Chessbase finally has re-written their database software using one Microsoft’s latest technologies – Silverlight. You can “install” it by going to http://www.chesslive.de/. And it’s free to use! And it looks all pretty and shiny!
Ok, the first paragraph is full of overstatements:
- this just gives the basics of functionality compared to their main products
- It’s free to use if you run a non-free operating system, Windows. It seems to be using Silverlight 3, which is as far as I know has not been ported to Moonlight yet, so I suspect you won’t be able to use this interface on Linux today.
- This just worked on my main PC, but on my laptop the install was a bit of a pain: it was first downloading “stuff” for a couple of minutes, and then informed me that I needed to upgrade Silverlight 2 to Silverlight 3. After I did that, my IE would begin to crash on startup, so I gave up on this whole Silverlight install thing in frustration. I suppose this complaint goes against Silverlight, not Chessbase.
- “Paste position” did not work for me, I hope they fix it soon
But enough of whining, I think it’s great that more and more chess websites adopt Silverlight (The Week in Chess did that about a year ago). The Chessbase old Java-based online interface looked hideous and was barely functional. This one is pretty nice, and I can drag and drop UI panels around!
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