A friend of mine is currently developing a backgammon server, and the idea of building a client was appealing, so I've started to expand my Python GUI programming knowledge a littler further and tried out wxPython.
A little background first: For reasons unknown to me, the name of the web server under development is "Tiger Gammon" (German site), and it's a nice alternative to FIBS, the First Internet Backgammon Server. Both servers communicate with clients over the telnet protocol, which seems odd at first. But when FIBS was born in 1992, that was probably the obvious choice. Tigergammon, on the other hand, strives to be a better FIBS, and thus uses telnet as well. So my client will have to follow that path.
In the meantime my wxPython client has grown pretty nice, but it's not ready for being shown off in public. But as of today, the client has its own splash screen, and I like it so much that I wanted to share it here. Since it's a client for tigergammon, I called it "meowBG", and when I found an old picture of our cat Alice sitting in a waste-paper basket, the logo just fell into place …
I ought to polish it a little more, but for my limited GIMP skills I guess that's as good as it gets. Should meowBG ever be released I may need a talented designer.
Posts about the client itself are soon to follow. Currently it looks like this ...
... which is not perfect but a decent start. Network play over either FIBS or tigergammon is already possible, but the user interface is still far from intuitive. Stay tuned!
