Aquarium and Engine Matches

[Marc Lacrosse]

I've pretty much given up on Aquarium. I have ChessBase, which is so superior in terms of ease of use for analysis, annotation, and search, that it isn't even close.(...)

Same here.
It's a pity that interesting features like what they call IDeA (intercative deep engine analysis) is lost in one of the most un-natural interfaces that i ever saw.
Almost any simple action is complicated in this GUI.
And quite a few basic features are missing or buggy.

For engine matches, I mostly use Winboard, which is reliable and stable. (...)

Same here too.
And with actively developped improvements (Pradu's PWBTM + newest updates of Scotti's WinboardX by HG Mueller) it could well stay best for a while!

Marc

[bnst]

Thanks both for useful information.

Andreas

[Ovyron]

Can you compare MS Paint with Photoshop?

Yes, I dislike the design of Photoshop. And I have a program that has almost all Photoshop features with a much more intuitive interface (800x600r friendly), so we don't need to go back to MSPaint (that's not a good example of a good GUI anyway.)

Notepad with Word?

I use Wordpad, but Word is fine (its complexity is nothing compared to Aquarium, Word could be analogized to the Shredder UCI GUI.)

If and when Shredder GUI has similar functionality , then you can compare usability.

I can compare the usability of the features that are in both GUIs, and conclude that it takes me more time (to figure out), navigation (because of the Ribbon), clicks (Because of the separation of modes), and frustration (because Aquarium will do something I did not expect) to do something as simple as Infinite Analyze a position.

As I said on the RF, using Aquarium for simple things is like taking an airplane to travel to the corner shop (using Shredder UCI GUI would be like going by bicycle, but the bicycle won't let you travel too far.)