AshleyF
Ashley Nathan Feniello (8k AGA)
Author of Go Album and Go Suite for Pocket PC. Also, check out: PointPopularityByMoveNumber. Just like every other software guy to discover Go, I once tried to write a Go program
I start my kids out young! :-)
Nathan (18 mo.):
Kaitlyn (5):
Calvin (7):
My wife and I recently visited Japan:
Arno: a Martian with a single eye?
unkx80: A Go stone on a goban?
Charles Looks more like a bowl with stones, to me.
Nodog: Bird poop on a basketball?
Sebastian: A toppling top?
Janet: Half a coconut on a grill?
Crimson : An egg smashed on a goban?
chrise a lost game for white ;)
I'm experimenting with richer diagram commenting. I'm basically just thinking of inline icons for relating the commentary to points and stones on the board. Ideally, it should be as complete as the diagramming feature itself; containing Black and White stones with numbers 1-10 and with square and circle marks. Also was thinking of having icons for marked and lettered empty points. That's about it.
Hey coolness! Arno has added the feature to SL!
Here are some examples of how they could be used in commentary:
" extending upward is solid."
"Black does not want to play here because then White would play
to form the Avalanche shape, so
at
applies the proverb 'The enemy's key point is yours.'"
"Also, later Black will have a peep at (followed by
connection and
extension)."
" is a big point on the board."
"Had been played here, White would certainly tenuki and play
."
" and
are miai."
" is an extremely good point."
I tend to dislike commentary like:
"Black 1 at 1 would save the group, but I think Black 1 at 2 or 4 do as well. So maybe White 1 at 2 or 3 can be made to work. White 1 at 3 certainly isn't answered by Black 2 at 4"
I'd rather see separate diagrams.
Some other ideas I've had (but I think are over the top for SL) are further separating presentation from data in SGF. For example, 'macros' in comments to refer to points and stones on the board rather than having markup tags. Then the SGF viewer could decide how best to represent the correlation. I was further thinking of defining a bunch of common comment glyphs (gleaned from KJD and Teaching Ladder games). Things like 'a and b are miai' could become '{miai:Q12,R13}' and the SGF viewer could decide to present however it sees fit. Some may simply display as text (in the language of your choice). Others may use inline icons and display matching markup on the board. Others in the future may even do some bizarre stuff like a 'cartoon balloon' at the point on the board being discussed or a finger pointing at the board while the commentary is read aloud (yeah, I'm dreaming). Also, it could be translated to various languages or represented as a standard set of international 'glyphs' like Chess Informant does. Even within English you could turn on/off Japanese terms, for example, and choose whether to see things like 'semeai' or instead, 'capture race' in the commentary (I'm sure Charles would always choose the latter :-).
Stefan: I don't know what glyphs are, but what you describe sounds like an expansion of SGF into XML. An interesting idea.
AshleyF: Yeah, more structured SGF. I've experimented with some XML-based diagrams: http://www.feniello.com/playground/content/senseis.xml (client-side transform but view source to see the XML). Notice that the annotations are expanded by referencing
this localizable definition.
Anonymous: Don't know where else to put this, but I think GoSuite is a very nice piece of software, and minus a few wrinkles, one of my favourite sgf editors. I hope you continue working on it and consider developing versions for other handheld devices. (Feel free to delete this comment once you've read it).
AshleyF: Wow, thanks much for the kudos!
Diceman?: Is there any Windows XP Version from GoSuite available? On the Pocket PC itīs a really great piece of Software. Thanks 4 programming it.
AshleyF: Nope, sorry no desktop version.
Family Site: http://www.feniello.com