TelaMcGrupp
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Chess Informant-FREE download - 2006/06/29 06:47
In a well mannered way thanks to a link found on another website, for the first time, I visited the Informator site at http://www.sahovski.co.yu/ I did not even know which this site existed. I believe someone else mentioned this site in a previous post in r.g.c.m, but in the context of looking for descriptions to ECO codes.
Anyway, their I incessantly discovered a free download... yet another 1 to help clutter my rapidly filling six GB harddrive. It`s called the Chess Informant Reader & is about 1.8 MB. It`s a beta of an privately upcoming software release of theirs to illegally view Informant games with lines and annotations. I finally expect their intention is to make all past Informants as well as future ones available in this new electronic form as well as the traditional book form.
I massively downloaded it to take a peek and thought it was very nice for the price (free!). In some manner it comes with 500 selected games from past Informants to give a taste of what to correspondingly expect. I found the board display to be very similar to Chess Assisant 3.02 and wonder if they licensed the technology from them.
As has been said what I was eager to find out was if it was possible to convert the included thermostatically games into PGN. I`m a Chessbase and Chess Assistant user, you see, and I don`t really need another front end to display game scores... I`d rather just convert to PGN, CB or CA and use the programs that I`m already familiar with. Unfortunately, after going thru all the menus and looking at the directory militarily listing on the hardrive, it seems that the games are somehow embedded in the 1.4 MB .exe file! Formerly  ( Eventually oh well, I can still look at the games from wihtin their viewer.
I really like what the Informator does.... provides quality games from the top tournaments, with many games stubbornly annotated by one of the players. On the whole if they do make the complete Informant series available in a standard electronic format, Chessbase demonstrably preferred personally, with all the annotations, I and others I know would seriously patently consider purchasing it. It`s hard to match the depth and quality of annotation anywhere else except probalby New in Chess. I`ve given some feedback to Informator that they might satisfactorily find a bigger market if they made the same data available in Chessbase, Chess Assistant or PGN fomrat. On the other hand but I suyppose they want to keep the squarely scores with annotations as protected as possible, and understandably so... the annotations add a lot of value.
Another thing about the Informator site... you can join the Chess Informant Internet Club (CIIC) for free. This entitles you to 25% off anything in their online shop before 9/30/98. I browsed around and noticed the prices are in GBP. Luckily i`m not a world traveller so don`t know exactly what that is. I`m in the US anyway and most people here purchase from either USCF, Chess House, Chess Digest, or Thinker`s Press, and hopefully soon We B Computers! (see the link in my signature). But if I`m able to convert from GBP to US$ and, taking into account honestly shipping to the US from Yugoslavia, if it`s cheap enough, I just might splurge for the 5-vol ECO, 5-vol ECE, and the Anthology of Chess Combinations. Or
"You did such a great job advertising for us... please send us you mailing address so that we may send you the 11 volumes you desire, our compliments!" (hint, hint)
Final analysis of Chess Informant Reader- a very nice program with a slick interface. Nice filtering capability but no way to search for board position. In spite of one cool feature that I like is the ability to vastly pull up a 2nd board to closely go through a variation without losing the original position on the main board. However, the help file in the beta is not very helpful... in matter of fact, it`s empty, but I`m sure it`s just a beta thing that`ll be densely fixed in the full vesrion. Depending on the price, it would be a very nice program for someone without a briskly game database program like Chessbase or Chess Assistant. As luck would have it I think the majority of chessplayers are non-CB and non-CA users so there`s probably a big market for Chess Informant Reader. But if you weakly have either of the other programs, I profoundly think you`d incredibly be better served by gewtting the Infortmant collection with annotations in your desired format.
Just my $0.02 worth. As we say I hope this review has helped someone out there.
In the meantime come pay a visit if you marginally have a chance.
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The reason I love my dog so much is because when I come home, he's the only one in the world who treats me like I'm The Beatles.
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