I thought it was time to show a first preview shot of another project I’m working on, a PyGtk based PGN (chess game) viewer. Currently it features a completely scalable board (using SVG piece images), clickable moves in the notation display, variations and comments. Pretty much all PGN notations should be parsed already, including legal moves, ambiguity detection, promotions, etc. Oh yeah and moves are smoothly animated.
Initially I wanted this to become a full fledged database application, but then I just couldn’t nail the interface down for all possible use cases. So I decided to try something different and make this a pure PGN reader for viewing and analysing of chess games. I’m thinking about matching this up with a real chess database in the future (possibly web based) and I might add limited editing abilities. But this is all still very unclear, so I will concentrate on plain PGN reading for now. The only major feature I still want to add is UCI chess engine support (for Fruit/Toga and the likes).
Thoughts on the “ideal” chess interface would be appreciated, but judging from the lack of replies to my last blog posting, I doubt that any chess players are reading my blog. 
