WinBoard news page

[H.G.Muller]

There is no way to clear the ICS window now. I am also not sure why people would want to do that. I included a 'clear' button in the Chat Windows; this was mainly intended for using when you switch the handle in the Chat-Partner field, so that you don't keep the discussion with the previous chat partner there if you don't want to. (When chatting with an individual, no names are printed.)

I guess that by not specifying the ICS text field as ES_READONLY in the winboard.rc file, people would be abe to do any editing they want in that window. Just select everything with Ctrl+A, and pres DEL, and it is cleared. WinBoard does not really use any of the text there. (Except when you right-click a word, it uses it in the context menu. But it just reads it back from whatever was there in the text window, it does not make any logical connection with something that was received. It is just used as a source of text you can click.) But I still don't see any legitimacy for the wish to do that.

[matematiko]

Mr. Muller,

It beats me as well why some people is asking for this, all I can think of is: That because we actually do not connect to FICS or ICC but to Yahoo or POGO, and because there is a lot of room and table chatting the window gets populated too quick.

I personally do not have any problem which the ways things are because I filter off all room (or lobby) chats, I was merely relying requests from other users.

This brings another subject, for troubleshooting purposes will it be possible to log to a text file everything that is "printed" to the ICS InterAction window? Again, this is not a problem for me because I have checked the option "Prompt Error Message upon exit" (or something like that) and when the emulator exits due to an error, I copy the content of the interaction window and paste it to a text file for feature analysis. But:
1.- Some people don't always have this checked, and
2.- The buffer of the ICS Interaction Window is limited and sometimes vital information is lost.

Please don't take this request too seriously, it is something that will be nice to have but if is too much of a hassle for you we can also live without it as well.

Regards,

matematiko

[Josh Pettus]

Well the new chat boxes can be used to filter out all the shouts in YaY into a chatbox and that can be cleared with a button on a box at the users whim. I tested this out yesterday. I don't know about kibitzes though, at least I couldn't work it out.

[H.G.Muller]

I have not added a kibitz box yet, although it would be trivial to do so. The reason wa sthat in computer chess the kibitz is usually used for engine scores, and is captured through the -autoKibitz option in the engine-output window. But not everyone is interested in computer chess, of course. So I guess I should add the possibility to use 'kibitzes' in the chat-partner field of a chat box to capture kibitzing there.

[Josh Pettus]

The improved ICS Options window for winboard is great! The options all work spectacularly. Do you plan on creating a similar window eventually for xboard? Maybe a General Options window as well instead of the long list of commands in the options menu-bar. I always wondered why Xboard had it setup that way as oppose to Winboard's neater solution.

[H.G.Muller]

Well, it is an even bigger pain to make XBoard menu dialogs (other than simple menus) than it is to make them for WinBoard. And the idea is that both XBoard and WinBoard will in the long run be replaced by the gtk+ version, which is cross platform. Arun is working on that, and doing too much work on the front ends which we will abandon when the gtk version is ready does not seem a good investment.

Of course the gtk version will need to have dialogs like WinBoard, not like XBoard, which is a bit of a problem, as Arun does not have even the slightest idea how WinBoard looks...

I upgraded the WinBoard-ICS installer now, to suppress displaying of uninitialized boards with the backgroundObserve option, and automatically display the background board after your own game finishes. (Where the background-observed game would become a normally observed game anyway, when it would still continue, and so you have a chance to see how it finished if it did finish.) I also put an item in the Options->General menu dialog to switch off logos, as there was no easy way to do this before, and some people were annoyed by them. Using it to switch on logos does not work so smooth yet. (You would have to restart for it to take effect, but that would require much more than the quick fix I did.)

[Josh Pettus]

Oh wow, you're right. If you have plans for a different interface, then it would be a waste of time. So, will this ultimately get winboard and xboard up to par with each other? That sounds really great! I can't wait.