miIGU (pronounced me-e-goo) stands for "mi interfaz gráfica de usuario", simply the Spanish for "my graphical user's interface." It's a GUI for UCI engines, specially designed to be a chess vision, combination and blindfolded chess training tool.
History
Features
ToDo
Known issues
Prerequisites
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Some day I found in the Internet advertising of a software called Chess Vision Trainer. After reading it, I liked the idea behind that program, so I bought it. It was much more than those GUIs that only have a check box captioned "blindfold" and when you activate it the only thing that happens is chessmen disappearing. Chess Vision Trainer (CVT) has wonderful additional features: it displays a delayed board in relation to current position of a game, forcing the player to always calculate, with a consequent enhancement of his/her combinatoric vision; besides, it let hide partial board ares in order of making blindfolded training to be gradual.
It's a great piece of software, but it began to lose my favor. The matter is that CVT has those innovative features not present in any GUI, but, at the same time, it lacks very basic features. It doesn't support Winboard, nor UCI, its opening book is a tiny one, can't save/read PGN, doesn't support time controls.
For those reasons, I abandoned it. Then I thougth that a wonderful idea would be if CVT features had been added to some freeware or open source GUI, like eBoard, Xboard, or Arena. I suggested that in Talkchess and Rybka fora, but the only answer I got was from Odd Gunnar Malin, programmer of PolarChess, telling me that PolarChess does support delays, so I downloaded, but... it only allows 4 ply delays... not enough.
Finally, I put myself, just a hobbyist programmer, to develop on my own this project. The intention I have is to share it for free. Nowadays, progress has been small. I've got only my personal version, lacking a lot of features (i.e., it's only a pre-alpha). But, I will continue on it, uploading all pre-alphas, alphas, betas and, hopefully, some day a stable version.
Update: finally Rybka Aquarium team gave me a response: the first release will not include training capabilities. So, miIGU has future. Hope it will be useful to you.
Notes:
Tested on Windows 98 SE, Windows XP, Windows Vista and OpenSUSE 10.3 (on Mono 1.9).
Last build June 12th, 2008.
Windows (with Toga II 1.4 beta5c)
Linux (with Fruit 2.3.1 para Linux)
I apologize for not introduce myself before. My name is José Portillo Parra. You can contact me at:
Best regards.