LiChess needs to update their arrow and highlight square features.

LiChess is awesome (nearly perfect), but here is a suggestion for improvement.

The arrow and highlight square/s feature uses lines/arrows and highlights that are, honestly, not that great. It's not the most important feature, but it does make a big difference when users decide where to play and study chess. Making these features better just makes the entire experience of being on a chess site smooth, if that makes sense.

The square highlighting in particular needs to be changed. A highlighting feature that uses a circle does not sufficiently highlight the square (especially when doing so for squares that have a black piece on them), at least not compared to the alternative. In my opinion, it should be a fully-filled type of highlight.

Second, the arrows look a bit too simplistic and, for lack of another word, boring. In other words, the look of the arrows can be better. The color/s need a little tweaking. Also, perhaps the arrow highlighting should allow for highlighting lines/arrows that allow us to highlight lines/arrows that are not limited to legal piece movement lines. Yes, that will put us in a position to make a mistake when we are highlighting very quickly, but it will just feel like a better and smoother experience.

I made a browser extension called Fancyground for Chrome & Firefox that changes square highlights from circles to full squares and lets you customize arrow colors.

You can drag your mouse outside the chessboard and back to the chessboard to allow for drawing illegal arrows. Or you can change the "Snap arrows to valid moves" setting in lichess.org/account/preferences/game-behavior

While here. is it possible (i do not know) for the arrows or all drawings to be having slight shifts per color, so that one could superpose things with different meanings.. to make full use of all colors.

I did not know about this outside drag excusion trick.. I will try next time.. For superposable arrows, though i guess the fine grain control is still the square object.. I did try to look at the CSS selectors from the drawings, to find if i could not style inject some shirts in whatever web rendering units are used to allow parallel orvelapping arrows.. gave up... would that be a stable user solution.. or could some color transparency combination behavior enable understanding that certin combos of color happen to overlapp.

old persisting drawing glictch of mine, possibly some mouse curse of mine, even with new ones... chrome. windows.

Also, i have bought more than one new mouse, and I still have a chrome problem right clicking to get a green cricle(or other right click with any keyboard modifier). The up mouse click event seems to be somewhat random.. In firefox i think i do not get that. I have stopped mentioning this, gambling each time. but while here. why not.. I wonder how it is possible that this persist and i be the only one... what else should i change.. If not reproducible forget it.. just a ghost in the machine...

drawing long term reporting out.. happy new year.

@dboing said in #4:
> banksiagui.com/multi-thinking-arrows/?sfw=pass1672515749

For the visual online thinkers among us. the 2D (or more) first people. Some of us, will spend the rest of the chess life with drawing tools at hand all the time. Some of us prefer the 2d visuo-spatial clutter to the 1D language string clutter stretch beyond FOV (or the minds' eye FOV).

There are implied selective process at population level, when restricting the degree of freedom of some technology where every one has to conform to the tool, and not the tool to the person..

like hand-sided scissors. I know I am cross-dominant, so i could test both, side.. using my right arm for scissors is way better...

got reminded of that lately, for old school gift wrapping.

My sister, a true left-handed had to contort a lot more. Had to become more agile than others who have it made for them, one would say, but perhaps at a daily cost if you scale that up daily to life time...
(I actually have 2 sisters, both true left handed, but only one close enough in age so that I could witness such thing and remember some of the contortions).

I do hope that life expectancy of left handed people has improved, now that we have (had) keyboards, or 2 thumb input devices... These analogies are reminders of how forgetting the human factor can lead to unnecessary conformity, population talent waste.