Ohh... well I gotta disagree.
Ever used any of the ICC clients? (ICC = Internet Chess Club)
They have 3 clients all of which are ancient and look like they're for Windows 3.1.
BlitzIn, Dasher and ICC for Windows are the clients' names.
But guess which of the clients are most popular with GM-titled, long-time users of ICC? It goes in descending order of popularity, from oldest client to newest client.
Then for FICS (Free Internet Chess Server) there is Babas Chess which isn't exactly a modern-looking program. Or you could use the still-popular XBoard which was designed (I think) in the early 90's.
Moving on, the "nice" looking chess clients are Lichess and chess.com. Lichess is a great open-source effort and actually provides some of the code base for OGS. Isn't OGS a nice website to play on? It's certainly benefited from the AlphaGo matches bringing new players onto it.
Chess.com is a bit of an exception because it's so popular, they simply have more grunt to do the UI updates. However, even their website (IMHO) doesn't look as nice as OGS. It's less customisable too.
While we're discussing bankrolling, ever used the Magic the Gathering client? Wizards of the Coast have boat-loads of cash, I mean, it's coming out of their nostrils like someone who guffaws after drinking too much coke at a party. Yet their client looks terrible! People paying hundreds of dollars a month for digital copies of a collectible card game and using an interface that is just awful.
HiDPI would be nice, very nice. OGS is browser-based and should support it out of the box.
But as with chess, these clients have been build many years ago, and they (mostly) work fine. KGS is the best SGF editor on the planet, with (IMHO) GoGui coming a close second.
And GoPanda is nice, yes, they stuck a picture as a background and made nice rounded-corner boxes. But they got rid of all the screen real-estate! I'm on a 13 inch laptop and the board size is maybe 6 inches top to bottom. Where is the fullscreen board mode? Oh they don't have one. While I'm at it, where is the ability to output commands in the console (like viewing a profile) in a sensible format? They got rid of that too.
What I'm getting at here, is that we will value clarity of the board and speed and efficiency of the client over snazzy graphics.
I will admit that tablets are lagging behind for the UI (someone told me Tygem has a very nice client?) I personally find tablets annoying to play Go on. I can't concentrate, I misclick, or my opponent misclicks... I prefer a proper computer.
If I were to nitpick (as if I haven't done that enough with this post) I will say that using Tygem over Wine on Mac is a pain. I can't command-tab out of the program. At all. But if you're on Windows, hurrah! Play on Tygem. It has a nice UI and lots of strong players.
|
