Miniature

You love chess. You love Maemo and its devices. You believe they fit so well... yet you haven't found a convincing implementation of a chess game for Maemo. Miniature to the rescue!

The concept
Miniature is a chess board that is always with you, ready to let you play and learn wherever you go.


 * The main use case is playing online against other players at http://freechess.org (FICS)
 * Now imagine that you can also chat with the other player.
 * Learning is important: watch games live, review stored games and also process offline the lessons offered at FICS.
 * Play P2P games against other players next to you or in your Contacts.
 * And not only regular chess. See also Antichess, Chess960...

Miniature is based on Qt, targets Maemo as primary platform and plans to have ports for Symbian, Windows Mobile and desktop OSs (Linux, Windows, Mac).

News

 * 2009-11-28: First bug report. :)
 * 2009-11-27: Miniature 0.1.2-1 released for Maemo and Ubuntu with first Chess rules applied.
 * 2009-11-17: Miniature available for your desktop PC
 * 2009-11-16: A first & dummy .deb package of Miniature is available in Maemo 5 extras-devel.
 * 2009-11-11: "(10:52:48 PM) mikhas: well, it's confirmed: Miniature runs on Qt 4.6, on the N900"
 * 2009-11-10: Talk thread started: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 * 2009-11-09: Miniature - it moves!, first blog post from Michael Hasselmann.
 * 2009-11-08: First running example mimicking the "first realistic mockup".
 * 2009-11-06: Code repository created: http://gitorious.org/miniature - source code exists since the beginning.
 * 2009-11-06: First realistic mockup for playing basic online chess (portrait).
 * 2009-10-31: First idea proposed in a Talk thread: Contributors needed: the killer free chess game for Maemo

Features
Miniature is still not ready for end users. It doesn't play offline games and doesn't even know how to go online.

Miniature 0.1.2-1 is available in Maemo 5 Extras-devel, a repository recommended only to developers. End users will do good staying far from it, but there is a launchpad PPA with irregularly updated Ubuntu 9.04 packages.

This version can:
 * Boot a screen in portrait mode.
 * Display a nice-looking board.
 * Set the pieces in starting position.
 * Enforce basic chess rules: capture pieces, auto-promote pawns to queens etc. What is missing is basically anything related to the King and en-passant captures.
 * Highlight the selected piece.

Check Miniature/Development to follow the latest status and to get involved.

Screenshots
This is how the real application looks like in v0.1.2-1.

Mockups
How things should look like in the future. (We are looking for real designers!)

Contact us
Questions, feedback and contributions are welcome!


 * Talk discussion thread: Miniature development: Play chess games online.
 * With some luck you will find us online at #miniature in irc.freenode.net.

Development
See /Development for more information on developing Miniature.

There are some policies that we follow in the project.