Tag: tips

Edit Game Record

It’s easy for mistakes to sneak in when you use SmartGo Kifu to record a game. At move 100, you notice that you placed an opening move off by one. Or you record afterwards, from memory, and you forgot an exchange played outside the main flow of the game. How do you fix it?

Go to Move

To correct a move, you first need to get back to when that move was played. Tap and hold on a stone, then choose Go to Move.

Go to move

Adjust Move

When you’re at the move that’s in the wrong place, tap and hold on that stone until the feedback changes, then drag it to the right spot. Voilà.

Insert Move Pair

If you’ve forgotten a pair of moves, first go to the position where those moves should have been played. Then tap on the popup menu in the bottom left of the board, and tap on Edit. Tap on the Insert 2 icon, then play the two moves. Instead of creating a new variation, those moves will be inserted directly into the game.

Insert two moves

SmartGo Kifu also provides commands to delete a single move or a whole branch, if your game record needs more extensive surgery. The Macintosh and Windows versions of SmartGo provide additional features to help you fix any issues in your game records.

Double-Tap to Zoom

Such a simple feature: double-tap to zoom in on the Go board. On the iPhone, it conveniently zooms to use the full height available. So why does SmartGo Kifu have a setting to turn it off?

Double tap to zoom

When SmartGo detects a tap on the board, your intent is not clear: do you plan to play a move, or is there a second tap coming? On iOS you can tell the system to disambiguate between the two gestures – for the single-tap to succeed, the double-tap has to fail:

singleTapGesture.require(toFail: doubleTapGesture)

The price you pay is that move entry is delayed by a quarter of a second. Thus that setting gives you a choice: convenient zooming or faster move entry. Not a good choice. (But at least you now know how to speed up move entry.)

There’s a better way to solve this: always play the move right away. Then if it turns out to be the first tap in a double-tap, undo the move and zoom the board instead. Fast move entry and zoom, no setting needed. However, that means being able to cleanly undo the move (and anything else that a tap on the board might do), and in SmartGo Kifu, that would be harder to implement than what the feature is worth.

Rewriting SmartGo in Swift is still work in progress; a long journey. But thanks to less technical debt, I’m able to add features like undo, and thus make move input fast while still allowing you to double-tap. Getting rid of a confusing setting always makes me happy.