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!

Contents

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

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 0.1.3-1 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.

New features in the last version:

  • Candidate UI to move pieces: one click to select piece, second click to select destination square and click to an external button to confirm the move. Pieces and squares can be changed at will before clicking the confirmation button.
  • Checks are detected now.
  • Backend fixes improving the responsiveness of the moves.

Features implemented in previous releases:

  • Boot a screen in portrait mode.
  • Display a nice-looking board.
  • Set the pieces in starting position.
  • Enforce basic chess rules except:
    • Checkmate
    • Stalemate
    • Castling
    • En-passant
    • Pawn promotion (works in the desktop version)

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

Screenshots

This is how the real application will look like in v0.1.3-x.

Mockups

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

Contact us

Questions, feedback and contributions are welcome!

Development

See /Development for more information on developing Miniature.

There are some policies that we follow in the project.

Contributors

Special thanks to Colin M.L. Burnett for his free piece set used by Wikipedia.