While I’m mostly doing polishing work (preparing for a first release), I’m getting a better idea about what I ultimately want to accomplish with the Chessmonk GUI. I intend to support the following tasks:
- Viewing Chessgames – The most simple use-case, which is very straight forward. Opening and viewing PGN files already works. I also intend to add database queries in the future, so you can view a subset of your large reference database.
- Analysing – Features I intend to add for this task are a free analysis mode, chess engine evaluation and positional database queries (like scid’s tree view).
- Editing – The ability to enter new moves, variations, comments, etc. Also to save a modified PGN file or to import games into a database.
- Book and Repertoire – Although I never used it, I very much like the simple philosophy of Bookup. It should be possible to manually evaluate a position in the database and use these evaluations in the positional database reference view. Especially when using back-solving (basically figuring out what’s the best evaluation when both sides play the best moves), this can be a lot more helpful than simple result statistics. Additionally I want to allow the user to flag every position as belonging to his opening repertoire, so the program can mark all games which involve any of these positions and novelties played in lines from the opening repertoire.
So as you can tell, I plan to add complete database support, but in a manner that does not take away from the current simplicity of the interface. I will most likely go for a relational database like PostgreSQL, which would make it easy to add online databases.
All this might sound a little over-ambitious for now, but the good thing is that I can approach one step after another, without being forced to ever complete them all. I still would like to invite additional comments from other chess players who use chess database software (not chess clients).
