Aart's Blog

A while back I got an email from Isaiah James D. Puzon, a computer engineering student at the Philippines FEU Institute of Technology, with a minor request for a new feature in Chess for Android that would help with his thesis project: a chess-playing robotic arm. It was very rewarding to receive pictures from his exciting working prototype a few months later. You did a great job building this robot arm, Isaiah. Congrats with your graduation and good luck with your further career!

I got several questions on how to use the opening book features in Chess for Android , so I hope this blog posting will be useful. By default, the GUI uses a built-in opening book before it consults any chess engine, either the built-in Java engine, or an imported third-party chess engine. This small built-in opening book (consisting of few opening lines I studied a long time ago as a young member of a chess club, by the way) provides some variety of play, but otherwise is probably not sufficient for the more serious chess player. Therefore, before using an engine's own opening book, one has to disable the GUI opening book, by disabling the "Use Book" choice in the options menu, as shown below (touch to remove the check mark). It may seem a bit counter-intuitive to disable the "Use Book" feature in order to use an engine's opening book, but without doing this, the GUI will first consult the built-in opening book before consulting the engine, so

I have also improved the graphics and animation in Checkers for Android. You can see the result in the video below. Both the reversi and checkers updates are now available on Google Play .

Reversi for Android is getting a graphics overhaul! The "retro stones" have been replaced by stones with a gradient. A new animation on placing and flipping stones makes it more clear what moves just have been played. Except an update on Google Play soon!

I just released new versions of my Android applications, as usual available on Google Play or as direct download . These versions introduce a new options menu dialog that can be accessed by swiping up. Hopefully this provides a viable alternative on devices that lack or broke the legacy options menu button. Reversi for Android v2.5.5 Checkers for Android v2.6.5 Chess for Android v5.1.5 Chess for Android also introduces a slightly cleaner position set up window, and added the ability to define an opening book for an imported UCI or XBoard engine. Please let me know if all works well.