Meet Glift: New software to help you improve at Go

gliftWidget = glift.create({“divId”:”glift_display1″,”sgf”:”http:\/\/gogameguru.com\/i\/2014\/06\/Go-Seigen-vs-Kitani-Minoru-19401016-commentary-An-Younggil-8p.sgf”,”sgfDefaults”:{“widgetType”:”GAME_VIEWER”},”display”:{“theme”:”TRANSPARENT”}});

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Download SGF File (Go Game Record)

About Me: Josh Hoak

My name is Josh Hoak and I am both a Go player and programmer. I live in Boulder, Colorado, and when I’m not programming or playing Go, I’m usually up in the mountains hiking or down in the city swing dancing.

For the past year, I’ve been working with Go Game Guru on various technical projects related to Go. Some are related to the Jubango, others are related to new study courses we’re developing, and still others are purely experimental explorations into ways to learn and practice Go.

Enter Glift

At the core of these projects is a new open-source Go player written in JavaScript, called Glift. It is pronounced either as ‘gee-lift’ or as one syllable like ‘glyph’, and it comes from the phrase, ‘go lightweight frontend’. It depends only on jQuery (and even that is going away soon), and uses pure HTML/CSS and SVG for rendering.

Glift started nearly four years ago, when I decided I was unsatisfied with the way problems were displayed on the web. Yearning for more dynamic lessons and interactive content, I started creating what has became Glift.

In particular, Glift was built to:

Be responsive. Mobile is growing explosively, so I wanted a viewer that could work well for both web and mobile.
Be clean and easily understandable. I wanted to display problems in a natural, book-like format, using cropping and paging. Call me old fashioned, but I love Go books! I wanted a web viewer that felt like doing problems from a book.
Be extensible. Whatever I built, I wanted to be able use it for many other web applications. Thus, Glift was built to support loading problems statically or dynamically from a server.

What’s Next?

Given this functionality, we will be switching to using Glift as the primary Go viewer at Go Game Guru in the very near future. Let us know what you think! If you find any bugs or have feature requests, feel free to report them at glift/issues or comment below. If you are a programmer looking to contribute, feel free to send your pull requests.

Also, be sure to check out:

And lastly, here is a lesson-prototype we made especially for Glift!

gliftWidget = glift.create({“divId”:”glift_display2″,”sgfCollection”:”http:\/\/gogameguru.com\/i\/2014\/07\/glift-article-long.json”,”display”:{“theme”:”DEFAULT”}});

Our Go game diagrams require JavaScript to work properly. Please enable JavaScript if you want to view them.