Hi, here are my thoughts about the current state of Scid and its development.
But first, let's compare it to other chess databases: Scid vs. Pc: Though they claim they have overhauled the user interface I find the menus a bit confusing and Scid's menus much cleaner and more intuitive to use. ChessX: Nice interface but when I load my 5.1 Mil games database as pgn-file it take a couple of minutes. In Scid and Scid-format it's mere seconds, which is great. Therefore alone I prefer Scid. ChessBase: The program that all professional and semi-professional chess players use and it has some fantastic features. And more ideas are added with every release. However, with the controversy around Fat Fritz 2 where they pretty much took the Stockfish engine, made some changes to the neural network, and charged their customers for it, I don't want to use their products. Plus, as a linux user it's not clear if the latest ChessBase version will run on my system. Now for Scid: In my daily use Scid often feels clunky and there are many tiny things that make me go grrrr! For example, the keyboard often refuses to work for no reason, since Scid seems to loose focus of the window somehow. Don't know why that is. Or when I want to open, let's say the Tree window, and it opens on a different panel as I want it to open. Don't know why either and I have to drag it manually to where I want it to be. Plus the fact that there is no way that Scid adjusts the width of it's columns according to title or content and you have to do it all manually (have written another post about it on this mailinglist). Here's my suggestion: I understand that in order to make truly professional software you need resources, i.e. time and money. And I think the developers are doing a fantastic job, given that you're probably doing all the work in your spare time. So why not found The Scid Foundation and raise money? As a matter of fact I haven't seen any "donate" button on the sourceforge page. Why not? I'd donate 50 or 100€ to Scid to support it's developement right away. And I'm sure many linux and chess enthusiasts will, too. Do a fundraising and with that money make Scid the truly professional chess software it deserves to be. Not just bug fixing but bringing exciting features to it, like the creation of opening repertoires (as in latest ChessBase), etc. And a modern user-interface. I like the clean and minimalistic approach of Scid, but the dark theme...it's just bad and overall it looks like Windows 2000 at best. And the board themes? Horrible for the most part! What I'm trying to say is: Scid in my view has so much potential. Let's make Scid a real alternative to ChessBase... and take my money god damn it! ;-) Greets Andreas _______________________________________________ Scid-users mailing list Scid-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/scid-users
