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Chessville
From the
From the
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Interface Reviews: BlitzInby J. Varsoke
BlitzIn There has always been a lot of clamor over this interface on ICC and FICS. More than a few ICC zealots have confided in me that the reason they pay the $50/year fee to play on ICC instead of the free FICS is this interface. While over on FICS, I often hear claims that the new interface X is almost as good as BlitzIn. Apparently, many think BlitzIn is the standard for comparison among ICS interfaces. So, I figured this would be a good place to start. Installation: The installation is a no-brainer. You download the latest version from the www.chessclub.com homepage and double click on the executable file. BlitzIn will install itself and then post icons in every conceivable location on your desktop. It'll be easy to find. First Impressions: After logging in, the first thing I thought was "how incredibly ugly and busy this interface is." The font on the console was large, blocky, and a dirty peach color, but I quickly found that the fonts could be customized under the Options->Text menu. Since BlitzIn allows you to use any font you have installed on your Windows machine, if you're looking at an ugly font it's your fault.
My favorite feature of BlitzIn is its ability to route channel
tells, shouts, announcements and personal tells to separate windows. A deluge
started when I first logged onto ICC; pages and pages of announcements from
Bots, from the admins, and from the help channel. There are a few ways you can
deal with all this cacophony. You can squelch most of the Bots by adding them
to your censor list ( Under Window->New Channel/Chat Console you can specify what output gets sent to a new Window. I clicked on Shout, S-Shout, and Announcement, hit OK and a new console window popped up. All the Bot text, announcements from Admins, and the like started showing up in that window and not in the Main console. Even better, you can set up another Chat Console for the help channel (channel 1 & 2) so that you can keep an eye on questions asked and the answers given by the helpers & admins. This is a great way to help you learn about the server. Probably best of all is that you can set up one of these separate chat windows for talking to a particular person. This makes it easy to keep track of conversations with multiple people at the same time. The only thing I didn't like about this feature is that there was no notification that there was new output in the separate window if you have it minimized. Say you were talking to someone and they left for a while and you minimized their window to unclutter your desktop. Then they came back and started sending tells to you -- well, there is no way for you to know this unless you open the window back up again. This channel routing ability has also been integrated into the board window so all the Kibitzes and Whispers on any particular game show up in that window. Very useful. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to log the kibitzes so that you can play back the game and see what was said when -- a feature that would be useful for recording GM banter games. Another feature BlitzIn includes to help with chatting is
the F9 key. When you press this it cycles through a list of the last
few people who sent you a tell. Beats typing in long handles. BlitzIn allows
for multiple boards to be open at the same time so you can observe several
games at once.
I tested out this facility by following (
For the click-happy user, BlitzIn has integrated URLs and
commands into their console windows. When someone posts a URL in a channel tell
you will see it underlined. Clicking on the link will bring up the page in your
web-browser of choice. Server commands are also underlined. So if you're reading
On a technical level, one of the biggest advantages of BlitzIn is the ability to write and use Plug-ins with the interface. These independently developed programs help provide things like spoken moves, and DGT sensor board support. While plug-ins are not as good as making the interface Open Source, this at least gives developers the chance to extend BlitzIn in ways the author is not interested in or has no time for.
ICC also includes in BlitzIn a "cheat detector", a controversial feature that detractors label "spyware". This program sits in the background of your computer, monitors when you switch tasks, and tries to detect if you have loaded any of the popular chess playing programs like Fritz while you are playing a game. If you are using computer assistance in this way, BlitzIn tells the server and the server notifies your opponent. At that point your opponent has the option of continuing the game or not. Keep it up and you'll be tagged with a (c) on your account, which means you use computer assistance. While this is an ostensibly good first line of defense against people who use computers to (c)heat at their on-line chess, it has a history of producing false positives and it certainly is no guarantee; it's quite easy to run an obscure engine that BlitzIn isn't aware of, or run Fritz on another computer. It also only works for you if your opponent is using BlitzIn as his interface. There are much more reliable ways of detecting (c)heaters; ICC has a program they call "SpeedTrap"; FICS has a similar program. They both do the same thing and get confident results. Pet Peeves, Annoyances and Bugs: BlitzIn maximizes itself to cover the whole screen each time you run it. It assumes you have the luxury of turning off the rest of your life when they log into the server. If you make your window smaller you might lose the internal windows because they'll be "off screen" as far as BlitzIn is concerned; it makes no effort to corral them into the smaller window or provide scroll bars. I've lost my seek graph a few times that way. The internal windows are also not independent. Thus you can't minimize everything except for one small board to keep in the corner of your desktop -- which is ideal for following a 4+ hour World Championship match at work. BlitzIn is so multi-window based, with its multiple chat windows, consoles, notify lists and a seek graph, that you'd think there would be a way to save multiple configurations of these windows: one for playing your league game with no distractions, another for observing GMs, another for hanging out talking to friends. Unfortunately, BlitzIn only permits one layout to be saved at a time. One bug I kept running into was that I kept getting knocked off ICC without notice. I thought I was connected, only to issue a command and get the following notice: "OnClose with error code 10053 WSAECONNABORTED: Software caused connection abort." Contacting ICC support, they told me my ISP had kicked me off the internet. Since I was logged into FICS at the same time I doubted that was the problem. Support then told me a router between ICC and me was kicking me off. It does sound plausible. But then I logged onto ICC with both Jin and BlitzIn at the same time. Sure enough, it's a BlitzIn problem. Development & Maturity: Aside from the above stated bug, you'll find BlitzIn is stable and reliable. Development seems to be stalled though, and no one I talked to at ICC seems to know if the developer is working on a newer version. Summary: This interface deserves much of the praise it receives. Its wide range of features, customizability, and ease of use make it a good choice for both experts and beginners. But if this is the cream of the crop, I gotta say, the cream is starting to turn. This interface is in desperate need of a face-lift. [Interface Series Intro] [The Big List (comparison chart)] [Thief]
Copyright 2002 J. Varsoke
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Board & Pieces: The board, however, is another matter. The pieces look
as if they were made for computers with only 256 colors. It's understandable
for this to be the default for BlitzIn. ICC is targeting a large consumer market
with varying hardware. Setting their initial requirements low is wise. And sure
enough you can change the board and pieces. None of your options are
especially desirable,
though. All the piece sets look like they were rendered in in a pre-Photoshop
era. And unfortunately, since the piece sets are compiled into the executable
there is no way to even manually replace them, much less a user friendly way
to do so through the interface. This is a terrible eyesore for such a feature
rich interface.
Features:
The single most requested and sought after interface feature is the Seek Graph.
When ICC folks come over to FICSland, the first thing they ask for is, "Which
interface can I download that has a seek graph?" The seek graph is an excellent
way to quickly visualize how many opponents are looking for games, what their
strength is, what are the time controls and what variant do they wish to play.
On BlitzIn the dots on the graph are color coded for the variant. A hollow dot
means it is an unrated game. The dot's place along the X coordinate shows how
long the game is (Blitz, Standard, etc). The Y coordinate shows how strong the
player is. Hovering your mouse over the dot shows the traditional ICS seek ad:
"634: guest(U) seeks Standard 15 0 unrated". This single feature makes
it easy for newcomers to get a game and start playing chess quickly without
having to learn the server commands necessary to do the same thing (
A
feature that holds promise in BlitzIn is the Notify list. This is like your
instant messenger buddy list, but shows you when people on your notify list log
into the server. This function is possible without such a list through the commands
Server
specific / Same Interface features: A handy feature for doing a post-mortem,
or giving a chess lesson on ICC is the arrows and circles you can draw on the
board. It adds a little clarity to the lectures given on ICC. You don't have
to search around for the f6 square, just look for the cyan circle. The a2-g8
diagonal doesn't have to be found because there's a bright red arrow showing
you the way. This excellent feature allows an instructor, analyst, or the
person conducting a post mortem to point out lines and squares to any observers.
