winboardz's border in xboard?

[Josh Pettus]

I noticed that the option -border is in the xboard .ini file but it doesn't seem to be active to anything. Were you at one point going to implement the border option in xboard too or was it not possible? Personally I'd like to to see the winboard board themes dialog implemented in xboard. It would be nice to put that stuff in the xboard.app. It'd make configuring with different sets more easier especially with the Oriental Chess with optional oriental pieces.
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As a general question, are we still moving toward phasing out winboard altogether and replacing it with xboard gtk? If so a list of all the things that winboard still has that xboard does not (or at least a replacement of; i.e.who needs messy fonts when you have .png/.svg images?) might be a good idea. Off hand on the surface, not too much save that and a dedicated ICS interaction window which you said could be done in GTK.

[H.G.Muller]

Borders are not yet implemented in XBoard. I guess the value of that option is saved by mistake.

I have no plans to phase out WinBoard; distributing GTK with it is too much of a hassle. The whole XBoard front-end is now based on platform-independent code (the 'middle-end'), calling a tiny set of universal GUI functions (XBoard's 'generic dialog creator'). It is only the latter part that differs between the Xaw and GTK versions. In the future I could also write a version of that for Windows API (in fact WinBoard already contains a generic dialog creator, used for the Load Engine, Tournament and Themes dialogs, which already does more than 50% of what is required). This would in fact be a completely new port of XBoard to Windows ('WinBoard II'), looking like XBoard.

There is little incentive to do this, as the current WinBoard works fine, and WinBoard II would not really add any functionality that WinBoard doesn't already have. So I'd rather spend my time on making an Android port of XBoard.

[Josh Pettus]

I was just curious, that makes sense though. I have enough experience by now to know that GTK inclusion can be a real pain. Android port sounds nice. I once found a pretty good gui that supported UCI engines as well as FICS genarically called "chess", but it has long since disappeared, or at least i can't find it anymore, and the commercial software on the google store really lacks the versatility of xboard.