Universal 3D Chess 1.01

A couple of days ago I received the new version of U3DC. According to the developer (and I agree on most of them), these are the improvements:

- Add a title bar to the main 3D view with short cut to functions (Next/Prev games, Full screen, Edit game info ...)
- New file format decoding, now able to load image in jpg, png, tga,gif, tiff, bmp, pict, psd, ps ...
- Drag feature to move the menu with your mouse if the screen is notbig enought
- Interface is more easy to use and more reactive
- New dialog box when quitting the program
- New game list style
- Borders between games
- Add board tag
- Game informations editing tool
- Conversion of an image to a game (GO) works not so badly now (but still experimental)
- Bug corrections in SGF file format

What stroke me the most when I first opened the version is the feeling of the whole application itself. It actually looks like a finished project, where the first version had some bugs to be fixed, now they are mostly solved. The navigation bar, though not necessary, looks quite cool and might be useful when working with massive amounts of games. The user interface and style have been improved a lot and it gives the sensation of a much nicer application (while the essence is exactly the same).

Here you have a screenshots of how it looks like (keep in mind that I've loaded a quite heavy image so that you get the final real quality):

Another feature which has been improved a lot is the "image to sgf" tool. Now it can actually convert an image to a sgf file so that you can play with it in U3DC. The only requisites are related to the amount and contrast of the colours you should use.

As you can see on the left, white and black stones must have plain colours while the board should remain in painful contrast with the other colours. Darker colours such as brown and red, will lead the program to convert it into black stones, thus giving a wrong result.

The result of the conversion of this image can be seen here:

I think further development in this line would be great, following the path left by Image2Sgf, so that it could automatically load the image from a camera into this wonderful 3D board.

By the way... have you ever wondered how to picture your girlfriend in a go board??? Playing with the some of the pictures of your collection is just... hilarious...