HIARCS is recommendable (chess programm for Mac users)

You mentioned that SCID is ugly. Well that - mostly - is true. I hated the piece sets that came with SCID. They were all blurry or pixelated, so I made my own (I made existing chess fonts ready to use in SCID).
I sent them to the developers and they probably will be included in future SCID releases (or already if you compile your own dev snapshots).

Ok apart from the board, the user interface is pretty gray and emotionless and/or (mostly) functional. But it's pretty old software and all the developers tend to focus on functionality.

Interested people can visit my SCID thread at talkchess (HD pieces, new board colors, latest databases (2,63 million games) and more:

http://talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=669575#669575

But nothing is wrong with HIARCS if you like it. What I can say about it from the product video, it seems to be pretty solid. I like the online books/tablebases.

But still... I don't think it's something for me. SCID is just a HUGE tool for a chess player and it cost >100€ less

"...SCID is just a HUGE tool..."

Mmh, may be. But does it work on Lion?

I just downloaded the dmg from Sourceforge.

It looks like it works.

But what a poor looking Stone Age GUI is this :-(

Regards, Karl

> But it's pretty old software and all the developers tend to focus on functionality.

This is something that tends to be true about any kind of free software. The people who work on it do it for a hobby, and that means they work on what they enjoy working on, which may or may not be what the average user cares about most. Things like making nice interfaces, writing tutorials for beginners, making comprehensive documentation - and for that matter making *comprehensible* documentation - such things tend to be neglected.

Lichess is an interesting but rare example of something that is made as a hobby but also has a nice interface! (Though the help and documentation are on the skimpy side.)

Personally I would love to read an in-depth comparison of SCID, HIARCS and Chessbase. I searched around the net for such things in the past, but didn't find anything that really helped me decide if Chessbase or HIARCS were worth the extra money over SCID.

And to be honest, I really want something like that which works well on a tablet! I'd much rather do my chess investigations sitting in an armchair or lounging in bed rather than sat at my desktop computer!

#13 SCID on the go

SCID on the Go is good to have, but a long way short of SCID on a PC in terms of usefulness. For example, you can find a list of games that match a position, but you can't do a tree analysis of them to understand what the common moves are.