Besides playing the game of Go occasionally I try to learn about the game on a daily or at least on a weekly basis. Besides problem books, online books etc. I have accumulated a lot of SGF files that are some sort of problems. Life and death, tesuji or some other form of can you guess the next move type of problems. I also get them from my teacher (see Improving Your Go With the Help of a Teacher).

Being in the software business and having written a lot of code in my life it was a no-brainer to write some software to make it easier to go over the SGF files. I wrote a simple application where clicking through SGF files was a breeze. It is available as open source at Github (see sgf4j-gui project).

I would then keep track in some text file as which lessons had I gone through and which should I go through soon again. The system worked and was fine. Just that I forgot to keep track very often and I would lose track where I was and it wasn’t perfect.

Now I added some more features to the program. It actually creates a text file in the folder of the SGF files that keeps track for me. I see from an icon next to the problem whether I considered the problem easy/medium/difficult/fail or if I’ve even solved it before.

The software isn’t nicely packaged or that easy to use. It also lacks many features. For example when I’ve solved the problem in my head I click next to see what the game tree tells me. Why couldn’t I just click on the board instead? Well, it just doesn’t have those features. Yet.

If you are up to compiling some Java and would like to have a system to go over the SGF files then take it for a spin. If you have any ideas, suggestions or even programming skills then feel free to pull request for those!

Update: here is a direct link to the latest release and here to the JAR file.