Little Go

Today Little Go 0.8.0 (project page) has been released to the App Store. This version introduces iPad support, including hi-res icons for the retina display of the iPad 3. The user interface remains largely unchanged, though, and has not been adapted to take advantage of the larger screen estate available on the iPad. I will try to think of something for one of the next versions, but the focus for 0.9.0 will clearly be on improved control over the computer player's playing strength. I'm a casual player, and Fuego consistently beats me with infuriating non-chalance - I must do something about this ☺.

Today Little Go 0.7 has finally been released on the App Store. Although the app was initially rejected by Apple's review team, I was quickly able to point out why the reason given was clearly wrong. Although I am happy that the app is in the store now, I am still a bit peeved at how arbitrary the rejection seemed to be - it almost looked as if the reviewer hadn't even bothered to launch the app a single time. Fixing a genuine bug would have been OK, but seeing 10 months of work being casually dismissed with a copy & pasted statement is a bit hard to swallow...

Anyway, the 0.7 release of Little Go adds no new features, but fixes a couple of serious bugs. Other than that, the main work that has been done is the addition of artwork such as an application icon, and in-game icons for the tab bar and the toolbar on the game view. As usual you can grab the sources from the project page.

Despite the original plan to focus on stability, a few things that could also be seen as features have managed to creep into the new beta release of Little Go. Of course, if you ask me I will say that those feature-like things in reality are bugfixes ☺ that were necessary to make Little Go ready for the App Store. Care for an example? A stone is now displayed immediately when you touch the board with your fingertip - a great improvement in my opinion! Also the mess with GTP engine settings has been finally cleared up, and... wait, why am I writing this? Check out the project page and see for yourself...

The new beta build 0.5 of Little Go adds handicap and komi selection to the "New game" view, and even more importantly, there is now a proper scoring feature available that calculates an accurate territory score and lets you mark stone groups as dead or alive.

I have decided that the app is now feature complete for the first public release to the App Store. In the next iteration the focus therefore will be on fixing the most glaring issues and running the app through Instruments. I have never used Instruments before, so this will be an interesting experience. Hopefully not too interesting...

After many months of slow but steady development my newest pet project Little Go has now reached a state where I feel confident enough to post a release note on the front page of herzbube.ch. Little Go is an iPhone app that lets you play the game of Go on your favourite smartphone or on your iPad. You can play against another human, or against the computer.

Little Go is still under development and not yet available in Apple's app store, but you can contact me if for some strange reason :-) you are interested in beta-testing. Please refer to the project page for details about which information I need from you, or if you simply want to download the tar ball and look at the source code.

The project page for Little Go has moved to https://littlego.herzbube.ch/.