Re: [XBoard-devel] Promotion and piece menus

[h.g. muller]

At 11:24 8-4-2011 -0700, Arun Persaud wrote:
> I think the biggest issue is still that this won't be obvious to someone
> who is using xboard for the first time...

I think this should not be an issue at all. I think it is really bad policy
to tailor our design to people who are to lazy to read the manual.
This is supposed to be an advances feature.
The solution for first-time users is to give them a big popup with a
"hint of the day" every time they promote, saying:

"Did you know you can also under-promote, by moving your mouse down
before you release the button when grabbing the Pawn? To not see this
message in the future, run XBoard with the option /idiot=false once."

And then of course configure the distribution with -idiot true as well as
-sweepPromotions true.

A second point is that you really underestimate how complicated it is
to implement what you are proposing. For starters, we would need to make
a few hundred new pixmaps...

I did try out my 'simplified' idea, but I do not like it as much as I thought.
It is very complex to have it interact with one-click moving (which basically
needs to keep using the old method), and it somehow doesn't feel natural.
For those who want too try it: it is in the latest commit of the hgm.nubati.net
popups branch. (But don't push it to Savannah master! I am more inclined
to completely discard it. But I would like to have opinions on it.)