It is. Writing a GUI is way more difficult and tedious than writing a chess engine. If you're just a BASIC coder without proper software design skills, you're going to have to learn a lot of new things.James Constance wrote:oh dear! is it really that bad?
We're using C++ and Qt to develop Cute Chess, which is a cross-platform chess project. It's actually 3 projects in one package: a command line tool for engine-engine matches, a GUI, and a chess library with an object-oriented API. The library (which is still undergoing big changes) will allow 3rd party developers like you to easily create their own chess interface or tools for PGN collections, Polyglot books, etc. You can check out our code here, maybe it will give you some ideas.