Hi!
John Fairbairn wrote:It's going off at a tangent, but there are lots of programmers here who write for other users rather than just themselves
In 2013~2014, I was asked by a friend of mine to help making a Go software a bit similar. My friend is teacher in a Chinese Go school for children, and they needed a tool to easily design and print tsumego or joseki, or board position, in small booklet to distribute homework for children. On top of that, they wanted the ability to use it as a virtual Go board, in the same way they would use their big magnet go board.
So for this program, the "magnet go board" metaphor was used: it was possible to add new black stones by left clicking, white stones by right clicking, and remove a stone by middle clicking. When designing/copying tsumego, it's common to have more stones from one colour than another, and the possibility to add all the black stones first, then the white stones after is handy. Then, there was a "mode" that could be toggled to activate numbering, so following stones would be numbered, and undo would undo the stones according to the reverse order.
So with a "magnet go board" metaphor, there is no such thing as history of moves, trees or variations. Also, it could not be used to open/export SGF files.
The important thing (in my opinion) was that, although they were not really good with computer skills, we did our best to work out "specifications" about what they needed (this was helped by me having spent quite a lot of time on site, so I knew how it would be used). Among the "specifications":
- the diagram can be copy/pasted from the software to the Microsoft Word (in fact, WPS, a local clone) so no need to save, then import into Word
- possibility to only show one part of the board (like top right corner only, or complete left side only)
- possibility to have the goban in color, or black and white, or grey shades (depending on what they print, to save on ink)
- a way to somehow "fix" the image resolution so that they can ensure the quality of diagrams is consistent. They were not tech savvy at all, and I implemented a way for them to set a fix number of pixel per goban intersection.
- Maybe the usual marking (delta, stone) I don't really remember
- should work on win xp
- can be ran from an usb stick
- later, they ask the possibility to save and reopen a position
John Fairbairn wrote:I understand that is there is no incentive for developers. Go books are no longer popular in any format E.g. at one extreme I have an e-book that sells about 9 copies a year. Paper seems more popular, but you are still looking at 100-200 copies a year except for beginners' books. So there is little reason for a developer to expend energy on a rather tricky aspect of programming, especially as the "market" almost demands that programs be offered for free.
I did that for free, and should still have the sources somewhere on my computer, so if some of you are interested, I could release that on Github. (let's see if I can find it and put some screen-shot)
Now, my point is, there would probably be people willing to do such work for free, at least as a way to support the Go community. But I strongly advise you work out a list of specifications for what you need, and go in great details. It helped me a lot at the time, that I had spend hundreds of hours hanging out at their school, so I had witnessed how they teach children.
In comparison, I am clueless regarding the workflow needed to write a book
