I would also add the KGS client to the "out of date UIs". It was pretty good when it was new, 10 years ago. It could be a lot nicer now.

And yes, I do have a plan to improve it, but it will be a while. Hopefully I can get it to the point that it will last another 10 years...I think a GUI redo every 10 years is bearable to me.

As an enormous fan of KGS (it is the only Go server I use on a regular basis), I have two things to say:

It's nice to see that you have the--is humility the best word?--courage to recognize that the client is out of date. KGS's UI is incredibly well designed (kudos for your hard work), but looks ancient.

On the flip side, I am incredibly happy to hear you have an update planned, I can't wait!

Also, on a different note, I know I'm late, but the Android client is the coolest thing in existence. I've had a chance to use it and now I'm just waiting for the money to buy an Android phone so I can use it. I should mention I had no plans to buy an Android phone before your client came out.

would telling you that the aga is in the process to moving to drupal in the future? is that old tech now?

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I actually love the kgs gui. I strongly prefer that style. No need to change

The Cgoban gui, on the other hand, is kind of ugly. Is it just me, or do dark green and beige not go together?

Google should pay me money. Or at least give me free phones and tablets! Glad you liked the client when you saw it. It's getting closer to where I want it to be.

In terms of KGS being updated, the thing I care most about is definitely the board/stones themselves. I can't even put my finger on it, but the look of Wbaduk/Tygem/Gnu go definitely seems more pleasing

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"There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level." -- Bruce Lee

GNU Go?



Anyway, I really don't have any preference with regards to the board and stones of the various clients. I think Tygem's and Wbaduk's interfaces look newer and fresher, but their layouts are worse than KGS's.

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No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

What's wrong with the UI? It has everything you need, and the graphics are pretty good, no? The only thing I can imagine is that the greenish background looks a little, well, dull. But changing that is just a matter of changing some image file somewhere in the client before a new release, right?

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It misses a full screen mode. It wastes extraordinarily much space when used in vertical screen position (the board width does not equal the screen width). The game information field above the board is superfluous and wastes its space; the information can be in the window title field. The buttons waste too much space. The messages when entering KGS and the user images are annoying. Teaching and demonstration modes are hard to use. Etc. Hence I disagree very much.

When "modern" means security risks like JavaScript, I prefer "old-fashioned" but secure.

Well, I don't know how secure or not the site is, but without it I wouldn't have found my current study partner so easily, so, I'll take the very tiny risk that comes with it for the convenience and ease of use.

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ad KGS UI:

i really like both its layout and graphics, my wishlist is much more about features, like voiced indication of remaining time (main reason why i ever tried WBaduk), maybe more stats, better users searching, logged / saveable chat, SE fixed for area scoring, etc. just minor function improvements, but would be nice

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Spilling gasoline feels good.

I might be wrong, but probably not.

Even Trolls have to start as babies

To me, the whole arrangement of this game has to do with minimalism, so I never expected shiny new sites with lots of effects.

- But isn't it fantastic how much important info you can find as a go-player surfing the net? The "90s-style" actually helps slow-minded people like me to focus on the game

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I prefer stone colors that are ugly. Just pixelated vector ice cream goodness for me, thank you very much. The more detail, the more it sucks. It makes it more abstract that way, I guess.

you mean like this?

There are plenty of relatively simple Go sites like ours (http://gogameguru.com/) that I would hope are not ugly or old-fashioned looking. I'm happy to be corrected if you disagree on this.

There are also several established, slightly older, sites (for example http://gobase.org and http://senseis.xmp.net) which stand out for the quality of their content. I'd really never thought about how old they were because it wasn't important to me.

In my opinion, content trumps everything else, as long as the site creator has thought about usability. On that note, if you have any usability issues with Go Game Guru, or you don't like the design (or if you do), We'd be glad to hear from you. We already got some great feedback from kirkmc, daal, hyperpape and mohsart in the early days of the site in this thread. Most of their suggestions were implemented.

Another thing that occurred to me while writing this is that 'modern' sites don't necessarily have more bells and whistles. Just look at kirkmc's site for a good example of a clean and minimalistic design. A nice contrast to the animated gifs of the 1990's .

David

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David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV

Nice to hear, I think CGoban is rather good usability-wise already (some things could perhaps be done with less menus but generally very good), but it's true the look could maybe use some freshening up.

Btw. if you are in need for new board graphics, I'll gladly donate the ones I did for http://jgoboard.com for use with CGoban any time.

I think many of the makers of these ugly sites share your viewpoint.

One the other hand, I think my quality of life is improved by beauty - if I spend an hour of my day browsing a go website, I would prefer simple, aesthetic design over irritating neon colors (or background goatse wallpaper) any time.

So while the functionality is most important, the looks and usability score high on my count, too. For example Schaak&Go website, which uses framesets for UI is very irritating because the navigation is lost if you try to open store pages into different tabs. It's like you'd go into a real world store which would have junk all over the floor you'd need to consciously avoid all the time while browsing. Not good. It would take them like 3 hours to change it for the whole website, but still it's there year after year, like the neon colors.

If I didn't care about beauty, I'd be playing chess.