Notices

Sure, but do you realize this experimental UI would for 2 player sitting in front of each other with a device in between? Black pieces are upside down for the white player just as white pieces are upside down for the black player: equal discrimination.

mikhas is trying to come up with the rotation alternative: white player sees everything upside down while black is playing and viceversa.

I saw several printed chess magazines in Barcelona in stores. There is at least one heavy-duty chess club in Barcelona, but I got lost when looking for it. I think it might be associated with elite chessplayer Alexei Shirov.

mikhas and me didn't play chess during the Long Weekend at Barcelona. I blame myself, since I had to leave earlier so my weekend was actually not long at all.

We discuss about Miniature a bit, but actually not much. The reason was quite positive though, I believe: we have a good communication through mailing list, IRC and this forum. The discussion (most of it while commuting from Cornellà to Barcelona) was more about confirming previous agreements than about discussing discussing divergent viewpoints or something. We also shared more about our motivations behind this project (get an early and very concrete experience about Qt 4.6) and our expectations for the next months.

All this to say that I feel we are in a good path.

No problem - we only need to wait for this phase to finish

I was hoping to discuss the UI problems we will face with the next phase (just take a look at the Jin plugin @ FICS, or look here). But I had difficulties explaining the Jin UI, and what we have to display to the user on the N900.

So what we did instead was to work on what is currently usuable in Miniature - moving pieces on the board! Better feedback on wrong moves or piece selection was also titled as "this is a must" in the proposal for the first end user release. The result of several iterations and feedback from two UX specialists was this:
The color names can be read as different roles, applied to some UI element.

Alright, so a move without mistakes would be:

- Select piece with one tap.
- Select destination square with one tap.
- Tap clock to confirm move.

This is quite familiar for chess players, that tap a physical clock in tournaments once they are done with their moves.

We need to have a UI making this evident for first time users, either with a very visible highlight of the timer when it's the time to confirm the move or with those instructions in the 3 first boots. Probably info in the banner is enough to start with.

What about games without timer? ."OK" button in the position of the clock? No games without clock to start with? I'm more for the latter.

Also maybe there are users that prefer to make moves without confirmation. This can be an option in the setting but, like many other possible options, I would leave it for later if there are real requests from users.

The diagram shown by mikhas above is now implemented in Miniature 0.1.3-1 (screenshots), available in Maemo 5 Extras-devel, Maemo 5 Extras-devel, a repository recommended only to developers. You can test the Ubuntu version too. Feedback welcome!

New features in the last version:

* Candidate UI to move pieces: one click to select piece, second click to select destination square and click to an external button to confirm the move. Pieces and squares can be changed at will before clicking the confirmation button.
* Checks are detected now.
* Backend fixes improving the responsiveness of the moves.

Features implemented in previous releases:

* Boot a screen in portrait mode.
* Display a nice-looking board.
* Set the pieces in starting position.
* Enforce basic chess rules except:
o Checkmate
o Stalemate
o Castling
o En-passant
o Pawn promotion (works in the desktop version)

How did you manage to get this ugly white background in the UI element spacing? Could you please tell me which Qt version you are using on the device?

Hi, here you have a mockup done with pencil: http://wiki.maemo.org/Image:20091219_001.jpg

And a workflow: http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature/Deve...ew_UX_proposal

I think this is good for offline games, and is mostly reusable for online games, games review, chess lessons, etc. The difference is that on the other modes the opposite player don't need his buttos, so that area on the top can be used for chatting, etc.

We have just discussed it with mikhas and seems to work for him. Feedback appreciated! Specially anything you find confusing.

I'll try to make a second pencil -iteration this evening.

Pencil iteration available at http://wiki.maemo.org/Image:20091219_001.jpg

Changes:

- Now the resolution and sizes are quite real.
- Status area is gone: all real estate was needed so we go fullscreen. Also the status area was the only non-symmetric element, perhaps disturbing the Black player.
- "Check!" and "Draw?" messages demonstrated.
- The bottom right corner is now dedicated to keep the last moves of your opponent. The figures will be drawn with pure Unicode characters!

You can download the image and set it as background of your 800x480 display device to give it a usability go.

To me this is ready to be handled by a graphics designer. I guess that mikhas has enough to keep his code going as well.

EDIT: added point about the status area gone.

Miniature has now bugtracker: https://bugs.maemo.org/buglist.cgi?q...op&value0-0-0=

... and 3 bugs reported.