🚀 go-pugleaf

1.)  Saying "White's flag dropped" and "Black's flag dropped" over and over
again covers up the printed moves.  Those "flag dropped" messages should
only be printed once, if at all, IMHO.  Or if a constant "flag dropped"
message is required, it should be put somewhere other than the status line
used for all other messages.

2.)  There's no way to stop a "Two Machines" game.  Pause responds, and so
does Reset and Quit, but there's no "Stop", and none of the other buttons
respond.  I want to be able to stop a computer-versus-computer game in the
middle and go to "Force Moves" to play with it.  Intuitively, I think
clicking on "Two Machines" again when it's already running two machines
should do this.

3.)  "Load Game" should not require a "reset" first; I want to be able to
load a position, then load a game that starts from that position.  Better
yet, I want to be able to save a game and its starting position in one file.

4.)  It would be nice if it was at least an option to have the ABCDEFGH and
12345678 markings on the sides of the board.

5.)  When playing on a small board, the window is bigger than it needs to
be because of the menu options at the top sticking out too far to the
right.  Suggestion:  Move Load/Save Game/Position to a sub-menu, but leave
the rest of the options out in the open.

6.)  Human-versus-human play, across different X displays, would be great.

7.)  I make a move, and iconify XBoard.  10 minutes later I pull it up and
the computer has moved.  The move is printed in algebraic form (unless it's
been covered up by the "X's flag dropped" message :-]), but I'd really like
to do a "Backward" and then "Forward" to see what happened, and exactly how
the board has changed.  So I do that.  Then I move, and iconify the game
again.  Whoops!  I forgot, once again, to manually re-click on Machine
Black to get things going again.  I know, I shouldn't be so absent-minded
... but come on, that's really a pain.  The computer should know what I
want.  :-) Suggestion: A new pair of buttons, "FlashBack" and
"FlashForward" (say that one 10 times fast!) that operate like Backward and
Forward except the computer automatically resumes play after you make your
next move.  Key bindings: capital "F" and "B".  (I see now that f, F, C-f,
and M-f all currently do the same thing.)  You say there are too many
buttons already?  Well, maybe everything should be stuffed in sub-menus,
after all.  If there are key-bindings, those are the quickest anyway.  Then
the problem is that another future feature is allowing the user to type in
moves algebraically instead of using the mouse.  My suggestion for that one
is to take keystrokes as "move input" when the pointer is in the top window
and border, and take them as key bindings for menu shortcuts when the
pointer is actually on the board.  Or vise-versa.  But that brings up
another point: I like having "f" and "b" respond as key bindings when the
pointer is on the board, because when viewing a saved game with comments,
the comment box is sometimes tall enough to cover up the top part of the
window, stealing my mouse focus away when I'm sitting there trying to click
on "Forward" over and over.

Whew.

Yes, I've read the TODO list, and I know some of this stuff is already in
there.  I'm just saying that these things (especially numbers 1, 2 and 3
above) are my biggest gripes.  All in all, I'm very impressed with XBoard!
In particular, the play-by-play recall of saved games, with commentary, is
a fun feature.


sorc

P.S.  A neat hack would be to have the square colors change to represent
how many attacks were on each square as the game progressed.  I may fool
with that myself, but I thought I'd mention the idea in public.  You know,
maybe just play with the brightness of the colors or something.


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