Something which I haven't heard directly addressed (although I might have missed it) --

Android and iOS have relatively modern browsers, but I imagine that a lot of interface work will be required to get things laid out nicely for a phone-sized device. (A tablet-sized device might look pretty good with minimal effort, I suppose.)

Are you planning to have a version of the site that targets mobile devices (or independent native clients on Android or iOS)? If not, will the API be sufficiently powerful that someone could build a third-party client? If so, what devices do you think you'll be supporting in the near future?

EDIT: I dug around and found http://kaya.gs/kayags/features.php: "It will work both on Ipad, Iphone and Android mobile devices." If "work" means the user experience will actually be good on those devices (as opposed to being able to use it with difficulty and awkward zooming/scrolling) then awesome.

This can be a killer feature for kaya.gs, unless wms gets the HTML-KGS interface done soon enough. Of course kaya has a lot of nifty features coming down the pipe, but KGS has the userbase already.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Its planned to fully support those devices. As it stands today, users have found it extremely usable in ipads, and androids. We will eventually optimize it for those platforms (although its almost always a styling for the display matter). Right out the box it seems to work.

On the other hand, i dont have neiher an android or an ipad, so until we get some , we will not look into it. We are thinking of putting up special donation levels (as Meijin or Kisei) to get the devices so we can test it ourselves.

An ipad would be slick for us, because it will make it very flashy to show it to potential investors and i've been hearing it works quite well there already, needing some fixes and other improvements like being harder to misclick.

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Founder of Kaya.gs

For Android, you can run an emulator pretty easily from the Android SDK. I have no idea what iStuff does.

Ah hadn't thought of that. On the ipad there might be an emulator that lets me see how it looks, but obviously wont be able to try how it feels to touch the screen. But not a bad idea at all, hadn't thought of that.

Thanks for the tip.

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Founder of Kaya.gs

Apple's Xcode includes an iPhone/iPad emulator. I've never used it, but I think the web browser - Safari - works in the emulator, so you can test web pages.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

iPhone's emulator in XCode in really good - quite fast and robust. On the other hand, Android's emulator is crappy, I strongly recommend against using it because it gives you a very bad indication of your application.

You obviously lose any multi touching capabilities while using an emulator.

Weird, I've had very good luck working with the Android emulator while doing development.

I love the enthusiasm, but is anyone here honestly considering to play a go game on the iPhone? I mean, it would be great for 5x5 go and a must-have for professional kibitzers, but for larger boards the screen is simply too small to play, no?

I've played a few games on KGS through my mobile phone. So, yes, I'm quite certain there are a bunch of players willing to play it from a mobile device.

It's a wonderful time-killer during the night shift...

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My blog about Go and Boardgames: Alejo's Tenuki

I've gone through periods where I play a daily game during my lunch break on IGS (always 19x19), via Tetsuki and the iPhone. The interface is very clever and easy to use. It even handles incoming calls with aplomb.

I play games on my Android tablet and watch them on my phone.

I'm not sure why you call the Android emulator crappy. I got the Android client up to alpha level with only the emulator, no actual device; when I bought a phone, it was pretty much pixel-for-pixel the same as the emulator. The only problem I've seen is that the emulator is a lot slower than modern phones, even when run on a powerful computer, but for KGS that isn't such an issue.

Check iOS emulator and compare.

I simply can't understand how can an emulator be so slow; developing gets painful.

For the iPad, I see the pattern that all the major applications that you use on the PC via a decent, state-of-the-art web interface, like Google, Amazon, eBay, YouTube, ... have a dedicated App for the iPad that lifts the usability to a whole new level.

So while using Kaya via the browser interface will be working quite good, it will not be what the spoiled iPad owner has gotten used to. Look at this video to see the experience when playing on IGS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iLSeHu9itA&feature=youtube_gdata_player

This Tetsuki app is very, very nice and it is really fun to play with it.

The reason I am making this so explicit is that I think in order to really target the iPad device, the APIs need to be available for 'third-party developers' to start building a state-of-the art iPad client.

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Stay out of my territory! (W. White, aka Heisenberg)

For iPad tesuki is great, but for iPhone the only interface I enjoy playing on is the boardz interface. Where drag and drop works and the stone stays a little bit above your finger until you drop it. I've only played one game on tetsuki because i was so worried about misclick and having to zoom annoyed me.

The iOS IGS client works pretty well on an iPhone. It shows you an overview of the entire 19x19 board and you place stones in a two step process; first tap zooms in on the board, second tap places the stone. You can even add a third step that forces you to confirm stone placement, to prevent mis-taps.

The iPad version of the IGS client is still more convenient, but the phone version is quite usable. Both versions are quite well designed in terms of looks and user experience, and I would say are the current gold standard on iOS for go server clients.

I've logged into Kaya on my android phones. (Yes, I have two...)

The screen size is not really an issue, for what I expected. The ability to play is not bad, though I wouldn't suggest blitz. Also, scroll bars appear broken when using the android default browser. Other than that, the rest of the server functions normally.

Yeah, the main issue we saw on mobile devices are the scroll bars, and the ability to double-tap to play.

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Founder of Kaya.gs