Q: I have a new Dell X50 v and I am having problems viewing the buttons at the bottom of the screen. Does Go Album support the new VGA PDA's? (Great programs byt the way. Very helpful for the player on the 'Go.' Tom . . .
A: MalwethPDA: I have an Axim X30 high... it works fine - just can't see those buttons, but it doesn't really hinder using the program. You just need to remember which button is where. ++++++++
The program looks great (but I don't have Pocket PC). What language do you use to create it? Is it C#? [[agro1986]] -- 2005-02-26
AshleyF: Yep, C#
Sebastian: Your site looks great!
What is the meaning of the top level distinction between Album and Problems? -- 2003-09-16
AshleyF: Several tags are automatically applied while solving problems (e.g. Attempted/Solved, Attempted/Failed, and the Difficulty/... tags). Others can be toggled directly on the problem browsing screen (e.g. Favorite, Mark). These are placed under Album. You are free to modify/delete/move them but they're likely to be recreated later automatically. Tags under 'Album' are sort of owned by the system. The hierarchy of tags under 'Problems', on the other hand, is completely built and owned by the user.
Sebastian: Oh, I see. So "Problems" is a synonym for "user defined"? - What does this tell us about the developer's state of mind? :-P
kritz I love it. What format are your problems in? It is now possible to get all the problems from the goproblems web site in individual .sgf form... Ask adum for permission. Then your program could have THOUSANDS of problems!
AshleyF: Yep, it certainly does work with 2000+ problems from goproblems.com! The problems are internally stored in a compressed XML format but you can Import/Export SGF files. I doubt Adum will allow releasing with his problems (especially intermingled with OpenContent) but they're easy enough to import.
kritz I can't speak for Adum ... but. see my page with reference to the problems on the palm. Also, if you check out the discussion section on the goproblems site, Adum POSTED my instructions on howto use a sgf viewer to work his problems. (I'd e-mail him. May I suggest amending the problem title to reference the source of his site?)
Sebastian: I love the zoom feature! It works great and is fast enough even in 3D mode.
Fhayashi: Am I missing something, or does GoAlbum only support one move answer problems? Is it significantly harder to allow multiple move answers?
AshleyF: Do you mean showing the solution sequence and letting you step through it like goproblems.com? For that, you're correct, Go Album doesn't store the solution (or failure) sequence; only the setup position and the points marked Best/Good. A problem can of course have multiple solutions, but not multiple moves deep.
I do plan to add sequences in the future. This will likely be a new type of entry in the album. Much like SL diagrams, they will be meant as diagrams that you can step through. They can be tagged like everything else and encapsulate useful information in and of themselves. They can also be used as solution/failure diagrams and can be attached to problem entries. If there is an attached continuation to a problem you've just attempted then you'll be able to step into it (or various other options such as numbered diagram, etc.). This will come as version 1.1 (some time after I stabalize and release what I have now).
For now, if you have problems with significant perils deeper in the solution sequence that by itself would make an interesting problem, then just make two problem entries. Also, this is the workaround for problems with no active color (e.g. the status problems from James Davies' Life and Death). Just make two problems; one with Black to play and the other with White to play.
Essentially, the Album is currently limited to problems where the objective is clear and the solution concrete and the reading should be up to the solver. This is true of most tsumego and tesuji problems; you know when you've found the solution (if you were a cartoon, there'd be a lightbulb above your head!). Other types of problems, such as fuseki, where the objective may need some explanation or where understanding the solution requires appreciating positional judgement, attached sequence diagrams will be very useful.
Sebastian: Do you mean "AND" or "OR" problems? ("OR" problems can have several correct answers, "AND" problems consist of several individual problems and need all of them answered correctly to proceed.)
AshleyF: Some feedback provided in mail from Sebastian:
I tried it out in the car (as a passenger, of course) and in the shuttle. It works great in the car, but the shuttle shuffles my PPC too much for me. ;-)
Some questions/remarks/wishes:
Is the NOT search a NOT AND or a NOT OR?
AshleyF: It's a 'NOT OR'. I'll add 'NOT AND' in the next build. How shall it be phrased? 'Match Without Any Selected Tags' vs. 'Match Without All Selected Tags'. Sounds funny...
AshleyF: BTW, you can get a 'NOT AND' by doing searches within searches. Tedious though...
However, I think NAND isn't really that important, and moreover there is a workaround (below). Yes, it's getting not so nice. If you had tri-state check boxes you could get rid of NOT altogether.
AshleyF: I'll think more about this... I think you're right though, it'll make a lot more sense with an improved TreeView.
AshleyF: Added Invert Results so you can now get a NAND as well as NOR without doing inner searches.
The search should display if it's on AND or NOT mode.
AshleyF: Good idea (next build)
AshleyF: Done.
Ability to cancel search
AshleyF: That would be convenient (I'll add to next build). For now, just note that selecting View > Clear All and then closing the dialog does the same thing. If there are no search results then your current set remains.
AshleyF: Done.
(NOT solved) AND (difficulty=lowest stored) should be the default. It's easy and intuitive and rewarding to work your way up, but frustrating and a major turn-off for a beginner to only be able to solve 1 out of 20 problems.
AshleyF: Good idea (next build)
AshleyF: Search criteria now persists between sessions at the search screen so you can set this as your default search if you like. Also, you can now sort by Easiest First if you like.
Ability to save search conditions
AshleyF: Yeah, I hate that too. It would be nice if the previous search criteria persisted. I'll try to get that in the next build. I have a little complication if between searches you go to Organize and move tags around or delete them. In the future (maybe 1.1) I plan to merge the Search and Organize views but I'll have to make my own TreeView control to get what I want so not right now...
AshleyF: Criteria persists, although still no way to save and recall multiple sets of criteria (future version will).
AshleyF: Even further down the line I've thought about the possibility of special tags that represent whole search criteria. Sort of like the search within search feature today but with previous searches available at a click.
In addition to the filter, it would be nice to have a sort feature. My ideal would be if this were done similar to the filter in Excel.
AshleyF: Ah, that's a cool idea. I'll see what I can do. Some things that might apply are difficulty, last attempt timestamp, original position in the album, missed ones first, unattempted ones first. Others?
AshleyF: Added a few sort options. Not complete yet...
AshleyF: I like your idea of weighting based on some measure of importance gleaned from how common the tag is; like Google-style keyword heuristics.
It seems like the Favorite button appears unpressed even when a favorite problem is displayed.
AshleyF: Hummm... that would be bug. I can't seem to repro it. The button should be outlined (doesn't really look pressed in) - thats just how the standard toolbar control is. Is the same true for the Mark toggle button? And for the buttons on the Edit screen? Possibly something with B&W display...
It's not so easy to see when you're at the border => make it thicker. (That was actually a request from Anders for Miniban.)
AshleyF: Do you mean a thicker line? I do this in 2D mode (see screenshot above), but in 3D mode I wanted it to look more photo-realistic. Also, the Auto Zoom feature never crops in tight around the stones except when they're actually on the edge of the board. If a stone is at the edge of the diagram then it's certainly at the edge of the board.
Regarding difficulty level: Since it's obviously not so easy to rate them, how about if you added another feature that allowed filtering by number of stones involved? This would at least be better than nothing.
I'm not sure what the best heuristics for complexity are. The problem with number of stones is that killing a dumpling is much easier than deciding a large scale mojo move. Maybe it should just be the area covered?
AshleyF: Yeah, I like your idea of automatically measuring difficulty by the number of stones in the diagram. I'll try to add something like that soon.
A better way to measure difficulty would be to have SmartGo decide. Record the thinking time till it finds the correct solution.
AshleyF: That's an excellent idea! I looked into it a bit and see that SmartGo adds the following properties to the SGF when asked to solve problems. I'll see what I can do to automate filing by difficulty/complexity:
TU: The time used to solve a problem (a real number, in seconds)
NN: The number of nodes examined to solve a problem.
NL: The number of evaluations or leaf nodes.
MD: The maximal depth reached during a search.
DE: The number of plies searched (depth).
PD: The number of top level moves at deepest search (partial depth).
AshleyF: I played around with this a bit and find that the biggest difficulty is getting it to concentrate on the problem and to understand the objective. Given an empty board with a small-scale life & death problem in one corner, it tenukis!
Is there a property that counts how many wrong attempts I did before I solved a problem? I would like to filter/sort by this.
AshleyF: Actually it only stores whether missed or not but not how many times missed. Think it's really valueable to track multiple misses? Wouldn't it be encouraging a BadHabit?
.AshleyF you are my hero!! Great program!... I am looking forward to a Version which supports variations, because otherwise I often prefer to belive that a problem is buggy rather than my mind. ;-). And sometimes the first move is simple but the continuations can get worse. just some more ideas... - I prefer the black background, no matter if it is whites or blacks turn. - since I run it on an older device I would prefer to be able to have different (smaller file size) collections, rather than everything in one file. Best wishes, Björn.
AshleyF: Thanks for the kudos. Soon (within a couple of months) you and Fhayashi will get your wish for variation support. Also, your wish for black background and for organization of separate SGFs (rather than one huge collection) will be coming.
Although not my original intention, as I've worked on adding variation support to Go Album it has naturally evolved into a full-blown SGF viewer/editor. I've added nearly complete support for FF[4]. The player to move is shown as a small numbered stone in the lower left (rather than changing the background - I like the black background better as well). I'll rework the tag-based organization features to keep just an index but actual games, problems, etc. will remain as separate SGFs (although game collections within a single SGF will be supported for those who like):
See Go Suite
[101] Weighed Fuzzy Sorting Given a set of problems which are characterized by two criteria, a and b, where
a = 0..count(a)-1, b = 0..count(b)-1.
If the user wants to sort by both criteria, the program could sort them according to the sort value
s = a/count(a) + b/count(b)
However, this introduces a high degree of randomness because many combinations of a and b will map to the same s. in particular in the case of two binary criteria. This can be overcome with ("irrational") weight factors fa and fb that are chosen according to the expected importance of each criterium:
s = fa * a/count(a) + fa * b/count(b)
[102] BTW, I was thinking of a similar feature for Miniban - see discussion there.
Rellik: Bug: When you delete a whole filtered set or the last problem from one set you get a null reference exception. Question: Will you combine Go Album and Go Suite in the near future?
AshleyF: Hummm... that's an old bug I thought I'd fixed. Is it happening to you in the most recent build (1.0 RC1)? I can't seem to repro - after deletion it should show "0 of 0" with everything but 'Search' disabled.
In the next release of Go Suite I'll add some more problem solving features such as 'auto responding' combined with the Guess Next feature so you can work through problems like at goproblems.com.
As for the tagging system though, I want to make it scale to huge collections like having all of GoGoD or more on your device; auto tagging by game info properties. It'll be a cool feature but it's going to take some work. Go Album scales easily to 10,000+ problems but that's 'cause without variations, game info, comments, etc. such a collection is only about a meg. For Go Suite, I want to allow collections to be simply individual SGF files stored wherever you like (even a couple of gigs should be no problem) with only the tag index maintained as a database.
Rellik: I use 1.0 RC1. The way I got this error was... I imported some problems (from MFoG) after that I imported the same problems again (my error) and then I wanted to delete that set.
AshleyF: Ah, I think I've reproed it. If you delete the current result set (or the whole album) and then kill the app (not just close, but stop the process) then you get a null ref exception as it's shutting down. Does that match your symptom Rellik? Thanks for finding it. I happen to have a habit of never killing processes (just minimize and let the OS do it as needed) so I never noticed it.
Malweth: I get a similar problem - when I attempt to delete an entire set of problems I get the following Error (and crash): "An unexpected error has occurred in Go Album.exe. Select Quit and then restart the program, or select Details for more information." Selecting Details gives the following:
Go Album.exe
NullReferenceException?
Application::Run+0xf
MainForm?::Main+0xa
Quitting and restarting Go Album shows me that the attempted deletion fails. I should also note that the problems I'm attempting to delete are the original problems that come in the .cab
Malweth: The buttons at the bottom of the screen are not showing up for me. Example: Browse Left, Browse Right, Search, etc. This also occurs in problem edit mode. This could be because I'm using a hi-res device (Dell Axim X30).
Malweth: Idea: When creating problems, have a default category that can be set. This way, when I'm entering problems in from a book they will all go into that book's own category.
Malweth: Idea: The ability to view problems in the order created would be useful when creating problems from books. This would allow one to see the last problem created (which will make finding my place in the book easier) and it would also make recategorizing (according to book rated difficulty) easier.
About Go Album:
1. Have you see Java programm GoGrinder for PC? It has some useful features for people, who likes to solve Go problems. There are:
a) Randomly rotate problem on board and randomly change color.
AshleyF: GoAlbum also randomly rotates/flips and swaps colors.
b) When you solve the problem, GoGrinder doesn't show you all alternate branches in SGF file. And when you choose wrong branch in SGF file (make mistake), GoGrinder allow you to go on it until the end of branch, and ONLY THEN GoGrinder tells you, what you didn't solve a problem correct. (It doesn't mean what GoGrinder have no "prompt" feature. It does. On a button "Navigate solution" you can see the way of solving problem). I think it's very interesting to solve the problem, when you have no idea until the end on the right or on the wrong way you are.
c) And I can't figured out how to solve a problems with more then one step.
AshleyF: 'b' and 'c' are both due to the fact that GoAlbum doesn't do variations at all! Each problem is just a single position with points marked good/best - no continuation at all. Some time I'll integrate the features of GoAlbum into GoSuite (w/full move trees) and make it work pretty much like GoGrinder.
It's hard to me to explain what I mean... I hope you understand me.
Thank you for two good programms. Cool design and graphics. I think it's the best Go programms for PocketPC.
AshleyF: Thank much! Glad you like it
xas?: Bug: I can't install the ARMV4 cab file. On my Toshiba (PXA263)
AshleyF: Try downloading again now (cab appeared corrupt from recent disk array failure).
xas? : That's ok, it works very fine now. Thanks you.
Pimenta: Bug: In Go Album, I cannot see the buttons in the bar (previous, next, favorite, etc.), although I can press their location and they work! The buttons in Go Suite are visible and work normally. Any ideas? Relevant info: VGA screen, Windows Mobile 2003 SE.
Thanks for the best Go apps for PPC...
AshleyF: I don't have a WM 2nd Edition device myself but I suspect that the toolbar button problem is related to a breaking change in behavior in the OS (see
http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2004/08/03/207311.aspx). GoSuite is unaffected because I'm using my own toolbar implementation there. I'll look into fixing...
Pimenta: Thanks. Feel free to contact me if you need any help in testing or anything else related to your Go apps. vasco(removethisandreplacewith_at_)tvtel.pt
Malweth: Thanks! This fix for GoAlbum + GoSuite would be MUCH appreciated. I know where the buttons are (due to over use ;) but being able to identify them (and not miss) would be helpful :D Thanks for the great software! Both are essential to my game.