Life In 19x19

The recent thread about updating the design of Go web sites has encouraged me to post a question that has been rattling in my head for a while: what opportunities do you see for a web/software developer with a little bit of time on his or her hands to make a useful contribution to the Go community? I have several years of programming experience, but I currently teach at a community college. I anticipate having some extra time in my schedule over the summer, and one of the things I would like to do is undertake a software development project that would enable me to keep my programming skills up to date. Go related software development seems like it would be fun, and I'd love it if the results of my project were useful to other people.

My best idea so far is a Go study journal site that would allow a user to set long-term goals and/or recurring tasks, easily upload and categorize sgf files, record journal entries that could be made either public or private, and visibly track their progress. I'm sure there are other great ideas or existing projects in need of another part-time developer, though. I'd love to hear what kind of ideas you might have for Go related software that's not already well-covered by another web site or application.

P.S. I'm a developer, not a designer (though I like to think I have decent aesthetic sensibilities), so if I get something off the ground I'm sure I'll need to send Hayang a message.

jeromie wrote:My best idea so far is a Go study journal site that would allow a user to set long-term goals and/or recurring tasks, easily upload and categorize sgf files, record journal entries that could be made either public or private, and visibly track their progress.

I love this idea. Of course, it's easily generalizable to non-go progress tracking, which is a strength, but also potentially a weakness - maybe there are already sites that do this?

Well, it seems that there is an acute lack of facebook games related to go... As this would go (also) for "player acquisition", you should definitely team up with Hayang

I don't like facebook and google+ and such, would be bad to have to use them to play go online.

LuckyJim, having more platforms supporting the playing of go is surely not a bad thing? If you can play go on a Nintendo DS, even if you don't have one, surely you wouldn't be opposed to that?

There's lots of room for things to do with Eidogo. It needs a better layout for touch screens, if only increasing the button size, space between buttons, and space between between navigation buttons and the move slider. These changes might be rather straightforward.

A more substantial change would be removing the fixed layout restriction from Eidogo, supporting non-square boards of multiple sizes, or boards that are missing one or more borders (half/quarter boards).

An even more substantial change would be incorporating either Anders Kierulf's Smart Go Books format or something like it. A mode of presentation where it is possible to have a comment span over several moves is something I'd like to see.

quantumf wrote:LuckyJim, having more platforms supporting the playing of go is surely not a bad thing? If you can play go on a Nintendo DS, even if you don't have one, surely you wouldn't be opposed to that?

It's only good if the new platform doesn't undermine existing, superior platforms. In the case of Facebook, some might think, "everyone has a Facebook account, so I'll just play Go on there." If enough people have that mentality, then the subset of Go players that refuse to have a Facebook account may be affected by the diminishing pool of non-Facebook online Go players (eg, if this pool of players diminishes too far, some Go servers may be affected enough that they can no longer justify operational expenses).

Fortunately, I don't think this is actually a probable outcome. Most likely, a Facebook Go server would be about equivalent to the Yahoo Games Go server; a convenient place for some people to be introduced to the game of Go, but not much more than a stepping stone to the "real" Go servers.

Jeromie, I've thought about development opportunities for a while and I think a responsive embeddable goban applet, with flexible presentation options for move comments, would really help the Go community create rich Go websites. With a better applet, I think more hobby-web developers will be encouraged to use it to present good Go content.

Right now people are using diagrams, images, and the existing applets like eidogo and stuff like this applet.

What if we had an embeddable applet with these capabilities?
- Width-responsive
- Hidable and stylable buttons
- HTML move comment area with comments that can span over several moves
- Minimal and Pretty by default
- SGF-compatible and Go-problem enabled
- "Next Diagram" option that loads a different SGF without reloading the applet

Someone like me would use it to create an excellent introductory Go website.

If you're interested in creating such an applet then I'd be very happy to guide the design portion. (I'm a student who worked as a designer/front-end developer for 4 years, minus the javascript. I can show you what I've made in the past.)

Yes I agree with others that improving on the current default of eidogo would be a good project!

yoyoma wrote:Yes I agree with others that improving on the current default of eidogo would be a good project!

I second this notion.

Thanks for the input. I had envisioned a home brewed sgf viewer in my study journal site, so it makes sense to focus on creating an embeddable sgf viewer for the community. It will probably be a while before I can begin in earnest, but I'll start thinking about the design and perusing the eidogo source code.

jeromie wrote:Thanks for the input. I had envisioned a home brewed sgf viewer in my study journal site, so it makes sense to focus on creating an embeddable sgf viewer for the community. It will probably be a while before I can begin in earnest, but I'll start thinking about the design and perusing the eidogo source code.

Actually, a killer SGF viewer for Mac would be swell.
Ws thinking of that myself, but no time, never enough time...

When proposing "go on facebook", I did not think about yet another go server, more about something like "The Path of Go" that is/was available for XBox [1]. I do not own an XBox, so I have no idea about the game besides its website, but it definitely focuses on "players-to-be". So again, it depends on your favourite target audience.

[1] http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/The-Path-of-Go/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d8025841099f

Bantari wrote:

yoyoma wrote:Yes I agree with others that improving on the current default of eidogo would be a good project!

I second this notion.

Same for me.

Sometimes, the path is wrong

here is an example :
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from that position, where white just played

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

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$$ | . . . X . . . . . . . . 9 X O . . . . |
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first choice lead to this :

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

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second path is this one

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

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oca wrote:

Bantari wrote:

yoyoma wrote:Yes I agree with others that improving on the current default of eidogo would be a good project!

I second this notion.

Same for me.

Sometimes, the path is wrong

here is an example :
viewtopic.php?p=119544#p119544

from that position, where white just played

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$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . X . . . . . . . . 9 X O . . . . |
$$ | . . O . . X . . X . . . . O X O O . . |
$$ | . . . O . . . . . , . . . . X X X . . |
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Click Here To Show Diagram Code

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$$ | . . . X . . . . . . . . 9 X O . . . . |
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$$ | . . . O . . . . . , . . . . X X X . . |
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second path is this one

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I like eidogo, but I think it's problem is that it isn't funded well enough to support the computational needs, rather than needing more development. I think much of its functionality was removed when it became popular. It would be a great one for the cloud, but all those CPU cycles and bandwidth wouldn't be cheap. If you could figure out how to run the queries quicker that would be good, but maybe not very web hackerish.