GUI

Home * User Interface * Graphical User Interface

Graphical User Interface (GUI), a user interface where interaction between user and a (chess) program takes place. Opposed to the sequential nature of a pure text based command-line interface, where a program prints its output and prompts for input, a graphical user interface allows a more sophisticated, graphical presentation of the programs output, as well within its event-driven architecture a more flexible user interaction not only by typing text commands, but using a pointingdevice, a mouse or a pen or finger pointing on and touching a graphics tablet with its touchscreen, for random and direct manipulation of graphical elements. A GUI dedicated to play chess typically has a graphical board and game representation, where the user may enter moves by clicking and dragging a piece, quite similar to moving a piece on a "real" chess board.

=Historical Chess GUI= Chris Daly interacting with Daly CP, 1970 on an IDIIOM

=Playing Chess= The sequential nature of the game of chess, along with the both fundamental states of a chess engine while playing a game, that is calculating a move and pondering, should be appropriately indicated by the GUI, for instance to allow the interaction of entering moves only for the opponent side while pondering. There may be other modes than pure game playing, for instance to replay and analyze a game, allowing the user to click and drag the moves of the game notation move list, which needs appropriate indication and ergonomic control.

=MVC=

=Chess GUI Issues= Today, most programmers rely on external event driven GUI applications using standard streams or pipelines to communicate with the GUI via protocols such as the Chess Engine Communication Protocol or the Universal Chess Interface. The external GUI application constitutes the MVC view and controller, and more or less even parts of a (redundant) game model (or even multi-game model), to make the GUI aware of its own game states to even make decisions on behalf of the engine, such as move selection from opening books and endgame tablebases, draw claims and offers and to finally declare the game over. These game interacting features of the external GUI application in conjunction with certain protocols such as UCI by far exceeds what a pure chess user interface was initially designed for - controller and view only, enter legal moves and render the state of the game. Sharing code of external GUIs, with potential game decisive move selection, time allocation and draw claiming, by multiple engines in official tournaments is a heavily discussed topic.

=Front End= Beside a pure user versus engine game playing interface, modern general purpose Chess GUIs implement features and modes for multiple engine tournament play, and can be used as front end for chess server and chess database back ends.

=Chess GUIs=
 * APwin
 * Aquarium
 * Arena
 * Banksia GUI
 * Chess Academy
 * Chess Assistant
 * Chess for Android
 * Chess for Glass
 * ChessBase (Database)
 * ChessGUI
 * Chess King
 * ChessPartner GUI
 * Chess Wizard
 * ChessX
 * Cute Chess
 * DreamChess
 * DroidFish
 * EBoard
 * EchoBoard
 * Fancy
 * Fritz GUI
 * Glaurung GUI
 * glChess
 * GNOME Chess
 * HIARCS Chess Explorer
 * Jerry
 * jose
 * Kvetka
 * LittleBlitzer
 * Lucas Chess
 * Mayura Chess Board
 * Millennium Chess System
 * PyChess
 * SCID
 * Scid vs. PC
 * Shredder GUI
 * Tarrasch
 * Uragano
 * WinBoard
 * XBoard

=GUI Shots=

=GUI Elements= A GUI consists of multiple elements or widgets, based on a visual rectangular area called window. Windows have recursive hierarchical relationships, that is a window may contain several child windows, which are usually restricted and clipped to the area of the parent window. The desktop metaphor as root, and all child and grand child windows of one or more applications can be interpreted as a tree structure, traversed in a depth-first manner if looking up graphical coordinates or visible areas, as already mentioned by Mikhail Donskoy at the Advances in Computer Games 9 conference in 1999.

A GUI application usually has one main- or frame-window, often sizable and movable, and child of the desktop. The main window further contains various standard child windows at its top and bottom areas, a caption bar, often configurable and dockable menu-, and/or toolbars, and status bar. The look and feel depends on the operating system and its window manager, there are quite common techniques and standardizations, also encouraged by cross platform widget toolkits.

Main Window
Beside its default child windows of the frame, the inner area also referred as workspace, may contain one or more so called document windows, to reduce clutter and make the desktop easier to navigate with multiple applications. A main window applies either a single (SDI), a multiple (MDI) or a tabbed document interface (TDI). Further modeless and often tabbed tool-, output log or miscellaneous windows for various purposes may share the workspace or may be docked on the borders or various areas of the mainframe, also called an IDE-style interface.

Dialog Windows
Another class of windows, dialog boxes apply modal transactions like saving a document to a file. They contain all kinds of child widgets to enter data, and most often buttons to confirm (OK) or cancel the transaction. There are further tabbed dialogs and multi-page wizard or assistants with next, previous and finish buttons to guide users through a sequence of transactions which are dependent on each other or partly optional.

=Chess GUI Elements= A document or model usually refers to a game of chess and its game notation as move-list, whether still in progress or loaded from a database.

Game Window
A game window, associated with the game document or model, is usually a frame around a board- and notation window, which represent two views of the same model.

Board Window
A pure 2D board window should be isotropic and quadratic. If the board window has keyboard focus, one may control a square cursor to select two squares to make a move, similar to clicking with the mouse.
 * 2D Graphics Board
 * 3D Graphics Board

Notation Window
The notation window represents the game notation or score-sheet of the chess game, the list of moves of the game. It works like a multiple line text box or multiple column grid view or list box often scrollable and indicated by a vertical scrollbar. A cursor inside the notation window might be associated with a half-move index in the range from zero (before first half-move played, initial position), to N (after last half-move played, current game position), and determines the position displayed in the board window. If the game window has keyboard focus, it receives input of moves via move coordinates or algebraic notation.

Information Windows
Information windows are associated with an engine actually playing or analyzing a game. It displays search information like principal variations and associated scores, times and that like. It is often implemented as scrollable logging window, always appending text at top or bottom lines.

=Mobile GUIs=
 * Chess for Android
 * DroidFish
 * PocketGrandmaster

=Operating Systems=
 * Android
 * Linux
 * Mac OS
 * MS-DOS
 * Windows

=Quotes= Harm Geert Muller wrote on a Talkchess thread

Beware that writing a GUI is between 10 and 100 times more work than writing an engine.

=See also=
 * Chess Game
 * Command Line Interface
 * CPW-Engine_com
 * Graphics Programming
 * InBetween
 * Protocols

=Publications=
 * Duane Szafron, Brian Wilkerson (1986). Some Effects of Graphical Interfaces in Programming Environments. CIPS/ACI Congress 86, pdf
 * Haiying Wang (1994). An application-oriented user interface model and development system. Ph.D. thesis, University of Alberta, pdf » Abyss
 * Mikhail Donskoy (2001). How the Computer-Chess Methods Help to Build Better User Interfaces. Advances in Computer Games 9
 * Paul Fischer (2005). An Introduction to Graphical User Interfaces with Java Swing. Pearson Education, Addison-Wesley, Amazon.de » Java
 * Oliver Vornberger (2006). Computergrafik. pdf (German)
 * Timo Klaustermeyer (2006). Wandel von Interaktion zwischen Menschen und Maschine am Beispiel des Schachspiels. Diplom thesis, Paderborn University, advisors Gerd Szwillus and Ingo Althöfer, abstract as pdf (German)

=Forum Posts=

2000 ...

 * chess GUI under Linux by Vasik Rajlich, CCC, March 23, 2004 » Linux

2005 ...

 * Programming models in graphical chess interfaces by Federico Corigliano, CCC, February 18, 2006
 * What's the role of the GUI? by Zlatnik, CCC, May 15, 2008
 * programming gui questions by Uri Blass, CCC, May 20, 2008
 * programming engine, programming GUI by Eric Lang, CCC, December 20, 2008
 * GUI in Visual Basic by Edmund Moshammer, CCC, February 28, 2009 » Basic
 * OliThink GUI in Java... Complete source posted by Oliver Brausch, CCC, November 25, 2009 » OliThink, Java

2010 ...

 * Which GUI toolkits are best? by Michael Sherwin, CCC, January 02, 2010
 * A Suggestion for GUI makers. Double-Click a Piece to Capture by Zagalo Martini, CCC, February 05, 2010
 * Aquarium (other GUIs too?) and WB support => I am shocked by Miguel A. Ballicora, CCC, February 27, 2010
 * New opensource GUI on android for UCI engines by Jean-Francois Romang, CCC, May 19, 2011
 * Peer-to-peer GUI adapter by Harm Geert Muller, CCC, July 15, 2012
 * Most wanted missing features for a chess GUI by Ben-Hur Carlos Langoni, CCC, December 14, 2013
 * To GUI developers and Linux engine packagers by Harm Geert Muller, CCC, September 12, 2014 » Linux

2015 ...

 * Interfacing with a GUI by ppyvabw, OpenChess Forum, December 08, 2015
 * Object model for chess GUI? by Steve Maughan, CCC, December 25, 2015
 * Linux Chess GUI that's good for engine matches/tournaments by Shawn Chidester, CCC, June 16, 2016 » Linux
 * Elements of the ULTIMATE Chess GUI? by Brendan J. Norman, CCC, October 19, 2017
 * Old chess GUIs by Matthias Gemuh, CCC, March 12, 2018

2020 ...

 * Web based GUI for UCI chess engine: YouTube series by Maksim Korzh, CCC, October 10, 2020 » Web GUI Tutorial
 * UCI Gui to remote Linux Engine by Joshua Shriver, CCC, December 05, 2020 » UCI, Linux

=External Links=

General

 * Graphical user interface from Wikipedia
 * Graphical desktop environment from Wikipedia
 * Graphical user interface elements from Wikipedia
 * History of the graphical user interface from Wikipedia
 * Style guide from Wikipedia
 * IBM Common User Access from Wikipedia
 * X Window System from Wikipedia
 * X window manager from Wikipedia
 * GNOME from Wikipedia
 * KDE from Wikipedia

Computer Chess

 * Graphical User Interfaces for Computer Chess by Adam Hair
 * GUI Protocol List from Computer-Chess Wiki by Ron Murawski
 * Septober - Computerschach by Herbert Marquardt (program list with screenshots)

Web Development

 * Ajax from Wikipedia
 * Rich Internet application from Wikipedia
 * Rich AJAX Platform from Wikipedia
 * Rich client platform from Wikipedia
 * chessboard3.js JavaScript GUI by Jason Tiscione

Tutorial

 * Web based GUI for UCI chess engine YouTube Videos by Maksim Korzh » BBC GUI

Toolkits, Libraries and API
=References= Up one Level