A cool chess clock

Playing chess with friends in the Pampa Humida, I couldn’t find a
proper way to teach my friends on how to play quickly enough so that
the game wouldn’t become boring as hell. So I found this web page[1]
with a simple chess clock on it. Written in javascript, it wasn’t
exactly reliable or fast, and required me to have network access
(unless I saved the page to my machine, but anyways). Also, the web
browser overhead was too much for my taste.

So I started looking around for software to fulfill my needs. The only
clock I could find was Ghronos[2] but it was Java-based and (so?) I
couldn’t get it to run natively on my machine (it would run in a
browser, but then I would be back to square one).

So I opened up Emacs and started hacking at a pygtk program, because I
like Python and I found that GTK looked decent enough I wanted to
learn it. Within a few hours, I got a basic version working (0.1) that
was just a countdown. A few hours more and I got fisher delays
implemented (0.2). (That took around five hours according to the
 changelog.)

Then I went to debconf8 in Mar del Plata and tried real hard (okay, I
didn’t try at all) to keep myself from working on the software and
follow the conference, and failed, so I polished the interface and
implemented more features: a reset handler, control over the initial
time (duh!), colors, etc. Now I think it’s a pretty decent clock,
still lacking some features, but it’s been fun anyways.

Now I’ve got a 1.0 version which seems pretty mature to me
anyways. It’s been fun.

[1] http://smashhatter.com/chess/chesstimer/chessTimer.html

[2] http://ghronos.sourceforge.net/

The chessclock can be downloaded at:

http://hg.koumbit.net/chessclock/

I’ll try to make a proper project page somewhere with screenshots and everything at some point.