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Your Move/Readers Write: Responding to 'SGFs and iStuff'

Published on 2/5/2013

"Regarding Roy Laird's article, 'SGFs and iStuff' (2/1 EJ)," writes Eric Anderson. "Please -- if you're going to do a comparative product review, please spend the effort to investigate the features. Otherwise, you're using your powerful and respected platform to spread casual (and misleading) opinions, and it's really quite unfair to your readers. Specifically -- 'Seems worth the extra cost unless you really need to import large databases.' Um, no. SmartGo Kifu is an excellent problem and game collection, combined with a Go playing engine. It includes a form of SGF editor; but that editor is not particularly suitable either for recording games or for constructing problems -- at least, not compared to EasyGo, which is specifically (and very well) designed to do ... SGF editing. Bulk file import and export is only one of the features you'd want in an SGF editor; other features include tree-editing capabilities (ever tried fixing a recording mistake in SmartGo Kifu?), problem editing (ever tried entering un-numbered initial conditions?), and variation analysis. Don't take my word for it. Here's an independent review. Although at first sight EasyGo looks like a close-cousin to SmartGo Kifu, it is not. They share a goal though: analyzing games, exploring variations and solving problems. But they focus on different sets of features, and work very different. That review -- only six paragraphs long -- is much more insightful and thorough, and helpful to readers, than your 'Seems worth the extra cost...'" "All that seemed necessary was to copy the linked-to sgf on the web page onto my desktop," suggests Kirby Smith. "Then I could use the 'edit' mode of the KGS interface (CGoban3) to view it and its commentary. I recall that The Many Faces of Go will also open these. Thanks for your journal's many interesting articles." A number of readers also suggested this solution, which works great for desktops, but Laird's review was specifically referring to smartphone apps available for Apple products.

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Your Move/Readers Write: Responding to 'SGFs and iStuff'

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