Re: [XBoard-devel] Promotion and piece menus

[Arun Persaud]

Hi

> Personally I think this works so well that it completely eliminates
> the need for the menus. But I am curious what other people
> think of it.
> 
> I think this works great

just tried it and I like it ;) But I think it needs a few more tweaks.
Here are my 2 cents:

* there is no indication on what to do, so it could be confusing to new
people, e.g. they would have to read the manual and it doesn't work out
of the box
* you need to keep the mouse pressed and it's probably easy to make a
slip and get the wrong piece... although it didn't happen to me when I
was trying it.

I think I would prefer the following:
- you move a pawn on the last row
- we show a queen (or some other preselected piece) on that field
(perhaps a smaller version or with a border or something, around the
queen we show the other pieces, in a circle around it, in a box or some
other way...
- if you keep the mouse pressed you can rotate the arrangement to
another piece by doing what you implemented now (if you do this and
change the piece we could skip the next step)
- you click on the piece you want, if you click somewhere else or wait N
seconds (e.g. ignore the promotion) you get the preselected piece.

For promoting I would find it nice, if when you are getting close to
promote a piece (e.g. move it on the 7th row), we would show somewhere
off the board possible default pieces and you could preselect one in
case you don't want to use a queen as the default... this would be
really nice for blitz games, similar to grabbing a piece before you
promote on a real chess board ;)

I do like the method for setting up positions, but both methods should
probably be the same and I also see the same problem that it's not
obvious without reading the documentation on how to use this feature...
perhaps all we need to do is to add a bit of text telling people what to
do in the message area while doing this...

anyway, my two cents ;) Think it's a great idea, perhaps there are also
better ways of improving it...

ARUN