Qt gui for Winboard

[chessuser]

Hello

I read the request for a gui recode with Qt

I suggested here to merge the server functuonality into this qt guu
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=52496

currently this qt gui is given
http://interface.sourceforge.net/images/chesstab.png

is there a Qt developer interested to start with us? Qt is here: http://qt.nokia.com/

Regards

[Reinhard Scharnagl]

I read the request for a gui recode with Qt

Where did you read this? And why do you post anonymously?

A request does not mean anything without providing a related bounty,
reflecting the value of to be awaited amount of work.

And why Qt? Linux is not a target, where you could have a return of value.
Thus I am using Embarcadero Firemonkey to cover Windows and Mac OS X.

But still there is no supported request. Thus all things will remain private.

Best regards.

[chessuser]

It was written somewhere, that a Qt gui would be good for FICS / Winboard.
Qt offers compiling for Windos, Linux and Mac, all posix.
As http://Interface.sf.net is already a chess board with user chat, it could be integrated there in the Qt gui.
Of course it is work, but see VLC player, they have switched as well with a great speed in one year to a Qt gui.
and have 700.000 Downloads per day now. As well for Android a new Gui has been developed, so it is possible.
InterFace is open source, so no bounty or payment is needed, I would help in development, if there are 2 Qt developers found.
Please get more familiar with Qt, it is the best gui and compiles without problems for Mac, windows and as well of course LINUX.
So a new approach for Qt and an integration in InterFace would create the most used gui for a chess server.
We just need to create a project and work on it,
Maybe your c++ code can be utilized with a Qt gui?

[Reinhard Scharnagl]

Hi Anonymus,

what could make me (or anybody else) motivated to realize any complex project?

Qt is not yet completely free. WxWidgets seems not to be up to date. But
I have experiences also in RealBasic and current in Embarcadero Firemonkey.

First covering my own needs thus I intend to target Windows and Mac OS X.
Linux is an absolute non-target, because there never is any return of anything.

Publishing anything as Open Source does not make any sense to me, because such
licenses still are not officially translated into the ten most spoken world languages.
And if a license would be broken, it seems to be an impossible job for a single
developer to provide the time and money for to globally detect and prove abuses
and to win legal cases.

So if you want anything to be done by others, instead of suggesting a preferred
way to perform that, you rather should prepare a bounty for better motivation or
to have it been prepared by even more interested people.

[chessuser]

Hi user Reinhard Scharnagl, this is user Chessuser.

I guess you are in general right. And you declare your needs.

Qt is quite cool and free. the toolkit itself provides a source, you can compile.

So you need Mac and Win, which could be in Qt one compile with the same code.

sf.net has a lot of projects with GPL. I think the chess engine has ugly gui s in any operating system
and for any piece, except the new android gui: http://www.jwtc.nl/chess
they are not intuitive and the complexity is quite high. Anyway, many people use it and it is very popular.
But they are all in the state of telnet and console based status. Which is in the state of the art like for matrix 9 needle printers.
today the high definition colour laser printers are on any desk, if you allow me to compare it that way.

So there is the suggest to create a new qt gui. yes.

Besides that Qt skilles are needed or at least the need to be willing to look into it, I think a bounty could be a donation, what do you expect for it?
And you are in an st age where this is the only mean to motivate you? Basic and Delphi is quite the best pre-condition to look into Qt.
I think of Qt as a wounderful toolkit, everyone who codes could learn quite fast and it has so beautiful widgets, that is is definately worth to look into it.

I would be interested in your needs for Windows and Mac for a FICS gui, as we have Winboard for Windows, what are your needs still? and there is no Mac gui?
Does a Mac gui creation with Qt makes sense for you? InterFace Chess Gui has not yet been compiled for Mac, but it is definately possible. For Mac not quite easy, but others already have managed.
Maybe we should start with Win, and your needs, anything Winboard does not offer?

[Reinhard Scharnagl]

This is a detail of my slow growing Windows and Mac GUI for 8x8 / 10x8 Chess.
That GUI is completely scalable. All its elements still are copyrighted by me.
All used colors could be customized.

It will be a much better successor of my first related Chess GUI + Engine SMIRF.
It is done using Firemonkey. Already Mac OS X and Windows are supported.

[chessuser]

ja cool.so delphi is not dead. the end user looks not deeper, if it is qt or delphi.
but that way interface chess gets no fics server support. i guess you are too advanced with your gui to rather switch to qt, right?

[Reinhard Scharnagl]

ja cool.so delphi is not dead. the end user looks not deeper, if it is qt or delphi.
but that way interface chess gets no fics server support. i guess you are too advanced with your gui to rather switch to qt, right?

Still anonymous ...

It is not Delphi. It is being written using C++.

Switching to Qt would imply to have multiple development systems for multiple OS - as far as I know.
Embarcadero C++ Firemonkey does this from one only development base system.

Qt might have an advantage, if you intend to have several people develop on different OS.
But then there is a huge effort necessary to integrate and test all those detail solutions.
And if one - like me - does not intent to give away the source code for nothing, where
should be then anything convincing for a switching over?

[chessuser]

http://thief.sourceforge.net/features.html
100% free and open source (GPL)

http://ajonsson.kapsi.fi/cutechess.html
Cute Chess is developed using C++ and Qt. The project has been in development since May 2008 and is currently in active development.
Cute Chess GUI running on GNU/Linux.


Presentation page of the project
http://sfabry.developpez.com/defi/defi.php
You can get the zip from here.
http://sfabry.developpez.com/defi/Ness522.zip
And here is the git repository if you prefer : https://gitorious.org/cutechess
Please note you need Qt3D library, see README.TXT


isn´t chess a hobby? and you did not answer, which bounty you await to switch over to a Qt gui.
Then the users have to decide, it the money is better invested in a Qt company created that than someone who never worked with Qt?
Therefore I spoke of a donation rather than a bounty payment.

What about a linux laptop as a gift after you created a Qt Chess connection to FICS in InterFace.sf.net?

[chessuser]

anything convincing for a switching over?

No feedback anymore? you wanted to get money and have been asked twice what your wish of a bounty is.
You are playing, a gambler, who is not willing to change? Why dont you post a concrete offer for money?

Let´s make a deal I think you do not want to make your source code open and any offer of money is too less for you and the payment would not be an efficient fair offer. Or are you just on vaccation?

Development is made out of communication and good will. Not (only) of coding lines or receiving money. I miss at least three points.

[Reinhard Scharnagl]

Well, I am short on time for such projects. And I prefer to slowly proceed with my own.

[chessuser]

Ok, thanks though for sharing your ideas and views.

[crystalclear]

I downloaded Qt because I knew nothing about it and it looked interesting.

I think any sort of GUI interface requires a fair bit of work to get to learn how to use it. I saw a lot of videos on youtube describing how to use various aspects of Qt and decided to try out the examples. However my version of Qt didn't resemble the version of Qt in the videos exactly. Some of the examples programs that came with Qt didn't seem to work properly either.

My initial impression is that Qt is a large powerful project that looks good but isn't yet stable.

It looks good enough for me to invest more time seeing what I can do with it. But I have a gut feeling I am going to get frustrated by a lot of niggling things not working, or not working as I expect.

[chessuser]

hallo? Qt is a great gui framework. I exists soon for version 5. Many many apps use it and it is cross-platform compiling for Mac, Linux and Windows.
It has been developed by Trolltech, then acquired for 100 Mio by Nokia and is now sold to Digia Tec, which announces soon a Android and Iphone compile.
It is much related to KDE and has great functions. The example for the google chat is diabled because of google´s api has changed, all other c++ / Qt widgets are referred to c++ and work, if you choose the right dlls for windows.
It is quite easy to learn and there are many examples in google to search for.
Qt would allow to solve for FICS Server support and all small apps on all operating systems to have ONE great solution, all developers can contribute to.
Chess and c++ Developer is a rare event. So to offer a cool tool, we need to unite the cows. And develop open source.
There is with interface chess messenger a cool tool with Qt gui given, to extend that with Chess Server support. We should give it a try and if every person is just adding one function and improving it, we would have a good team with progress.

[H.G.Muller]

Well, if it existed for Android, it would certainly provide an incentive to use it in an Android port of XBoard. But I understand it doesn't yet.

I am not sure you fully understand what exactly is needed, and as a consequence how this can be best achieved. The XBoard source code is all ready to be ported to any platform. But it can only be done by someone knowledgeable on that platform (in this case Qt). Knowledge of Chess or Chess interfaces is hardly helpful for this task. Having people that know nothing about Qt first become experts in it to do this job, while there are plenty of Qt experts around, is not an efficient way to do this. So your efforts to convince people here are really 'barking up the wrong tree'. You should get experienced Qt programmers willing to work on XBoard. They are more than welcome, as far as I am concerned. The tiny bit of stuff they would need to know about XBoard to get them going I will happily provide them. But you probably won't find any Qt experts here.

[chessuser]

yah, a good advice. Qt experts are virtuose, but we need one with chess interest. As this is the driver and motivation key, we should assume as well, that everybody is able and willing to learn. an android port of interface should be ready soon: http://interface.svn.sourceforge.net/vi ... e/android/

[crystalclear]

I have misunderstood you somewhere chessuser.

Is Qt being changed to be able to provide Android executables too? That is what I understood earlier. If so then surely this chess playing "Interface" software will require little or no changes to it to run on Android, as the Qt compilers will take care of that.

Now you appear to be saying that "Interface" is being ported to Android, as if there will be all sorts of conditional compilation - if Android do this and if Qt do something else.

[chessuser]

Qt needs necessitas.sf.net to compile for Android. The new company Digia after Nokia announced, that Qt will compile soon just by one click for android.
So the potentials will be soon there and as well the handmade android port.

[crystalclear]

I just tried compiling some of my chess software using the QT IDE.
I get error messages like this ....

Code: Select all

undefined reference to `@__security_check_cookie@4'


A search on the internet seems to show that these are from microsoft including some buffer overflow attack checking in some of the standard C procedures, without them linking the library containing the appropriate software. A little research indicated that a compiler flag /GS- should be able to work around the microsft problem, but I don't know where to set that flag in the QT IDE GUI.

Another error message I get is

Code: Select all


undefined reference to `_allshl'

This appears to be from trying to use 64 bit variables in places, ie bitboards fr some chess related routines. As far as I can tell, the compiler is trying to replace the 64 bit arithmetic routines with function calls written in 32 bit code, and these functions are not being linked into the executable. It's a case of the IDE's left hand not knowing what its right hand is doing.

[chessuser]

you compile your own code?
i dont know this code.
ad 1: set the flag in the .pro file and c++file.
ad 2: you need to link the sha1 lib correctly.
you can normally fix these errors. how advanced is your code? wanna step into our project? did you try to compile this?
regards.