XBoard native Mac App

This forum is for general discussions and questions, including Collectors Corner and anything to do with Computer chess.

Moderators: Harvey Williamson, Steve B, Watchman

Forum rules
This textbox is used to restore diagrams posted with the fen tag before the upgrade.
Post Reply
h.g.muller
Member
Posts: 32
Joined: Fri Jan 09, 2009 11:14 am
Location: Amsterdam

XBoard native Mac App

Post by h.g.muller »

Good news for Mac users! Joshua Pettus managed to port XBoard to OS X' native Quarz interface, so that X11/XQuarz are no longer needed to run it. This also makes it look more like a Mac app (menu bar no longer inside window, etc.):

Image

Downloads are available from WinBoard forum.
h.g.muller
Member
Posts: 32
Joined: Fri Jan 09, 2009 11:14 am
Location: Amsterdam

Post by h.g.muller »

There now is a new version of this App, which handles the issue of 'current directory' in a way more suitable for OS X. On Linux engines are independently installed, in directories like /usr/games that are in the shell search path, so they can be invoked without knowing where they are. In OS X Apps, however, everything belonging to the package goes into its own directory tree, rather than being scattered over standard directories. The previous release solved this by letting XBoard automatically change to the App directory, form which it could easily find all other App components. But this had as a disadvantage that files created by the user (saved PGN, tourney files) would also by default be created there, rather than in the user's home directory.

We now solved that by allowing a new symbolic notation for the bundle path, ~~, which XBoard can use to access the other App components (such as engines, Polyglot, piece images) without the need to setting the bundle path as current directory, so that user files will not by default be created in the App directory, but amongst the user's own files.

The App now also is updated to the latest XBoard releases: 4.7.3 for the stable branch, fixing some more bugs, and a new development release (4.8.alpha). The latter has as most important new feature that the engine infos printed in the Engine Output window are printed in columns that the user can open or close, and that in addition to the 'classical' infos depth, score, time and nodes there are also columns for seldepth, speed (knps) and tbhits.

Image
Post Reply