @ Mississauga, On	#131

Originally Posted by qgil

Miniature has some source code already!

http://gitorious.org/miniature

I guess only Mikhas knows whether it is functional at all, though. If you give some instructions about what to do in order to get something running on the N900 I will follow and help with testing and feedback since the earliest stages. I'm not familiar with git repositories and etc but I'm willing to learn.

About the arrows. ok ok, let's give us some time and tests to see what are the right defaults and alternatives (if any) for representing moves. Showing legal moves is not even in the roadmap yet.

We just need to find the right balance between all the things that could be done, the priorities to make happy the first wave of users, the resources we have, the simple/complex UI we wish for settings etc...

joshua.maverick, thanks for the offer! There is two things you can start with:

- We need a logo/icon. The application is called Miniature, I suggested we could go for something based on a humble and simple black pawn. A starting point could be http://gitorious.org/miniature/minia...black/pawn.svg - oh sorry, I mean http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...hess_pdd45.svg . But feel free to go your way as long as you keep a clean track with copyrights / licensing.

- You can help creating a nice-looking yet simple and very usable UI for Miniature. See http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature#Mockups - even if the sketches there look nice, they are actually not intended to represent final look&feel. The attention now is put on the UI layout (what elements are where) and the usability.

I recommend you not to touch the board/pieces themselves by now since we are going first for the very standards. Custom boards and pieces appear later in the roadmap and even then there is a lot of freely available artwork.

Let us know if you have other graphical ideas.

On it. I'll spend some time catching up on this thread, and start working on designing stuff as early as wednesday. Sounds like this is going to be fun, I'd work now but 5 hours sleep in 72 hours is a bit much

__________________
Need App or Widget Elements Designed?

Does your n900 camera produce hazy "bluish" images?

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mikhas	2009-11-10 , 14:54
Posts: 148 \| Thanked: 199 times \| Joined on Nov 2009	#132

Originally Posted by joshua.maverick

On it. I'll spend some time catching up on this thread, and start working on designing stuff as early as wednesday. Sounds like this is going to be fun, I'd work now but 5 hours sleep in 72 hours is a bit much

Actually, we only have figures, no board. The one that you see in all the screenshots is just taken from the mock-ups, modified by me [1]

So actually, we could really need two polished boards (one portrait, one landscape), with a *fixed* pixel size and a high pixel density (the device has what, a 200 DPI display?). Make it look better than the one we currently have

As always, stay clear with the license. If it is media you might want to use a CC-style license (GPL doesn't really fit, perhaps MIT license does). For our figures, the GFDL is accurate since SVGs are, in fact, text documents (from a certain point of view).

Another task: The squares to indicate last move/current move, arrows maybe, too. You already know that the cell size of our board is fixed (60px in portrait mode, if we use no border), so you could already start there.

Yet another task: The timer background which indicates whose turn it is (white rectangle with very round corners). It should have had more AA, but I failed.

Also, someone could check the Qt doc and look for a good UI font, maybe? Moves, timer, names - this all needs a visual appealing font. I have no idea whether we could ship fonts with Miniature, though. The current one (plain default, whatever it is) doesn't bother *me*, but then again I am no artist or font expert. The only requirement, for a font: It has to support the Unicode chess figures.

[1] http://gitorious.org/miniature/minia...ds/default.png

EDIT: added license remarks.
EDIT2: Font info added

Last edited by mikhas; 2009-11-10 at 15:40. Reason: Font info

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	qgil	2009-11-10 , 16:31
	Posts: 3,105 \| Thanked: 11,088 times \| Joined on Jul 2007 @ Mountain View (CA, USA)	#133

There were some generic posts and the only reason why I didn't commnet further was the will to stay on topic. Suffer no more though because The Chess thread is born!

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	qgil	2009-11-10 , 17:34
	Posts: 3,105 \| Thanked: 11,088 times \| Joined on Jul 2007 @ Mountain View (CA, USA)	#134

http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature/Development has been cleaned with all the information available distributed in subpages.

Phase 0 looks like basically DONE...
http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature/Deve..._Project_setup

What about concluding this thread with the Phase 0 and start a new one to concentrate on the first item in the roadmap: Play Games Online. 3 phases full of fun. We could create it in the Games forum.

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	qgil	2009-11-10 , 20:31
	Posts: 3,105 \| Thanked: 11,088 times \| Joined on Jul 2007 @ Mountain View (CA, USA)	#135

Originally Posted by mikhas

So actually, we could really need two polished boards (one portrait, one landscape), with a *fixed* pixel size

Having the cross-platform compliance in mind, wouldn't it be better to avoid completely fixed sizes, offering always a fluid UI? Alright, something like an avatar might be an exception but the board willing to take as much real state as possible on different form factors might be a problem.

What if we discover at some point that we just need a recompile to have Miniature running in a Symbian, Windows Mobile or Moblin device that has less/more than 480px screen?

Also just checking: are we doing things right to allow localization when the right time comes?

__________________
http://maemo.org/profile/view/qgil/ + http://qt-project.org

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mikhas	2009-11-10 , 20:59
Posts: 148 \| Thanked: 199 times \| Joined on Nov 2009	#136

Originally Posted by qgil

Having the cross-platform compliance in mind, wouldn't it be better to avoid completely fixed sizes, offering always a fluid UI? Alright, something like an avatar might be an exception but the board willing to take as much real state as possible on different form factors might be a problem.

What if we discover at some point that we just need a recompile to have Miniature running in a Symbian, Windows Mobile or Moblin device that has less/more than 480px screen?

Also just checking: are we doing things right to allow localization when the right time comes?

Yes, you are absolutely right. I didn't think about this properly. So the question is: Is it possible to create a crisp "as-if-it-were-fixed-size" looking board while using SVG?

Last edited by mikhas; 2009-11-10 at 21:01. Reason: grammar fix

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mikhas	2009-11-10 , 21:05
Posts: 148 \| Thanked: 199 times \| Joined on Nov 2009	#137

Originally Posted by qgil

Also just checking: are we doing things right to allow localization when the right time comes?

This might be a better question for the ML, I doubt Boris is following this thread (and he probably knows the answer).

I'd just make sure to wrap every translatable string into tr() calls. Then a .ts/.qm resource file should be enough. Anyone having experience with Qt Linguist perhaps?

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	qgil	2009-11-10 , 21:07
	Posts: 3,105 \| Thanked: 11,088 times \| Joined on Jul 2007 @ Mountain View (CA, USA)	#138

We have just concluded the Phase 0: Project setup.

Let's continue the discussion at Miniature development: Play chess games online

Thank you for all the people that has helped in this thread!

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kanishou	2009-11-12 , 12:44
Posts: 341 \| Thanked: 607 times \| Joined on Dec 2008	#139

Originally Posted by mikhas

Yes, you are absolutely right. I didn't think about this properly. So the question is: Is it possible to create a crisp "as-if-it-were-fixed-size" looking board while using SVG?

This was actually my goal with the Chessmonk board, and I think it was fairly successful. Despite using some pixmaps for the wood grain pattern, it is completely scalable. Border lines are drawn with Cairo at pixel precision, the SVG pieces look good at any size.

Of course everything which is redrawn frequently should be cached as pixmaps.

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mitweeeeh	2010-03-13 , 13:31
Posts: 7 \| Thanked: 8 times \| Joined on Mar 2010	#140

Originally Posted by kanishou

I am porting my simple PGN viewer to Maemo, and it's almost finished. It does nothing but display PGN files, but it looks good and has really good finger usability. I will blog about it as soon as I find time to finish it up, but these shots should already give the idea:

Those are SVG pieces, so they can be used for any display configuration. Feel free to use them. The board is scalable too, but I'm using pixmaps for the wood grain pattern.

It's an interesting idea to have a chess client just for displaying games. Perhaps it would even be a suitable addition for Chessmonk (which is the name of my utility), I will have to think that over. I also had the OCR idea right before I saw qgil mentioning it. I wonder how reliable it could be, but it's definitely worth investigating. It would have saved me a lot of hassle when I was still studying the game.

I believe that making a good app for chess playing on the phone will be much harder, partly because the complexity of chess servers can't simply be ignored (you may get in trouble with other players if you do...). But also for the reason you mentioned, that it requires really fast and precise input. Good luck to anyone who tackles this problem though.