Home | Quincala Shop | Tournament 2010 | Where to Play | Rules, Scores &ct. | Tutorials | Software | About



Quincala Software Download and Installation Instructions

The Quincala Software is written in Java, and distributed as a self-contained "jar-archive" file. To run it, no installation is necessary apart from the standard Java (see below). You can remove it completely at any time from your computer simply by deleting the downloaded file. See here for more information on security and privacy.

FIRST make sure you have Java installed, at least version 6 (sometimes also called Java 1.6 just to confuse you). The latest version is usually preferable. Click on this link to find out, and if necessary, install:

http://java.com/en/download/ (opens in a new window or tab)

NOTE: YOU DON'T NEED THE YAHOO TOOLBAR FOR QUINCALA, SO YOU MAY UNTICK THAT DURING JAVA INSTALLATION. (Linux users might want to install Sun Java 6 or higher through their package manager instead; Apple users please tell me about Java on Apple. Non-Windows user might need to set Sun Java to automatically open jar files: contact me if there are any problems.)

THEN click the link below and save to your Desktop or a folder of your liking. The software can be run just by double clicking the downloaded file.

Quincala Game Viewer 0.9 F2 (with the latest bug fix "F2" on 19 September 2010)

OR you can try this self-updating download, using Java Web Start: Right-click the link below and choose "Save Target/Link As ..." (or something similar depending on your browser) to save the file to your Desktop or a folder of your liking. The software can be run just by double clicking the downloaded file.

Quincala Software.jnlp (same software as above, but will update itself)

Please note this about the self-updating version:

  1. It will work whether you are connected to the internet or not, just like the software above
  2. When you are connected, at the time of launching the software it will automatically check for a later version of the software and download it before starting (the application is less than 1MB, but even that might be annoying if you have not got broadband internet access)
  3. For security reasons, it will display a warning message before engaging with the clipboard etc. but I believe you only have to agree once per action.
  4. Elegantly, by left-clicking the above link, you can just launch and try out the latest Quincala software, without committing to save it to hard disk first!

HANDY HINT: If the downloaded file is not saved on the Desktop, to make a short-cut in Windows, just right-click the downloaded file and choose Send to -> Desktop.

Manuals and Help Files

The help file to the latest Quincala software is available here (pdf format).

Licence and Source Code

The Quincala Game Viewer is released under GPL version 3, which is a so called open source licence. That means, among many other things, that it is free to download, re-distribute and use, and that I have to make the relevant source code available for perusal and modification. The full legal notice for the software is posted here.

Here is the source code for the Quincala Game Viewer 0.9 F2 software: QGV_0.9_F2_source.zip. The source code for the self-updating file is always the same as the latest normal java application, except the switch "useJNLPServices" is set to true. NOTE that although the software is reasonably stable and works well, currently the code itself is rather transitional and experimental in places, and the documentation is patchy at best.