Fritz
12 now shipping
Fritz is the world’s most popular chess program, developed by ChessBase,
“the world's leading chess software company” (Washington Post).
Version 12 is now available and shipping.
Whether you are a beginner, club player or professional – Fritz has everything
that chess players could want: automatically adjusting playing strength, handicap
and coaching functions, explanation of positions, coloured danger warnings,
openings statistics, automatic game analysis, trainings modules for openings,
tactics, endgames, and a database of one million games.
Fritz continues to fascinate the chess world. It has beaten a reigning World
Champion in the battle of man vs machine, and it has worked with World Champions
as a clever training partner (Garry Kasparov: “I regularly analyse with
Fritz”) which will entertain you with fresh and humorous verbal comments.
In the following we are going to discuss some of the new functions of Fritz
12. There will be more installments describing other features in the coming
weeks.
New ribbon operation
Fritz 12 represents a complete rewrite of the famous Fritz interface. The program
has been modernized and adaped to standards now being used in other big software
packages. If you know any of these you will feel immediately at home in Fritz
12.
All the various functions of the program are started by ribbons. These so-called
ribbons were first implemented by Microsoft in Office 2007. A ribbon (also called
a “band”) links together the elements of menu and browser symbols.
According to the context, there are different icons visible for the program
functions in the specific work situation you are in.
Click to enlarge
At the top of the program window there are – as in traditional menus
– words representing various groups of commands, e.g. “Home”,
“Insert” or “Board”. A click on one of these, however,
does not open a menu, but displays a ribbon containing the relevant commands.
Each “Menu” then has its own ribbon with symbols. One very important
function within this concept is the Application menu. You will find
the Application menu in the upper left-hand corner of the program window.
This is where important settings and primary functions of the program can be
accessed, e.g. starting the options dialog. Another important component is the
Icon List, via which frequently used functions can be accessed with a single
mouse click.
This concept offers many advantages in your daily work with Fritz. Functions
you want can be accessed more quickly, e.g. the choice of board or challenges
on the chess server. Since the functions are listed in order of frequency of
use, your work goes more quickly and smoothly. In addition, many functions can
be accessed via a right click with the mouse and by keyboard commands.
Here you can activate the coach and help functions. The coach appears when
you make a mistake. You can either get a hint to take back the move or you can
use choose to ignore the advice and play on.
In the above area you turn on or off different help and coaching function.
The dialog for creating or opening databases in the new ribbon interface.
3D Board switches to a photo-realistic three-dimensional view of a chess board.
The program has genuine virtual reality chessboards. If you wish to make frequent
use of this setting, you should have an up-to-date graphics card with special
3D functions. The 3D representation also requires a current version of Direct
X, which is supplied on the DVD.
New photo-realistic 3D boards in Fritz 12
